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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

The messaging is all over the place anyway. Not so long ago OAI was talking about faster iterations and warning people to not expect huge leaps. (A position that makes sense imo). Yet people talk about AGI in a serious manner?

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> We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents "join the workforce" and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

"Reflections" by Sam Altman, January 2025 - https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

"AGI achieved internally" -- Sam Altman

Yes a quote from a meme post on Reddit. No doubt he has been overselling the future for a while but why use a quote with the wrong context?

See the sibling comment from AlexandrB. Altman and tons of other hype men in tech do this thing where they make outrageous promises, then retcon as “just jokes” whichever ones don’t come true, so that they can never be disproven. It’s a swindle made all the more irritating by the enablers like you who go “why did you take the joke seriously?” to get cred on the internet while helping the scam continue.

Or to put it another way, do you think Altman denounced all the hype (and subsequent investment dollars) he got because of the “AGI achieved internally” post? Did he say to anyone “hey, that was a meme post, don’t take it seriously”? Or did he milk it for all it was worth before only later quietly climbing down from that when it was no longer paying dividends. Again, duplicitous and disingenuous behavior.

Again, out of all the quotes to call out the weakest one was picked.

So you admit he was lying then. If he is a known liar, then we know what to expect, I guess.

I am not admitting anything as I don’t have any skin in the game. It’s just a weak hyperbolic quote compared to the PR narrative.

“Hidden, poorly internally labeled fiat@ account”

I don't think anyone serious is talking about AGI from LLMs, no.

And yet altman talks about AGI being imminent, but his company has only ever produced LLMs.

Now why would the CEO of an AI company say something like that!?

Is it a given that they need to unrealistically hype everything? To me it just seems like he's killing any and all credibility he had

Probably a bad long term strategy?

I mean other non-AI companies use hype too sure.. but it's maybe a little sprinkle of 1.1x on top aimed to highlight their best features. Here we're going full on 100x of reality

It's not a given but Altman is a public figure for a reason while I don't know the names of any of the other CEOs off the top of my head. He talks a lot and when he talks, it's about AI. Even talking about the dangers of AI is hype because it implies it's an important topic to discuss now because it's imminent.

> To me it just seems like he's killing any and all credibility he had. Probably a bad long term strategy?

He's already got more money than God and there's an infinite supply of suckers who think wealth and skill/intelligence are correlated for him to keep feeding off of (see also Goop and Tesla, incredibly successful companies also run by wealthy hucksters). Sam Altman will be just fine.

I do know that AGI has a different meaning internally to what we think it means:

https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2025/01/microsoft-and-open...

Massive grain of salt though.

Only if you consider Sam Altman not serious: https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i...

I find this pattern in tech hype really frustrating. Someone in a leadership role in a major tech company/VC promises something outrageous. Time passes and the promise never materializes. People then retcon the idea that "everybody knew that wasn't going to happen". Well either "everybody" doesn't include Elon Musk[1], Sam Altman, or Marc Andreessen[2] or these people are liars. No one seems to be held to their track record of being right or wrong, instead people just latch on to the next outrageous promise as if the previous one was fulfilled.

[1] https://electrek.co/2025/03/18/elon-musk-biggest-lie-tesla-v...

[2] https://dailyhodl.com/2022/06/01/billionaire-and-tech-pionee...

> Only if you consider Sam Altman not serious

> Elon Musk[1], Sam Altman, or Marc Andreessen[2] ... these people are liars.

Bingo. These people are salesmen & marketers. Lying to sell a product (including gathering funding & pumping company stock) is literally the job description. If they weren't good at it, they wouldn't hold the positions they do.

Being a good salesperson does not require lying. It's not the job that's doing the lying, but the person lying to you.

There's also this deluded-CEO/grounded-CEO routine between Altman and Nadela. Altman will be quoted saying something outrageous in social/mainstream-media which Nadela can then later tone down, add nuance and be realistic about in some firechat or podcast to address the minority who understands, will listen, and would criticize.

It does look like "A lie will make it halfway around the world while the truth is busy lacing its boots" is a major part of a communication strategy.

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