The story of the "YC mafia" takeover of Conde Nast era reddit as summarized by ex-ceo Yishan who resigned after tiring of Altman's constant Machiavelli machinations is also hilarious and foreshadowing of future events[0]. I'm sure by the time Altman resigned from the Reddit board OpenAI had long incorporated the entire corpus into ChatGPT already.
At the moment all the engineers at OpenAI, including gdb, who currently have their credibility in tact are nerd-washing Altman's tarnished reputation by staying there. I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ, RIP) book called the "Psychopath Code"[1] is rather on point in this context. He notes that psychopaths are attracted to project groups that have assets and no defenses, i.e. non-profits:
If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable [a psychopath] will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage...[the psychopath] may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet...He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on important business...His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible...He breaks the social conventions of the group. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. This is a dominance mask.
A group of nerds that want to get shit done and work on important problems, who are primed to be optimistic and take what people say to their face at face value, and don't want to waste time with "people problems" are susceptible to these types of characters taking over.
At the moment all the engineers at OpenAI, including gdb, who currently have their credibility in tact are nerd-washing Altman's tarnished reputation by staying there. I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ, RIP) book called the "Psychopath Code"[1] is rather on point in this context. He notes that psychopaths are attracted to project groups that have assets and no defenses, i.e. non-profits:
If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable [a psychopath] will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage...[the psychopath] may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet...He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on important business...His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible...He breaks the social conventions of the group. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. This is a dominance mask.
A group of nerds that want to get shit done and work on important problems, who are primed to be optimistic and take what people say to their face at face value, and don't want to waste time with "people problems" are susceptible to these types of characters taking over.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
[1]https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapter4...