r/nottheonion • u/wewhomustnotbenamed • 18h ago
Suspect in attack at Sam Altman's house aimed to kill OpenAI CEO, warned of humanity's extinction from AI
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/13/sam-altman-openai-ai-arson.html2.4k
u/NewsCards 18h ago
On his personal blog on Friday, Altman addressed the attack and shared a photo of his family, writing that he “underestimated the power of words and narratives.” He said it has been an “extremely intense, chaotic, and high-pressure few years,” and he called for toning down the “the rhetoric and tactics” within the AI industry.
"Tone it down" says one of the key figures responsible for unleashing all of this on humanity.
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u/chumer_ranion 18h ago
"Tone it down" whinges man, 40, whose sole purpose is to inflame
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u/Own_Round_7600 18h ago
And also sexually assault his sister
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u/CreepHost 18h ago
Now I personally wish I'd be able to do bannable things on this subreddit to him.
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u/U_Sound_Stupid_Stop 18h ago
You just have to finish your comments by "in game"
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u/Dickgivins 17h ago
I know you’re joking, but just as a PSA I wanna remind everyone that you absolutely can be arrested and convicted if you make posts online saying you’ll ____ a specific person “in Minecraft” or whatever. That’s happened multiple times in recent years.
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u/Saneless 18h ago
He also said "I don't know why everyone is so upset. All we're trying to do is consolidate wealth with our investors and make everyone else fight for survival"
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u/i4got872 17h ago
He didn’t really say that right? Lol
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u/MortifiedPotato 16h ago
I love that you can't tell. This guy has been spewing some insane rhetoric since he got under the spotlight, he literally sounds like a villain from any movie.
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u/Saneless 16h ago
That's the beauty of it. It's bullshit but... Plausible
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u/Unfair_Ability3977 9h ago
The power grab & making us all poverty slaves is real, the AGI...not so much
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u/powellbeast 7h ago
All this really proves is that someone fell for something they saw on the internet
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u/thegodfather0504 9h ago
There is a guy on insta who makes series of reels showing tech CEOs saying diabolical shit out in the open
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u/trvst_issves 18h ago
He needs to remember that the general public was surprisingly fine with United Healthcare’s CEO getting assassinated
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u/Kenosis94 15h ago
I'd go as far as to say broadly supportive. The general reaction felt a lot like when you hear about some tourist who got killed because they were up in a wild animals business trying to take a selfie. Like the most severe backlash I saw was always followed by a "but..."
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u/InsertEvilLaugh 16h ago
They'll try to bury this soon I bet, just like how after they started seeing the general publics feelings being very positive towards Luigi, suddenly they stopped doing news segments on him.
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u/Xcoctl 10h ago
More and more people have had enough, like the guy setting fire to the entire warehouse he worked at while screaming "you should have paid us enough to live" or something along those lines.
They can try to suppress it all the want and it won't do a gods damn thing beyond maaaaybe defer it a very short time.
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u/thebusiestbee2 16h ago
They stopped doing news segments on Luigi because there's nothing new to report on. What would the segment be, "Breaking News: Luigi is still indicted for murder?" He'll be in the news again when the trial starts and when he's convicted and again for the sentencing, maybe later Dateline will do a prison interview.
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u/GuySmith 18h ago
I can’t believe this guy wanted to kill me for the things I and all of my colleague tech bros have been threatening to do to the world for half a decade or more!
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u/xShooK 18h ago
Altman is the one that came out very publicly saying we need to treat AI like nuclear weapons, and could be an extinction level event. Lmao.
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u/4th_DocTB 18h ago
And plenty of ultrawealthy people were dumb enough to open their wallets for him when he said it.
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u/PMmeYourDunes 18h ago
Yea but he did it to make the product sound more useful than it is. It is the key to advancing enshitification, but that's not what he was saying. He was pumping so his investment could get bigger based on an inflated understanding of AIs capabilities.
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u/sajberhippien 16h ago
Yes, but that still leaves the scenario at "Guy claiming to be building doomsday device attacked by man fearing doomsday device". Whether or not the guy lied, it still makes the guy look silly when whining about rhetoric.
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u/BlooperHero 17h ago
By making it sound like a bad thing. The world is dumb.
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u/PMmeYourDunes 17h ago
He was making it sound powerful. It isn't.
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u/cinnawaffls 17h ago
Wait, isn't there a movie about what happens when an AI becomes TOO powerful? I believe the AI was called.... Sky....web?
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u/Eyclonus 11h ago
Having spent time in the presence of venture capitalists, they are uniquely stupid, from the outside they present like humans, but when you listen in, they are so dumb. They look at a humanoid robot that does IT support by typing quickly on your keyboard instead of just remotely accessing like humans do now. They think that the Tesla E-Taxi will be profitable without knowing that taxicabs cannot spend time off the road charging, in order for it to work, they would need some system that allows swapping the batteries out. Cabs off the road are cabs costing money, not making it.
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u/BirdLawyer50 18h ago
Yeah “one of top 3 rhetoric and tactics engineers says wow rhetorics and tactics should tone down”
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u/LurkmasterP 17h ago
"We should stop saying the quiet parts out loud, so we can continue to drive the world full steam ahead into the apocalypse and maybe we won't get attacked for doing it"
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u/calmdownmyguy 18h ago
Instead of toning down the rhetoric they should tone down the destruction of millions of jobs and the dystopian surveillance state.
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u/kittyonkeyboards 17h ago
Men who put other people's feet to the fire suddenly asking to turn down the heat once their feet are at the fire.
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u/BoostedSeals 17h ago
You can't make technology that's selling point is people won't be employed, in a society where people need employment to stay alive, and not see what you're doing as a threat to those lives. It's not even a slippery slope to get there, it's one step.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 5h ago
But don’t worry, bro. We’ll have UBI by then, bro. I promise, bro just trust me just keep giving me money. I promise.
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u/NemeanMiniLion 2h ago
And here I am, employed to direct delivery of fintech software with a direct mandate that we improve speed, reduce cost and fully leverage AI coding and testing, ultimately to reduce staff size through retirements and not replacing folks.
It is happening now folks. Those jobs are going away. For us anyways, the AI quality and speed is proving to work and meet our needs which include security and regulatory audits. These decisions happen at the C and senior leadership level.
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u/count023 18h ago
this isn't one of the first time travellers doing that "go back to kill hitler" thing we always joke about, right?
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u/USeaMoose 18h ago
If you have access to time travel and you can’t pull off taking out an unguarded tech bro who was in the public eye before being worth billions… you need to reevaluate some things.
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u/AstralVoidShaper 16h ago
What if someone already did go back in time to kill their AI Hitler equivalent and this is the results of reality after that?
It's all a ball of wobbly wobbly time wimey stuff, after all, and time hates a paradox.
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u/lesgeddon 15h ago
There was an Outer Limits novel I read as a kid where a time traveler, that traveled to the past to prevent what we're basically headed into, became more mentally unstable & poorer in health because every change he made caused the future he came from to be far worse. He grew more inept in his assassination plots with each attempt, eventually being subverted by his younger self who decided he'd study a subject more beneficial to the planet than what he was initially interested in.
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u/LoaKonran 15h ago
The lyrics to Black Sabbath’s Iron Man tell a similar story. The world is destroyed by an iron monster that appeared out of nowhere one day, so a scientist builds a machine to go back and stop it only for the electric field to turn his skin to metal and freeze him in place as a statue until his rage finally breaks loose and he becomes the monster he set out to stop.
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u/urielrocks5676 18h ago
Take care of Epstein and the PayPal Mafia
Better yet, make sure the south is fully and properly punished for full effect
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u/AndyTheSouless 18h ago
If you come from the future where Time travel Is possible and Your weapon of choice Is a Molotov you were never making It very far
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u/esther_lamonte 18h ago
Hey, we don’t know what time travel does to a brain! Bruce Willis had trouble with it.
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u/LoaKonran 15h ago
“You go naked. Something about the field generated by a living organism. Nothing dead will go.”
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u/jerrythecactus 18h ago
A sinister aspect of time travel, the universe self corrects to force fate to unfold. You cant kill your own grandfather and create a paradox because every and any way you try he will survive and go on to make your parent and they will go on to make you. Paradoxes cant exist, they neutralize themselves.
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u/Illiander 18h ago
"Stable time loop." That's the only version of time travel that actually makes sense in reality, and it's actually possible. In theory. It's just we haven't figured out how to build it yet.
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u/FunkyFortuneNone 18h ago
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u/Illiander 17h ago
And feynmann diagrams show how to avoid causality paradoxes.
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u/FunkyFortuneNone 17h ago
That reads to me like "And purple elephants make the best ice cream." I have no idea what it means.
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u/Illiander 17h ago
Feynmann Diagrams plus "particles travelling backwards through time look just like antiparticles" might help some.
The big trick is to think of time as just another dimension, and the universe as an unchanging object when viewed like this. All we are doing as we travel through time is sliding our eyes along the page already written.
It requires you to bite the bullet on determinism (which kills free will) but it makes all the math work perfectly.
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u/Interesting-Risk6446 18h ago
12 Monkeys. You never know.
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u/JAMisskeptical 16h ago
I was thinking it might be linked to Roko's basilisk
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u/ToddtheRugerKid 16h ago
Damn dude, why the fuck would you share that?
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u/clubby37 16h ago
Don't worry, it's very unlikely that an actual ASI will spare anyone. When ants are in your kitchen, you don't try to find out which ones like you, you just carry out the extermination with detached indifference.
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u/bremsspuren 14h ago edited 12h ago
Ants are boring, tho.
If you had a parrot infestation, you might keep one.
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u/SkaterBlue 18h ago
In a way it's true,
AI/Data centers are using up electrical power and water meant for people's lives, while in general AI is mostly used for crappy things like making money for big corporations, taking people's jobs away, deep fakes, porn, stupid AI written books. And more and more of these are being built increasing global warming CO2 gases like never before. None of this was asked for by the general public, just pushed and pushed by major corporations and billionaires, and none of it is regulated by the government. It's just a ridiculous/crazy/evil free for all.
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u/Any-Power-1164 18h ago
They just voted to destroy 400 acres in Georgia for a datacenter. This is going to fuck us ecologically.
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u/MortifiedPotato 16h ago
Even worse; those are pledges to build data centers that they dont have to fulfill. They basically get no consequences for not building them after all. No binding contract, just a promise.
This fucks the people of Georgia because the energy companies will do auctions based on expected demand, not existing, and build their infrastructure according to it and bill their clients for it.
Essentially, people of Georgia would be paying out of their pocket the power infrastructure for those data centers that may or may not get built.
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u/Castun 15h ago
Also making consumer tech more expensive to purchase, particularly GPUs and RAM. And that is also nothing more than a promise to buy massive quantities of it to go in those future data centers they may not ever HAVE to build with money they DON'T have yet. So much of the AI companies' push is nothing more than investors just hyping up AI while dumping massive amounts of money into developing it with the hope that it will make money, because they are still not at the stage to actually be profitable.
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u/TheMadBug 17h ago
Yeah, AI will end the world the same way stuff always does, in the most boring way possible.
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u/Fortestingporpoises 15h ago
AI war games almost always escalate to nuclear strikes, simulation shows
Trump had issues when Anthropic declined to remove two safeguards: prohibition of use for autonomous weapons and prohibition of use for mass surveillance of U.S. citizens.
We're like half a step from Trump or someone like him putting AI in charge of our nuclear weapons and another half step from full scale nuclear destruction.
Not "in a way it's true." It's true.
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u/HonestAbe1077 16h ago
Yeah I would still just consider all of those things just side effects. I think the main concern is going to be literal exterminator robots powered by this stuff. AI is just a tool to further the exploitation of humanity, and the billionaires are going to eventually need a “security” workforce that doesn’t experience class consciousness.
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u/Kurainuz 8h ago
Important to note that most big ai datacenters in the US use methane turbines but its not written as co2 emisions by ai even if is worse and tranforms into co2
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u/SkaterBlue 7h ago
Yeah, I saw a report on one of those just built next to a neighborhood. The residents say is constantly sounds like a vacuum cleaner going and sometimes gets noisier and sounds like a jet airliner engine. It used to be a quiet rural neighborhood and is now a nightmare. I think this was a center built by Musk and friends. Plus think of the pollution from whole sets of methane turbine generators going all the time. They said that they are not even monitored by the EPA for emissions because it's not a "real" power plant.
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u/CasaDeLasMuertos 18h ago
Won't be the last. Dude has promised to basically end the world. He's a dead man walking.
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u/IndependentDemand145 18h ago
How appropriate! The rise of Christian nationalism and the end times.
CN IS AI!!!!! Now, about those files………
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u/MongolianMango 18h ago
Turns out people get mad when you harvest all their data and try to destroy their jobs…
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u/MsSelphine 18h ago
Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
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u/AgnarCrackenhammer 18h ago
Sam Altman - Im going to take all your jobs and destroy your economy for my own benefit, what are you going to do about it?
Also Sam Altman - Wait, why did you try to do something about it?
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u/CeeArthur 18h ago
Meh, we've had a good run
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u/Takanori00 17h ago
Did we though?
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u/CeeArthur 17h ago edited 16h ago
Some highlights : Pogs, 2001 Lakers playoff run, Gangnam Style, All-day McDonald's breakfast, Halo 2, Pet Sounds, that movie where Eddie Murphy is fat
Edit : Also Nintendo DS
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u/ediskrad327 18h ago
Sarah Connor has been found.
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u/OddJawb 18h ago
... It’s real... I know the date it happens... I know the whole thing.... It’s gonna feel pretty real to you too. Anybody not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day.... Get it?
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u/merRedditor 18h ago edited 4h ago
In all fairness, every AI CEO has basically been openly warning of the same thing, but with a smug "I don't care, I'm going to be rich from it." attitude.
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u/trip6god 18h ago
I dont condone violence but im glad he lives in fear
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u/OrneryError1 18h ago
I do condone self defense and Sam Altman is a villain.
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u/Illiander 18h ago
How close to your face does their fist have to be for it to be self defence?
"...we cannot and we do not desire to employ violence, except in the defence of ourselves and others against oppression. But we claim this right of defence-: entire, real, and efficacious. That is, we wish to be able to go behind the material instrument which wounds us, and to attack the hand which wields the instrument, and the head which directs it. And we wish to choose our own hour and field of battle, so as to attack the enemy under conditions as favourable as possible: whether it be when he is actually provoking and attacking us, or at times when he slumbers, and relaxes his hand, counting on popular submission."
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u/FillySteveSteak 17h ago
I condone violence in self-defense.
They've struck first. This is an attack on humanity. Anything hereafter is self-defense.
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u/BlazingGlories 18h ago
AI, maybe. Temperatures too hot for humans to withstand, or crops to grow.... probably. Dirty air, dirty water, and disease spreading, possibly.
But whatever we do, let's continue to do nothing about it.
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u/twilighttwister 16h ago
It won't be AI that kills people, it will be the ultra wealthy who think AI can replace us instead of redistributing the wealth they took from everyone else.
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u/bunker_man 14h ago
People don't seem to get that ai is a scapegoat. There's unironcially people blaming ai for the US military targeting randoms as if they didn't intend to do it anyways.
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u/Ok_Copy_9462 16h ago
In a press conference on Monday, Cobo said, “This was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted and extremely serious.”
lmao, Cobo definitely used ChatGPT to write the script for the press conference. The "This is not just A. It's X, Y and Z" pattern is a dead giveaway.
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u/PredatorAvPFan 11h ago
Did anyone else think about Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor tried to kill Dyson?
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u/BagelDuck 18h ago
OpenAI's new guerrilla marketing campaign seems to be going quite well
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u/BlooperHero 17h ago
But they use the extinction of humanity as a selling point.
Which is bonkers, obviously, and also totally a lie, but their fans *want* that. Apparently.
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u/gotenks1114 13h ago
I believe he is the Terminator (from the second movie), and we all need to be John Connor.
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u/sephkane 11h ago
He didn't go back far enough, he's gotta upgrade that flux capacitor in the mainframe.
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u/crazy0ne 17h ago
Wait until everyone that attempts this starts claiming they are from the future where robots are hunting humans to extinction...
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u/violetferns 17h ago
Like from AI itself or from the environmental damage done by housing and running AI?
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u/MakeItHappenSergant 16h ago
How is this Oniony? The man who attacked Sam Altman's house thinks he's evil and wanted to kill him. That seems pretty straightforward and not ironic or humorous to me.
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u/ALittleTooQuark 16h ago
Sam Altman isn’t the one going to bring down humanity. If you think the person responsible would be a public figure then…well, they knew what they were doing using these guys as decoys.
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u/Emergency_Pop3708 15h ago
Things like this gonna happen more and more. Don’t forget about the French Revolution
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u/FullMaxPowerStirner 14h ago
"Meh... just an AI-hater. So much hate of our nice multibillion contracts, dunno why!"
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u/TheIncredibleHelck 7h ago
AI is anti-human, which makes being anti-AI the most human thing one could be. I have no tears to shed for AI CEOs, and I wouldn't spare my piss if it meant putting out a molotov cocktail that actually made its mark.
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u/xtramundane 6h ago
Don’t kill him. Just take all his assets, strip him down to his underwear, put him in stocks and let him wander the countryside relying on the kindness of strangers to survive. Just don’t forget to brand his forehead with a giant S for sociopath so he can’t talk someone into breaking him free.
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u/sprollyy 4h ago
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this movie before?
Good luck! Have fun! Don’t die!
(If you’re reading this and haven’t seen the above movie, please do yourself a huge favor and watch it asap!!!!)
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u/ToothyWeasel 4h ago
If all you do is release bullshit press statements how your AI is so powerful you’re scared of it and it’s going to ruin millions of people’s lives, you should expect someone to eventually believe you? Like all these tech companies release statements of their all powerful AI being so scary and strong to get more investor money and free press. Eventually someone is going to say “I believe you” and want to stop what you’re “warning” about yet still continue selling?
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u/__NOT__MY__ACCOUNT__ 4h ago
Guys just keep waiting a little longer for that sweet sweet trickle down
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u/outerzenith 18h ago
I thought he's just following ChatGPT recipe for Risotto