Dario is a lot more focused on enabling people with AI, Sam goes on interviews like he's Wormtongue trying to summon a "god". Then there is the whole "open"ai where he took it closed source for profit, the engineers kicking sama out but he wiggled back in (at the cost of a lot of the founding engineers), the suspicious death of a whistleblower, the crazy investment schemes of billions of dollars that he's hoping taxes will save him from, the immediate curtailing to Pete in the DoD, and a few other things that make him at least a highly questionable fellow.
Dario left OpenAI because of the bad he saw there, and made a superior product (though these things change very rapidly).
> Why is it Altman is facing kill shots and Dario isn’t?
Altman peaked in the zeiteist in 2023; Dario, much less prominently, in 2024 and now '26 [1]. I'd guess around this time next year, Dario will be as hated as Altman is today.
> Very convenient to leave out Amazon in your back of the envelope test, who’s internal metrics were showing a path toward quasi-monopoly profits
Not in the 1990s. The American e-commerce industry was structurally unprofitable prior to the dot-com crash, an event Amazon (and eBay) responded to by fundamentally changing their businesses. Amazon bet on fulfillment. eBay bet on payments. Both represented a vertical integration that illustrates the point–the original model didn't work.
> There’s a difference between being too early vs being nonsense
When answering the question "do the investments make sense," not really. You're losing your money either way.
The American AI industry appears to have "viable economics for profit" without AGI. That doesn't guarantee anyone will earn them. But it's not a meaningless conclusion. (Though I'd personally frame it as a hypothesis I'm leaning towards.)
Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto explained the failures of many dotcom startups and Amazon's later success in the field (in part) to the fact that dotcom era delivery was done by highly trained, highly compensated, unionized in-company workers, meanwhile Amazon prevents unions, contracts (or contracted, I'm not up to date on this) companies for delivery and has exploitative working conditions with high turnover, the economics are very different and are a big contributor to their success
Why is it Altman is facing kill shots and Dario isn’t?