Adam
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2019–2026
0:45 · 171K views · Apr 30, 2016
A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson comments on sycophants. It satirizes executives surrounded by yes-men.
Mostly used as a joking or illustrative reference when threads cover yes-men, executive hubris and sycophancy.
5 comments from Hacker News
The show Silicon Valley had a great protrayal what surrounding yourself with yes-men can do to a person The best part: this video
> That's so meta it applies to everything though. Fair... but I think you're also over generalizing. Think about how these models are trained. They are initially trained as text completion machines, right? Then to turn them to chatbots we optimize for human preferential output, given that there is no mathematical metric for "output in the form of a conversation that's natural for humans". The whole point of LLMs is to follow your instructions. That's how they're trained. An LLM will never laugh at your question, ignore it, or any thing that humans may naturally do unless they are explicitly trained for that response (e.g. safety[0]) So that's where the generalization of the more meta comment breaks down. Humans learning to converse aren't optimizing for for the preference of the person they're talking to. They don't just follow orders, and if we do we call them things like robots or NPCs. I go to a business advisor because of their expertise and because I have trust in them that they aren't going to butter me up. But if I go to buy a used car that salesman is going to try to get me. The way they do that may in fact be to make me think they aren't buttering me up. Are they being sycophantic? Possibly. There are "yes men". But generally I'd say no. Sycophancy is on the extreme end, despite many of its features being common and normal. The LLM is trained to be a "yes man" and will always be a "yes man". tldr: Denpok from Silicon Valley is a sycophant and his sycophancy leads to
"The challenge is his personality and demeanor can turn on a dime going from excited to angry. Since it was hard to read what mood he might be in and what his reaction would be to any given thing, people quickly became afraid of being called into meetings or having to share negative news with him." -Esther Crawford [LINK] also Gavin Belson was spot on this video [LINK] [LINK]
I couldn't agree with you more here. To me, it's a clear sign that he "wears no clothes". The Metaverse presentation was the most idiotic presentation I've ever seen. He must be completely surrounded himself by people that just agree with him. It reminds me of this clip from Silicon Valley. this video
Every section about the CEO just makes me think of Gavin Belson from the Silicon Valley series, surrounding himself with "yes men" and firing people who make him feel like he might be a little wrong. this video [LINK] [LINK]