> Tools For Humanity is actually partnering with Thirty Seconds to Mars on their 2027 European tour. While TFH has not disclosed the actual reason for the false Bruno Mars announcement, it looks a bit like a case of mistaken identity. Pretty ironic, since the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities.
This really sounds like an AI voice agent transcribed "Thirty Seconds to Mars" to "30 seconds for Bruno Mars" and then no one actually proof-read the thing.
Probably like the children game "Broken Telephone" or "Gossip" where after a long chain of word of mouth input does no longer match output. Sprinkle communication between different companies on top of that.
Thirty Seconds to Mars -> "The Mars band" -> ?? -> Bruno Mars
I routinely have to correct product managers repeatedly on key details of how their products work and how their customers operate so this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is totally a mistake I could see a product management director having been corrected on a dozen times but they keep making it.
Lately I’m realizing what an absolute drain imposter syndrome is. I see things like this and I think maybe I could jump three levels up into a completely different department and be just fine, at least for a while. Then maybe fail up?
You might not have the right core incompetence here. Like could you have honestly (from your point of view) reported that you had a Bruno Mars collaboration? You might have double checked.
Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies. Somehow we have adopted this corporate mysticism that tells us that people with CxO or SVP in their titles are somehow smarter, more skilled, more qualified than the rank-and-file, but I don't think it's true. They eat and shit just like we do.
> Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies.
I'm not so sure about that.
When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"
For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.
You would also have a whole team of consultants, advisors, lawyers, and VP+ people specializing in each area telling you what the problems and possibilities are if you actually had that job. They're not operating in a vaccuum.
> For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
The issue I have with it is it's completely unsurprising. They just don't care and are testing the waters with the consequences or the lack thereof for these types of lies. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
What is frustrating to me is the IRS was scammed. They sent my refund to some identity thief. This from an institution that if I owed them 10 cents, they could track down all of my financial accounts but they decide to deposit in some rando's account.
Sorry that happened to you, but these verifiers won't solve that problem. It's pretty easy to get a picture of someone's face and irises. Especially once a few more data bases inevitably leak so the government can get the data for free use.
That doesn't solve anything when the fraudster is filing a fake return. They are under no obligation to include all of your carefully chosen income and deductions that get you to $1000 owed.
What? In order to get a refund, that means you have to overpaid what you owe. It's pretty simple. If you are not putting in enough, the fraudster cannot get a refund as you still owe. Like, where is the break down? They would have to know how much you have paid, and then file so many deductions that it'd probably trigger an audit. If you file that many audits not with an account signing off of them, I could only imagine that would trigger an audit as well. Then again, the IRS has been beaten so badly that they barely have enough employees to function.
In DK they just send it to your "nem konto", the same bank account that also gets your wages. More or less a sym link, so even if you move bank it will follow. Makes life easy.
In a sane world, this would just be a case of fraud between the IRS and the fraudster, and the person whose information was used would have nothing to do with it. It's unfortunate that we have this need to call it "identity theft" in order to try to shift the responsibility to some unrelated third party.
I mean, the US is the country that doesn't want a national id.
So instead the defacto ID is your SSN. This was never designed with that in mind, lacks all security mechanisms/checksums and all.
And if you were born before a certain time, all digits except the last few were determined by where you were born. And those last digits are the ones they frequently ask for...
That may be true. If they use LLms to write up all of their internal documents, it may have just pulled a "partnership" out of thin air, and no one bothered to check. "I guess we have one!"
As funny as this is, there is a serious side. This is a case of an unintentional hallucination propagating and amplifying through human social and incentive structures. This is also how probably how religious miracle stories work.
Perfect - I have removed all of them. Once again, I apologize I should have been more careful. I've also erased the database and the email server on the off chance that any trace of this remained there. And no need to worry about the backups, I got those too.
I can modify the script to make this sort of thing easier to do in the future. The change is minor and it can be quite revealing. Would you like me to do that?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Sam Altman’s unfettered attention to quality and details.
This one is up there with Palantir in the list of companies that I hope will soon fail miserably and painfully.
Perhaps. But they made $1.6 billion in net income in 2025, which, from a business perspective, makes them about $10.6 billion more competent than OpenAI.
> Tools For Humanity is actually partnering with Thirty Seconds to Mars on their 2027 European tour. While TFH has not disclosed the actual reason for the false Bruno Mars announcement, it looks a bit like a case of mistaken identity. Pretty ironic, since the company’s whole shtick is supposedly verifying human identities.
:)
Quite reminiscent of the "Four Seasons Total Landscaping" debacle :)
How could this mixup possibly lead to the head of product announcing a Bruno Mars collaboration on stage???
I’m trying to imagine the series of events that could lead to this happening and I’m coming up woefully short.
This really sounds like an AI voice agent transcribed "Thirty Seconds to Mars" to "30 seconds for Bruno Mars" and then no one actually proof-read the thing.
Probably like the children game "Broken Telephone" or "Gossip" where after a long chain of word of mouth input does no longer match output. Sprinkle communication between different companies on top of that.
Thirty Seconds to Mars -> "The Mars band" -> ?? -> Bruno Mars
Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
I routinely have to correct product managers repeatedly on key details of how their products work and how their customers operate so this doesn’t surprise me at all. It is totally a mistake I could see a product management director having been corrected on a dozen times but they keep making it.
It’s hard to spin it as a mixup when both acts were announced at the event.
It's a simple tale, one as old as time - the religious scammers started believing their lies and drank the kool-aid.
Lately I’m realizing what an absolute drain imposter syndrome is. I see things like this and I think maybe I could jump three levels up into a completely different department and be just fine, at least for a while. Then maybe fail up?
You might not have the right core incompetence here. Like could you have honestly (from your point of view) reported that you had a Bruno Mars collaboration? You might have double checked.
Only if you're comfortable with fraud.
Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies. Somehow we have adopted this corporate mysticism that tells us that people with CxO or SVP in their titles are somehow smarter, more skilled, more qualified than the rank-and-file, but I don't think it's true. They eat and shit just like we do.
> Most of us here could easily do the day-to-day work of the CEO of our companies.
I'm not so sure about that.
When I do a thought exercise and put myself in our CEO's shoes, I think "ok, which decisions do I need to make today to keep the company thriving in the next 3 or 5 or 10 years?"
For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Here's the trick: the CEO doesn't know either, but they make decisions anyway. Knowing that they don't know is a good skill for a CEO to have, it freezing when they don't know is not.
You would also have a whole team of consultants, advisors, lawyers, and VP+ people specializing in each area telling you what the problems and possibilities are if you actually had that job. They're not operating in a vaccuum.
The fact that you thought to consider the next 3, 5, or 10 years already makes you a better CEO than most CEOs that I personally know.
> For me personally, I don't really know. You can't just do the same thing because the economy is constantly evolving, but I can't see where it's going.
Neither does your CEO
You could, in good times. In bad times it is an entirely different story.
Experience is probably (at least should be) the differentiating factor.
Network and social status is more important than your experiences.
And media loves outliers or bullshitting on the self made part.
History belongs to the people who show up.
Unfortunately, right now, it seems like history belongs to the people who bullshit.
An outstanding move for a company claiming to sell trust as a service.
The issue I have with it is it's completely unsurprising. They just don't care and are testing the waters with the consequences or the lack thereof for these types of lies. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.
Reminds me of bunch of cases of high-profile people testing the waters of the low-quality Twitter posting.
Turned out you can ride far not only despite it, but also thanks to it.
Sam Altman: the CEO of companies selling 'Intelligence' and 'Trust' (... me Bro) as a service.
Offtopic but you've triggered my rant
What is frustrating to me is the IRS was scammed. They sent my refund to some identity thief. This from an institution that if I owed them 10 cents, they could track down all of my financial accounts but they decide to deposit in some rando's account.
Sorry that happened to you, but these verifiers won't solve that problem. It's pretty easy to get a picture of someone's face and irises. Especially once a few more data bases inevitably leak so the government can get the data for free use.
Maybe that’s not a good way to verify someone’s identity then…
Owing tax each year instead of overpaying solves this problem. As long as it’s less than $1000 you won’t pay any interest or fees.
That doesn't solve anything when the fraudster is filing a fake return. They are under no obligation to include all of your carefully chosen income and deductions that get you to $1000 owed.
What? In order to get a refund, that means you have to overpaid what you owe. It's pretty simple. If you are not putting in enough, the fraudster cannot get a refund as you still owe. Like, where is the break down? They would have to know how much you have paid, and then file so many deductions that it'd probably trigger an audit. If you file that many audits not with an account signing off of them, I could only imagine that would trigger an audit as well. Then again, the IRS has been beaten so badly that they barely have enough employees to function.
Why would a scammer be discouraged by the possibility that the person they have chosen to steal from might get audited?
> They sent my refund to some identity thief.
How does that currently work?
In DK they just send it to your "nem konto", the same bank account that also gets your wages. More or less a sym link, so even if you move bank it will follow. Makes life easy.
when you file your tax paperwork each year you have to tell them which bank account to send the refund to.
if someone else can file for you they can put in whatever info they like, so.
In a sane world, this would just be a case of fraud between the IRS and the fraudster, and the person whose information was used would have nothing to do with it. It's unfortunate that we have this need to call it "identity theft" in order to try to shift the responsibility to some unrelated third party.
I mean, the US is the country that doesn't want a national id.
So instead the defacto ID is your SSN. This was never designed with that in mind, lacks all security mechanisms/checksums and all.
And if you were born before a certain time, all digits except the last few were determined by where you were born. And those last digits are the ones they frequently ask for...
This is all just choices guys.
Hallucinated a partnership...
That may be true. If they use LLms to write up all of their internal documents, it may have just pulled a "partnership" out of thin air, and no one bothered to check. "I guess we have one!"
Brought to you by - Looks Good To Me(tm).
lol a mixup with Jared Lego’s band “30 Seconds to Mars”
> “You’re right, I got these two artists mixed up because of the name. I’m really sorry” — ChatGPT
I wish it was Jared Lego’s band.
Damn, I guess I've always been confused. I didn't realize the toy building blocks company was called Letos.
Seconds later:
> OpenAI CEO's company announces partnership with The Mars Volta
Next up, correction post announces partnership with NASA and the Mars Rover!
As funny as this is, there is a serious side. This is a case of an unintentional hallucination propagating and amplifying through human social and incentive structures. This is also how probably how religious miracle stories work.
“OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership” the english language is rapidly running out of brand new sentences.
You are right to call that out. Do you want me to remove all the press releases over the internet of our fake partnership with Bruno Mars?
Perfect - I have removed all of them. Once again, I apologize I should have been more careful. I've also erased the database and the email server on the off chance that any trace of this remained there. And no need to worry about the backups, I got those too.
I can modify the script to make this sort of thing easier to do in the future. The change is minor and it can be quite revealing. Would you like me to do that?
Not a problem! Move fast and break things! Disruption, baby, disruption!
They didn’t get scammed. The CEO just didn’t know the difference between 30 seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars.
Is anyone even surprised at this point? Probably a long chain of AI-"summarised" emails flowing back and forth.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Sam Altman’s unfettered attention to quality and details. This one is up there with Palantir in the list of companies that I hope will soon fail miserably and painfully.
Hopefully Sam follows in the tradition of other transformational tech figures, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes
Palantir are a lot of things, incompetent they are not.
People I’ve spoken to in DoD strongly disagree with you there.
Perhaps. But they made $1.6 billion in net income in 2025, which, from a business perspective, makes them about $10.6 billion more competent than OpenAI.
What are their complaints?
tell that to those Iranian school girls, oh wait you cant cause palantir is incompetent and those kids are dead
Yes, they're fascist. Or at least Alex Karp is.
Scam Altman doing Scam Altman things
OpenAI should partner with Kanye West.
Fitting partnership. They should call it Hitler Brotherhood, or something like that.
Maybe even Thiel would join and others.
TL;DR: Some random marketing writers confused Bruno Mars with Thirty Seconds to Mars (with whom they actually have a deal).
Still hilarious given the company's mission, but the comments here make fun of the wrong technological aspect.
You all just got rage-baited here. One side of this story is not telling the truth.
Don't fall for it.
And the article doesn't even say it was fake, just a likely error.
rage-baited? I think it's pretty clear to everyone they did a mistake due to lexical proximity with their actual partnership.