OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership

https://www.vice.com/en/article/openai-ceo-identity-verification-company-fake-bruno-mars-partnership-mistaken-identity/

114•BoggleOhYeah•1h ago

Comments

_verandaguy•1h ago

An outstanding move for a company claiming to sell trust as a service.

2ndorderthought•1h ago

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.

3form•1h ago

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.

abirch•1h ago

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.

2ndorderthought•56m ago

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.

ectospheno•45m ago

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.

ralph84•25m ago

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.

Mashimo•28m ago

> 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.

nemomarx•11m ago

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.

hvb2•16m ago

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.

mentalgear•50m ago

Sam Altman: the CEO of companies selling 'Intelligence' and 'Trust' (... me Bro) as a service.

camillomiller•1h ago

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.

sumeno•1h ago

Hopefully Sam follows in the tradition of other transformational tech figures, like Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes

blitzar•57m ago

Palantir are a lot of things, incompetent they are not.

sjsdaiuasgdia•56m ago

Yes, they're fascist. Or at least Alex Karp is.

tyre•46m ago

People I’ve spoken to in DoD strongly disagree with you there.

amuradbegovic•35m ago

What are their complaints?

Lionga•52m ago

Scam Altman doing Scam Altman things

chaostheory•51m ago

They didn’t get scammed. The CEO just didn’t know the difference between 30 seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars.

sigmoid10•49m ago

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.

throwatdem12311•49m ago

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

steve1977•49m ago

Hallucinated a partnership...

renegade-otter•15m ago

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).

Mashimo•47m ago

> 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.

semiquaver•45m ago

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.

mattas•44m ago

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.

Mashimo•31m ago

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

konschubert•28m ago

Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

cowsandmilk•24m ago

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.

sophacles•22m ago

It's a simple tale, one as old as time - the religious scammers started believing their lies and drank the kool-aid.

oersted•19m ago

Quite reminiscent of the "Four Seasons Total Landscaping" debacle :)

Lionga•45m ago

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?

jacquesm•33m ago

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?

Fokamul•37m ago

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.

rvz•30m ago

You all just got rage-baited here. One side of this story is not telling the truth.

Don't fall for it.

gblargg•15m ago

And the article doesn't even say it was fake, just a likely error.

cryptonym•5m ago

rage-baited? I think it's pretty clear to everyone they did a mistake due to lexical proximity with their actual partnership.

danans•28m ago

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.

hansmayer•27m ago

Is anyone even surprised at this point? Probably a long chain of AI-"summarised" emails flowing back and forth.

thevillagechief•18m ago

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?

ghoulishly•3m ago

“OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership” the english language is rapidly running out of brand new sentences.

Show HN: I built a zero-tracking news hub to escape doomscrolling and clickbait

Trump Fired the National Science Board. Here's Why That Matters

PgBackRest is archived, what now?

VibeLens: Visualize, personalize, and audit your AI agent sessions

Another US state wants to force registration for all e-bikes

Open routines, local AI workflow automation

CATL says sodium batteries are mainstream-ready, signs 60 GWh deal

Show HN: Rhythmguard – spacing scale enforcement for CSS and Tailwind

Architectural Requirements for Agentic AI Containment

PAVO-Bench – 50K voice turns and an 85K-param router for ASR→LLM→TTS

The medieval habit of 'two sleeps'

Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners, They Just Can't Remember

Data Lineage in DuckDB: How Duck_lineage Tracks Every Query

Attack of the Killer Script Kiddies

Network Stats for Q1 2026: Neocloud Traffic Trends

Reporters at this news site are AI bots. OpenAI's appears to be funding it

Show HN: I built a WhatsApp bot to help you remember birthdays

IBM Bob

They said AI would kill SaaS boilerplates, but it's doing the opposite

AI and Coder Employment: Compiling the Evidence [pdf] [Federal Reserve]

Golang heap profiling without pprof enabled or eBPF

No Idle GPUs: Managing Research Compute at Runway

Panama's ocean lifeline vanishes for the first time in 40 year

Tight Curves and Wide Horizons: The Return of Highway 1

Show HN: VoiceGoat – A vulnerable voice agent for practicing LLM attacks

The West Talks About "Distillation." Fine. Let's Talk About Project Azorian

What's New in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 44

Monitor Linux syscalls in real time for threat detection with bpftrace

Why more content is no longer a reliable way to grow SEO

Is OpenAI Falling Further Behind in the A.I. Race?