Sam Altman and OpenAI are consistently unreliable. One more example that by this point should not surprise anybody.

Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think ‘oh, the lawnmower hates me’ – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle.

I think this is a well argued plea by Ken Shirriff to stop using the term “cargo cult” and I agree with it but would like to add two things.