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

BoggleOhYeah 279 points 105 comments April 28, 2026
www.vice.com · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

_verandaguy

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

camillomiller

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.

Lionga

Scam Altman doing Scam Altman things

chaostheory

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

sigmoid10

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

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

Hallucinated a partnership...

Mashimo

> 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. :)

Lionga

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?

Fokamul

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

You all just got rage-baited here. One side of this story is not telling the truth. Don't fall for it.

danans

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

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

thevillagechief

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

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

allears

Not a problem! Move fast and break things! Disruption, baby, disruption!

hmokiguess

Next up, correction post announces partnership with NASA and the Mars Rover!

therobots927

And we trusted Sam Altman with the economy. Sheeeeesh

rvnx

Something I don’t understand, how does that verify identity? Couldn’t a third-party person simply save the pictures taken by the Orb (especially by modifying the firmware)? What’s with this crypto-coins that goes with it ? That doesn’t make sense, seems like a pretext

tw04

Bruno Mars seemed really weird. On the flip side, it is rather fitting that OpenAI is partnering with a guy that's running a weird cult. https://www.kqed.org/arts/13865555/thirty-seconds-to-mars-ja...

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