- cross-posted to:
- til
- cross-posted to:
- til
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age, whose influence supposedly extends to the White House on the strength of his ideas alone.
Or at least that’s the image he’s managed to cultivate. A new exposé in the New Yorker paints a different portrait, and it’s substantially more vexing. Drawing on interviews with numerous OpenAI insiders who worked with Altman, the article portrays the CEO not as a technical wiz, but as a skilled manipulator— and one with a surprisingly shallow grasp of the AI systems his company is building.
According to numerous engineers interviewed for the article, Altman lacks experience in both programming and in machine learning — a shortage of expertise that becomes obvious when the CEO mixes up basic AI terms.
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I don’t expect a CEO to do any coding. I also don’t expect a CEO to be as much of an expert as the PhD level computer scientists, machine learning experts, professors of psychology, neurology, ethics, etc., that his company is employing. It is not possible or even relevant for him to have those skills to the level of the top academics that work for him.
So the typical Tech CEO. What’s new?
Not only have I (25 year programming vet) never had a CEO who could code, I’ve never had a CEO who thought he should be able to code. As a species, they tend to be proud of their leadership chops rather than their ability to actually do anything.
No C-Suite suit I’ve ever met in my life has struck me as a leader type. I know there’s some out there but they all think that being in charge makes them leaders.
Pretty much. These guys are all marketing with not so much understanding of the tech their hawking
Elon 2.0
Predictable
Why is this framed as if it’s in any way surprising?
has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age
Has he? The only things I ever read about him are that he’s a dunce with too much money at his disposal.
a shortage of expertise that becomes obvious when the CEO mixes up basic AI terms.
Is that why he thinks the acronym “GPT” is a trademark that belongs to his company, even though it existed before they did?
Apple has a trademark for ‘Apple’ in computers. Apples have existed before trademarks have.
This guys a fucking psycho for real. Another robot man with too much money for his own good, or anyone’s good, really.
Altman is just another tech bro dropout who never completed anything, similar to Musk.
But the skills required to be a CEO are that of a skilled manipulator, why would a CEO waste time coding when he can hire meatbags to do that? The nature of US startups benefits con artists and bullshit artists, because the VC money community is not the STEM community.
I like to call them Chief of Capital abbreviated cockheads.
Least surprising thing I’ve read about him
Why would a CEO have to know how to code? OpenAI has a marketcap of $852B, he can hire has many programmers as the company needs.
OpenAI isn’t publicly traded, they don’t have a market cap.
Wrong word. OpenAI is valued at over $500B. CEO’s of multi billion companies don’t waste their time doing tasks done by $150k/yr positions.
Because when you’re in a small, scrappy tech startup, everyone is expected to contribute. It is only when the company launches and the founding CEO leaves so that a professional CEO can take over that you would not expect them not to have to code.
The company is valued at over $500B, with over 4,500 employees. That is not a scrappy tech startup. If the CEO of a company that valuable is coding, he/she don’t have their priorities straight.
lmao no shit.
Having been in Tech in the last Tech Boom and also in this later one (I was even in Startups some years ago), I can tell you that whilst the previous one was mainly driven by Techies wanting do cool things, this one is entirely driven by grifters with backgrounds in areas like Finance and Marketing.
The present generation of Startup Founders are almost never Technically skilled, rather they’re skilled at Salesmanship (most notably, Pitching) and they don’t dream of cracking some complex problem, they dream about making a lot of money via an Exit Strategy.
The only surprising thing about Altman not understanding Technology in depth is people being surprised by it.
this one is entirely driven by grifters with backgrounds in areas like Finance and Marketing
I worked for startups in the '90s and this describes all of them, too.
Your interesting use of Capitalization is odd.
Salesmanship is a charitable way of putting it. Slopmanship maybe, but I would say a confidence man, like Musk, hyping their products with flights of fancy, playing the fools along with the legions of cynical investors also riding the wave.
Well, the ones on present day Startups do tend to be on the area of the Venn Diagram where Selling intersects with Fraud
I mean, yeah…obviously. The amount of CEOs with any technical understanding of what they supposedly manage is just about zero.
And the AI grift is basically on the same level as the Religious grift, supposed spiritual leaders/gurus who convince people that they have some special connection to God/the universe/spiritual realms, etc.
And people eat it up, it’s been a thing for literally thousands of years. We are primed to want to belive it, and when it comes with membership in an exclusive club of other “true believers” , that’s a winning formula.
I know who is that person they are looking for, Dario, CEO of Anthropic, he can write code and knows AI.
The way I see it, people pushing for AI and robots are the unskilled billionaires who don’t want to pay the skilled for their work. Billionaires are useless.
CEOs speak in bullshit and since AI makes up bullshit you could say it speaks their language.