- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
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.
You must log in or # to comment.
My CEO all up in the codebase but we are a team of 5. I do not envy his many hats.
I mean, yeah. He’s not a programmer lol he’s a businessman. Most CEOs don’t actually do anything.
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.
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.
Does the author not really understand what a CEO is? Don’t get me wrong, Sam Altman is a piece of shit - but his coding ability has nothing to do with that.
Classic Silicon Valley
He’s like every other CEO. Doesn’t know anything about the stuff they are selling because it’s built by someone else. Actually his product is for people like that. They don’t need any skill to make something now. Before at least they had to buy it from us
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.
Sounds like his AI.
I think a good CEO should strive to understand as much of a business he runs as possible. But the larger the company the more I find that it’s common that the CEO actually is NOT skilled in the fields most integral to the company’s success.
AMD has Lisa Su, but that seems like an exception more than a rule.
The job of a CEO is not the same as the job of a Machine Learning engineer.
Their job has less to do with writing code than it is to make money. I agree they need to understand their business but they have to juggle supplier relationships, market demands, HR concerns, logistical problems…
It’s why if you want to be in management, you often have to leave your hard skills behind and rely more on your soft skills.
That said, fuck billionaire CEOs.
Jensen at nvidia is according to employees (ex and current) an incredibly competent engineer too
He’s a sales person. Name me one sales person that was good at coding.
Bill Gates back in the 80s maybe?
How much longer until this goes the way of Theranos?
Hopefully not very
He is there to lead not read.
Failing upward at an immense scale. I see this every day at work, the louder and more incompetent just keep on getting promoted. A social experiment would be to just speak whatever chatGPT vomits up loudly and confidently no matter how ignorant.
This should be obvious. It would be an exception if these people knew shit about fuck. Instead of just listening to them, you should maybe check what they have personally contributed to anything. What does Altman’s github look like?*
They’re all talk, with nothing to show. But then again, have you heard what this doorknob has to say? That we should maybe build a dyson sphere around the solar system?
*I want to believe this is his real account
Not defending Altman, but I’ve been a developer for 15 years and that is what my GitHub looks like too because I don’t spend my spare time programming. I wouldn’t trust a surgeon who did surgery at home. I hate this weird idea that all good developers are developing in their spare time.
The point is that he should have done something, not that he should have done it open source on free time. I threw gh there because it’s the easiest place to find clues if it exists.
The point is that it’s not a good indicator of what people are capable of or what they have done. For instance all of my college classes used bitbucket instead.
Please stop making me defend this asshole.
The fact that the account is 9 years old (from long before he was famous) points to a potential for this being his real account.
