Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts
futurism.com
The OpenAI CEO reportedly confuses basic coding and machine learning terms, numerous insiders have admitted.

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.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        0·
        2 hours ago

        Unironically yes.

        90% of what CEOs do is talk to other CEOs and other C Suite members. Very rarely are they actually subject matter experts, those days are long gone. Externally, they are mascots, internally, they read reports from their underlings and then ‘make the final call’.

        You may notice that these are things that LLMs actually do a somewhat decent job of, ingesting a wide variety of input info, and essentially transforming it into a compelling narrative.

        This is why so many CEOs and C suite are so enamored with, and impressed by ‘AI’:

        Its a better version of what they do, which is essentially professional gaslighting.

        C suite tend to be sociopathic narcissists.

        This is just literally a verified and studied fact.

        So, the sociopathic narcissists are impressed by an automagic gaslighting machine, that is often actually more factually corrrect than they are… but of course the actual facts don’t matter to a narcissist, what matters is accomplishing their will.

        This is a big part of why they genuienly do not understand why everyone else doesn’t ‘appreciate’ AI the way they do.

        They’re out of touch, delusional, by way of narcissism.

      • ViatorOmnium@piefed.socialEnglish
        0·
        3 hours ago

        I’ve been saying that since forever. There’s exactly one job that can be replaced by LLMs (and maybe a good PR person to show up for physical events).