- 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.
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How much longer until this goes the way of Theranos?
Hopefully not very
has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age,
The media keeps glazing him, because he keeps spending money on PR firms so that happens
If everyone keeps saying a capitalist CEO is a once in a life super genius…
The reason is so people invest in that company, not that the CEO is actually intelligent.
It’s the same shit Musk went thru, so people have no excuse falling for it again.
Why do people think that the CEO is like the “best employee” at what the company does?? No CEO at any company I’ve ever worked at has had a basic understanding of the work that I did. They understand “the business” but aren’t the ones doing implementation.
And that’s “fine” - we have different jobs. Theirs, apparently, has been worth millions of times what I do though…
It’s not surprising.
There are brain damaged people out there who still think Elon Musk is a good engineer.
I think he used to care more. I’d also say he was never a good engineer, but he was better at learning what his top engineers were trying to show him and pushing through answers that made sense.
He’s since lost any of that touch with reality. The engineers he listened to said no too much. He found right-wing grifters that are now teaching him, and they say “no” a whole lot less than the engineers did.
That whole submarine pedo thing told me he was the type of boss that made unrealistic demands and raged at anyone that pushed back. It was no surprise to later learn that his companies have people whose whole job is to deflect him when he’s there so he doesn’t get in the way of the engineering.
His whole “yell at advertisers to get them to give him money” was another sign of that. He’s used to yes men placating him and flew off the handle when he didn’t have power to dictate how others acted, even if they just went back to what they were doing prior the moment he left the room.
Since the CEO makes decisions based on what they sell, it would be good form them to know something about what they sell.
I have a CEO that I respect. I’m in an engineering heavy company and the CEO is anything but that, and he knows it. His background is finance and that’s most of his job, and interfacing with government. He delegates effectively and does not insert himself in technical decisions. The one thing he does do is ask a lot of questions. In some respect he doesn’t care what the answer is, but he wants to know that we’ve considered all the angles before he takes our advice. I’ve been pulled in to a boardroom before because something was on his mind that he wanted to share. One occasion he told me to think about it. He didn’t want me to follow up with him, but when it came up at a board meeting he wanted the COO to have an answer, so he was flagging the issue for me. Good guy.
This is what a CEO is supposed to do. They are the glue between every department and are supposed to make sure that everyone is on the same page. They ask “what is needed for us to get to this point and how can I help”. They leave all functional details to the subject matter experts. They act as guide rails and do not derail the train.
Good CEOs understand that they are worth less than their employees because without their expertise and domain knowledge the CEO has no product to sell.
My CEO has deep technical chops, and has shown multiple times he can get his hands dirty with the rest of the team.
It’s not unusual for founders in highly technical fields to have a good level of expertise in that field. Not mandatory but if you look at Alexandr Wang (scale AI, former engineer), Dario Amodei (Anthropic, AI researcher), Michael Truell (Cursor, computer scientist and International Olympiad in Informatics medalist) the expectation is not unreasonable.
The sales people generally take over later.
At my old company of about 20,000 employees, our CEO used to travel between our regions to give speeches at our work gatherings. So we’d have to listen to him talk every year or so.
I was constantly amazed listening to the bullshit this guy would spew. He literally founded the company and led it for 20 years - but I firmly believe he had absolutely no idea what it was that we actually did.
We were an IT and management consulting company, so we’d be doing stuff like building applications, systems integrations, change management, or managing programs. The usually consulting shit.
This dude would give these speeches like we were out there solving world hunger.
I mean duh. Obviously the guy who barks orders he has no comprehension of is worth millions of times what the people actually doing the work are. Isn’t it obvious? How would a bunch of engineers have a functioning product without a useless figurehead?
He Can Barely Code
He can code?I’m sure he gets the ‘vibe’.
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.
Sounds like his AI.
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.
A CEO who is clueless about their organization’s nature is at an enormous disadvantage. I think it is too common now. Part of the reason so much sucks ass
Exactly, that’s AI’s job.
I expect any CEO to be a worthless chode that has stepped on everyone en route to the top.
Are you a Boeing executive, by any chance?
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.
Jensen at nvidia is according to employees (ex and current) an incredibly competent engineer too
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.
That our ceo’s are all soul less confidence men and woman does not make that the natural order of things.
He’s a sales person. Name me one sales person that was good at coding.
Bill Gates back in the 80s maybe?
He is there to lead not read.
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.
So this just in Tech bro billionaire CEO is just like the others, be it Elon Musk or Steve Jobs they are posers who managed to put out a very persuasive mask of competence and knowledge but in the end they think they know a lot more than they do and are some of the worst people causing long term damage to society. Altman with his backtracking on open source and working for the public good for private gains, Elon Musk with everything he’s ever done, or Steve jobs being directly responsible for the lack or repairability of our own electronics or being able to install what you want on your own smartphone without going through Apple’s walled garden, Bill Gates making it almost impossible for competitors to rise through the 90’s and only now is Linux starting to see a rise in its userbase due to Microsoft’s own stupidity, tech bro CEOs have been the worst.
You know, the actually intelligent people KNOW they don’t know everything. Anyone they claims they are super smaht and know ALL the things are probably incredibly dumb
Classic Silicon Valley
The sub header for this paper is hilarious.
“I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”
HAHAHAHA, no shit, he may just as well end up in a new league all his own with how much money will burn once this goes belly up.
