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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I should have put “leadership” in ironic quotes. Like they say: don’t step in the leadership.
Pretty much. These guys are all marketing with not so much understanding of the tech their hawking
That doesn’t surprise me. The guy is and always has been a grifter.
I’m more asking what lineage he was birthed from to be in the exact right place to screw over tech development for everyone
AI guy is bad at coding
surprisedPikachu.jpg
CEOs are required to be skilled manipulators. That’s literally what their job is, actually.
So AI could do their job 10x better?
Well, partly. They “generally” (not mostly at least) do deals with and handle people who are somewhat competent, and I think AI absolutely wouldn’t work on many of those people. It’s also very much about body language, choosing the right words and answers that I don’t think AI is close to being good at, yet.
But don’t quote me on that, I don’t use AI at all and never have outside of a dozen “haha funny image making thingy” so I’m very much not up to speed with how it behaves.
I am Fishead:
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
Since the CEO makes decisions based on what they sell, it would be good for them to know something about what they sell.
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.
Least surprising thing I’ve read about him
Elon 2.0
Elon presents himself as an elite coder and tech savant, and it sounds like his teams have to work around his hubris to prevent him from damaging things. I don’t know how Altman presents himself. More important to understand what your role is. His seems to be manipulating Trump, raising money, and evangelizing AI.
The good thing he does for their engineer team in general is to be willing to use a white sheet design and not be forced to use legacy shuttle components.
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.
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.
Sam Altman also raped his sister apparently
It’s a messy situation where nobody other than the two people involved will ever know the truth.
She claims it happened between 1997 and 2006 and she filed the lawsuit 19 years later in 2025. There won’t be any evidence remaining other than what she claims to remember. He won’t be able to clear his name by providing alibis for something that happened 20-30 years ago. Her family said it didn’t happen and that she has mental health issues. She says she has mental health issues due to the abuse. Her ultra-rich brother had been financially supporting her and the claims happened after she asked for more and he refused. The family is siding with Sam, but Sam is also an insanely wealthy and powerful man who is known to lie constantly, so maybe their reason for siding with him isn’t because they’re absolutely sure he’s right. And then there’s the fact that he’s gay, but sexual abuse isn’t necessarily about sexual desire.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say he definitely raped her. OTOH, it’s also not possible to say he’s definitely being falsely accused. It’s just a shitty situation.
Im partial to believing the victim over the billionaire
This guys a fucking psycho for real. Another robot man with too much money for his own good, or anyone’s good, really.
I heard that Bezos can barely drive a delivery truck, too.
I mean come on, is it really a surprise that the role of CEO is so detached from the actual workings of a company? That’s why CEOs can just hop companies without working their way up from the bottom. The role rarely has anything to do with the product or service.
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.
