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.
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.