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.
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.