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 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
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.
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.
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
Least surprising thing I’ve read about him
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.
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.
He’s like every other CEO. Doesn’t know anything about the stuff they are selling because it’s built by someone else. Actually his product is for people like that. They don’t need any skill to make something now. Before at least they had to buy it from us
This guys a fucking psycho for real. Another robot man with too much money for his own good, or anyone’s good, really.
Why would a CEO have to know how to code? OpenAI has a marketcap of $852B, he can hire has many programmers as the company needs.
OpenAI isn’t publicly traded, they don’t have a market cap.
Wrong word. OpenAI is valued at over $500B. CEO’s of multi billion companies don’t waste their time doing tasks done by $150k/yr positions.
Because when you’re in a small, scrappy tech startup, everyone is expected to contribute. It is only when the company launches and the founding CEO leaves so that a professional CEO can take over that you would not expect them not to have to code.
The company is valued at over $500B, with over 4,500 employees. That is not a scrappy tech startup. If the CEO of a company that valuable is coding, he/she don’t have their priorities straight.
That’s how tech works today. Huge capital pumped into useless projects.
Y Combinator (Sam Altman’s early venture) had a number of what I would consider huge successes. AirBnb, Dropbox, Reddit to name a few. However, when you are talking startups, it’s like penny stocks. Far more failures than successes.
Talking about the success of Reddit, in Lemmy… I came here because Reddit is going down in quality.
Probably true, but it is still undeniably successful.
For now.
AI guy is bad at coding
surprisedPikachu.jpg
My CEO all up in the codebase but we are a team of 5. I do not envy his many hats.
Predictable
I know who is that person they are looking for, Dario, CEO of Anthropic, he can write code and knows AI.
lmao no shit.
