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.
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.