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.
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.
This is what a CEO is supposed to do. They are the glue between every department and are supposed to make sure that everyone is on the same page. They ask “what is needed for us to get to this point and how can I help”. They leave all functional details to the subject matter experts. They act as guide rails and do not derail the train.
Good CEOs understand that they are worth less than their employees because without their expertise and domain knowledge the CEO has no product to sell.
My CEO has deep technical chops, and has shown multiple times he can get his hands dirty with the rest of the team.
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.
I mean duh. Obviously the guy who barks orders he has no comprehension of is worth millions of times what the people actually doing the work are. Isn’t it obvious? How would a bunch of engineers have a functioning product without a useless figurehead?