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?
Successful CEOs know their own limitations and are smart enough and humble enough to take the advice of people who know what the hell they’re talking about.
The only quality Tech Bros share is their ability to spew bullshit with complete confidence. It is long past time we got over our child-like worship of rich con men.
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.
Mine can, but then again, it’s a <50 employee consultancy. Mostly he still does sales and is a project lead for some customers though, he only really writes code when there are no engineers available and one of his customers needs something quickly.
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