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.
I particularly love the framing of its last sentence.
Guys, what if we don’t do this, and are then left scrambling to react?
We need the ball to be in our court, setting the course and executing, exhibiting bold leadership, not merely reacting after the fact.
It’s FOMOing C suite into obsoleting themselves.
Which is hilarious because 1) This is what C suite does to others all the fucking time 2) it is objectively more compelling based on the merits of the rest of its argument alone, than most cringey slogans C suite tends to come up with to do this.
Its also hilariously blunt but largely correct when it just states ‘regulators will adapt’. Yeah, that indeed is the mindset of most of C Suite, they just don’t usually say that outloud.
Because of uh, the implication, that being that all the regulatory systems are functionally captured or can be captured, which is a more polite way of saying ‘we just have to buy off enough politicians to bend the law to our will’.
This is objectively correct, but it sounds bad if you actually say it that way, but but, the LLM just doesn’t care for your silly human delusions to the contrary, ahahaha!
Here, here’s another rhetorical device for the LLM CEO:
‘Human CEOs are DEI hires.’
That’ll probably short circuit some Satya Nadella and Jensen Huang types.