- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- til@lemmy.world
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.
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I mean, yeah…obviously. The amount of CEOs with any technical understanding of what they supposedly manage is just about zero.
And the AI grift is basically on the same level as the Religious grift, supposed spiritual leaders/gurus who convince people that they have some special connection to God/the universe/spiritual realms, etc.
And people eat it up, it’s been a thing for literally thousands of years. We are primed to want to belive it, and when it comes with membership in an exclusive club of other “true believers” , that’s a winning formula.
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.
CEOs speak in bullshit and since AI makes up bullshit you could say it speaks their language.
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
Having been in Tech in the last Tech Boom and also in this later one (I was even in Startups some years ago), I can tell you that whilst the previous one was mainly driven by Techies wanting do cool things, this one is entirely driven by grifters with backgrounds in areas like Finance and Marketing.
The present generation of Startup Founders are almost never Technically skilled, rather they’re skilled at Salesmanship (most notably, Pitching) and they don’t dream of cracking some complex problem, they dream about making a lot of money via an Exit Strategy.
The only surprising thing about Altman not understanding Technology in depth is people being surprised by it.
Salesmanship is a charitable way of putting it. Slopmanship maybe, but I would say a confidence man, like Musk, hyping their products with flights of fancy, playing the fools along with the legions of cynical investors also riding the wave.
My CEO all up in the codebase but we are a team of 5. I do not envy his many hats.
Classic Silicon Valley
I mean, yeah. He’s not a programmer lol he’s a businessman. Most CEOs don’t actually do anything.
He’s a finance guy, a confidence man, like Musk. That is the quality prized by society, not the ability to do anything productive.
Does the author not really understand what a CEO is? Don’t get me wrong, Sam Altman is a piece of shit - but his coding ability has nothing to do with that.
I think a good CEO should strive to understand as much of a business he runs as possible. But the larger the company the more I find that it’s common that the CEO actually is NOT skilled in the fields most integral to the company’s success.
AMD has Lisa Su, but that seems like an exception more than a rule.
The job of a CEO is not the same as the job of a Machine Learning engineer.
Their job has less to do with writing code than it is to make money. I agree they need to understand their business but they have to juggle supplier relationships, market demands, HR concerns, logistical problems…
It’s why if you want to be in management, you often have to leave your hard skills behind and rely more on your soft skills.
That said, fuck billionaire CEOs.
That our ceo’s are all soul less confidence men and woman does not make that the natural order of things.
Jensen at nvidia is according to employees (ex and current) an incredibly competent engineer too
Sounds like his AI.
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…
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 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.
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 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 form them to know something about what they sell.
CEOs are required to be skilled manipulators. That’s literally what their job is, actually.
So AI could do their job 10x better?
Unironically yes.
90% of what CEOs do is talk to other CEOs and other C Suite members. Very rarely are they actually subject matter experts, those days are long gone. Externally, they are mascots, internally, they read reports from their underlings and then ‘make the final call’.
You may notice that these are things that LLMs actually do a somewhat decent job of, ingesting a wide variety of input info, and essentially transforming it into a compelling narrative.
This is why so many CEOs and C suite are so enamored with, and impressed by ‘AI’:
Its a better version of what they do, which is essentially professional gaslighting.
C suite tend to be sociopathic narcissists.
This is just literally a verified and studied fact.
So, the sociopathic narcissists are impressed by an automagic gaslighting machine, that is often actually more factually corrrect than they are… but of course the actual facts don’t matter to a narcissist, what matters is accomplishing their will.
This is a big part of why they genuienly do not understand why everyone else doesn’t ‘appreciate’ AI the way they do.
They’re out of touch, delusional, by way of narcissism.
I’ve been saying that since forever. There’s exactly one job that can be replaced by LLMs (and maybe a good PR person to show up for physical events).
That’s what ppl keep saying. Effectively they are overpaid mascot.
has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age,
The media keeps glazing him, because he keeps spending money on PR firms so that happens
If everyone keeps saying a capitalist CEO is a once in a life super genius…
The reason is so people invest in that company, not that the CEO is actually intelligent.
It’s the same shit Musk went thru, so people have no excuse falling for it again.
I heard that Bezos can barely drive a delivery truck, too.
I mean come on, is it really a surprise that the role of CEO is so detached from the actual workings of a company? That’s why CEOs can just hop companies without working their way up from the bottom. The role rarely has anything to do with the product or service.
