Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts
futurism.com
The OpenAI CEO reportedly confuses basic coding and machine learning terms, numerous insiders have admitted.

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.

  • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    17 days ago

    Not defending Altman, but I’ve been a developer for 15 years and that is what my GitHub looks like too because I don’t spend my spare time programming. I wouldn’t trust a surgeon who did surgery at home. I hate this weird idea that all good developers are developing in their spare time.

    • Mark with a Z@suppo.fi
      1·
      17 days ago

      The point is that he should have done something, not that he should have done it open source on free time. I threw gh there because it’s the easiest place to find clues if it exists.

      • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        17 days ago

        The point is that it’s not a good indicator of what people are capable of or what they have done. For instance all of my college classes used bitbucket instead.

        Please stop making me defend this asshole.

        • Mark with a Z@suppo.fi
          1·
          16 days ago

          Github or bitbucket makes no difference. If someone has something good there, that’s easy to find and proves something, no?

          Obviously you have to look elsewhere, like his career, if there’s nothing public.