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.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    15 hours ago

    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.