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.
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.
Your interesting use of Capitalization is odd.
It’s Trumptastic!
I dunno man, seems Fuckin’ Straight to me.
I worked for startups in the '90s and this describes all of them, too.
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.
Well, the ones on present day Startups do tend to be on the area of the Venn Diagram where Selling intersects with Fraud