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 don’t expect a CEO to do any coding. I also don’t expect a CEO to be as much of an expert as the PhD level computer scientists, machine learning experts, professors of psychology, neurology, ethics, etc., that his company is employing. It is not possible or even relevant for him to have those skills to the level of the top academics that work for him.
A CEO who is clueless about their organization’s nature is at an enormous disadvantage. I think it is too common now. Part of the reason so much sucks ass
I expect any CEO to be a worthless chode that has stepped on everyone en route to the top.
Exactly, that’s AI’s job.
Are you a Boeing executive, by any chance?