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.

  • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
    25·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • vodka@feddit.org
      12·
      2 days ago

      Jensen at nvidia is according to employees (ex and current) an incredibly competent engineer too

      • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 hours ago

        Yeah, he’s another good example. Funny thing is he and Lisa are related. That’s a hell of a legacy cooking in that family tree.

    • CosmicTurtle0 [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      91·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • GaMEChld@lemmy.world
        1·
        23 hours ago

        I’m not necessarily saying they need to be ABLE to do all the jobs, but I think it’s probably a good recipe for success for the CEO to understand the importance of each role in a company. And that said, an Engineer type CEO is probably a boon to companies who are in the business of engineering solutions.

      • teyrnon@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        2 days ago

        That our ceo’s are all soul less confidence men and woman does not make that the natural order of things.