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.
The sub header for this paper is hilarious.
“I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”
HAHAHAHA, no shit, he may just as well end up in a new league all his own with how much money will burn once this goes belly up.
hes basically the version of Musk for AI/coding. plus the trifecta of scammers came from the same place, paypal, thiel and musk, and altman and thiel’s gay pool parties.
So the typical Tech CEO. What’s new?
Not only have I (25 year programming vet) never had a CEO who could code, I’ve never had a CEO who thought he should be able to code. As a species, they tend to be proud of their leadership chops rather than their ability to actually do anything.
No C-Suite suit I’ve ever met in my life has struck me as a leader type. I know there’s some out there but they all think that being in charge makes them leaders.
Yeah, I should have put “leadership” in ironic quotes. Like they say: don’t step in the leadership.
Pretty much. These guys are all marketing with not so much understanding of the tech their hawking
That doesn’t surprise me. The guy is and always has been a grifter.
I’m more asking what lineage he was birthed from to be in the exact right place to screw over tech development for everyone
CEOs are required to be skilled manipulators. That’s literally what their job is, actually.
So AI could do their job 10x better?
That’s what ppl keep saying. Effectively they are overpaid mascot.
they are the patsies for the board of the directors usually they have the power,and act as lightning rods, its a plus if they use woman to take the flack (aka glass cliff)
21 years later, here I am learning the term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cliff
The glass cliff is a phenomenon described by psychologists Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam, in which women are more likely to break the “glass ceiling” (i.e. achieve leadership roles in business and government) during periods of crisis or downturn when the risk of failure is highest. Other research has expanded the definition of the glass cliff phenomenon to include racial and ethnic minority groups.
Unironically yes.
90% of what CEOs do is talk to other CEOs and other C Suite members. Very rarely are they actually subject matter experts, those days are long gone. Externally, they are mascots, internally, they read reports from their underlings and then ‘make the final call’.
You may notice that these are things that LLMs actually do a somewhat decent job of, ingesting a wide variety of input info, and essentially transforming it into a compelling narrative.
This is why so many CEOs and C suite are so enamored with, and impressed by ‘AI’:
Its a better version of what they do, which is essentially professional gaslighting.
C suite tend to be sociopathic narcissists.
This is just literally a verified and studied fact.
So, the sociopathic narcissists are impressed by an automagic gaslighting machine, that is often actually more factually corrrect than they are… but of course the actual facts don’t matter to a narcissist, what matters is accomplishing their will.
This is a big part of why they genuienly do not understand why everyone else doesn’t ‘appreciate’ AI the way they do.
They’re out of touch, delusional, by way of narcissism.
in idiocracy the AI replaced any and all bosses int he future, that includes ceos.
I’ve been saying that since forever. There’s exactly one job that can be replaced by LLMs (and maybe a good PR person to show up for physical events).
Well, partly. They “generally” (not mostly at least) do deals with and handle people who are somewhat competent, and I think AI absolutely wouldn’t work on many of those people. It’s also very much about body language, choosing the right words and answers that I don’t think AI is close to being good at, yet.
But don’t quote me on that, I don’t use AI at all and never have outside of a dozen “haha funny image making thingy” so I’m very much not up to speed with how it behaves.
I am Fishead:
They are mostly just well connected snakeoil salesmen.
AI guy is bad at coding
surprisedPikachu.jpg
Why is this framed as if it’s in any way surprising?
has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age
Has he? The only things I ever read about him are that he’s a dunce with too much money at his disposal.
a shortage of expertise that becomes obvious when the CEO mixes up basic AI terms.
Is that why he thinks the acronym “GPT” is a trademark that belongs to his company, even though it existed before they did?
It makes a lot of sense if you consider the article takes the POV of an incredibly gullible invester with lots of fear of missing out.
Apple has a trademark for ‘Apple’ in computers. Apples have existed before trademarks have.
Not to mention the Beatles music corporation, which was Apple too.
They can have their logo trademarked, but they can’t go after grannies for calling their desserts “apple pie.”
OpenAI literally goes after people for calling their generative pre-trained transformers “GPT.”
Apple has a trademark for ‘Apple’ in computers
I did have that qualifier there for very good reason ;) Those grannies can make apple pie all day, but as soon as they try to sell a phone called Granny’s Apple Pie Phone they will get sued.
All that said, I don’t have skin in the game. I don’t particularly like ‘devils advocate’-ing for OpenAI or Apple here lol so I’ll stop. I’m not really in favor of IP law in general, but I imagine trademarks can protect open source ventures to prevent hijacking by a corporation, but that’s about the best use-case I can see for IP law
OpenAI has shareholders and a board of directors. Of course they will go after people. Shareholders and the directors want profit and they want it now. Little Mark’s GPT app is a threat to those directors’ dollars, unfortunately. Directors don’t care because they don’t have a soul, they gave OpenAI access to the best legal council money can buy. Sam Altman will utilize it to make those directors and the rest of the shareholders happy. He wants to keep his job because he’s an egomaniac who thinks running an AI company is godhood, when he’s actually just an employee of the wealthiest people alive and if keeps doing whatever they want him to do with no questions asked, he gets into the kid-diddling club with exclusive rights to rape children
Apple has a trademark in computing technologies because apples are not typically associated with computers. GPT, as a technical term related to the model and architecture, is pretty natural associated with ML products, so it really should never get a trademark grant for being merely descriptive.
Why do people think that the CEO is like the “best employee” at what the company does?? No CEO at any company I’ve ever worked at has had a basic understanding of the work that I did. They understand “the business” but aren’t the ones doing implementation.
And that’s “fine” - we have different jobs. Theirs, apparently, has been worth millions of times what I do though…
I have a CEO that I respect. I’m in an engineering heavy company and the CEO is anything but that, and he knows it. His background is finance and that’s most of his job, and interfacing with government. He delegates effectively and does not insert himself in technical decisions. The one thing he does do is ask a lot of questions. In some respect he doesn’t care what the answer is, but he wants to know that we’ve considered all the angles before he takes our advice. I’ve been pulled in to a boardroom before because something was on his mind that he wanted to share. One occasion he told me to think about it. He didn’t want me to follow up with him, but when it came up at a board meeting he wanted the COO to have an answer, so he was flagging the issue for me. Good guy.
This is what a CEO is supposed to do. They are the glue between every department and are supposed to make sure that everyone is on the same page. They ask “what is needed for us to get to this point and how can I help”. They leave all functional details to the subject matter experts. They act as guide rails and do not derail the train.
Good CEOs understand that they are worth less than their employees because without their expertise and domain knowledge the CEO has no product to sell.
My CEO has deep technical chops, and has shown multiple times he can get his hands dirty with the rest of the team.
It’s not surprising.
There are brain damaged people out there who still think Elon Musk is a good engineer.
I think he used to care more. I’d also say he was never a good engineer, but he was better at learning what his top engineers were trying to show him and pushing through answers that made sense.
He’s since lost any of that touch with reality. The engineers he listened to said no too much. He found right-wing grifters that are now teaching him, and they say “no” a whole lot less than the engineers did.
That whole submarine pedo thing told me he was the type of boss that made unrealistic demands and raged at anyone that pushed back. It was no surprise to later learn that his companies have people whose whole job is to deflect him when he’s there so he doesn’t get in the way of the engineering.
His whole “yell at advertisers to get them to give him money” was another sign of that. He’s used to yes men placating him and flew off the handle when he didn’t have power to dictate how others acted, even if they just went back to what they were doing prior the moment he left the room.
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.
It’s not unusual for founders in highly technical fields to have a good level of expertise in that field. Not mandatory but if you look at Alexandr Wang (scale AI, former engineer), Dario Amodei (Anthropic, AI researcher), Michael Truell (Cursor, computer scientist and International Olympiad in Informatics medalist) the expectation is not unreasonable.
The sales people generally take over later.
I mean duh. Obviously the guy who barks orders he has no comprehension of is worth millions of times what the people actually doing the work are. Isn’t it obvious? How would a bunch of engineers have a functioning product without a useless figurehead?
Since the CEO makes decisions based on what they sell, it would be good for them to know something about what they sell.
Altman is just another tech bro dropout who never completed anything, similar to Musk.
But the skills required to be a CEO are that of a skilled manipulator, why would a CEO waste time coding when he can hire meatbags to do that? The nature of US startups benefits con artists and bullshit artists, because the VC money community is not the STEM community.
I mean, yeah…obviously. The amount of CEOs with any technical understanding of what they supposedly manage is just about zero.
And the AI grift is basically on the same level as the Religious grift, supposed spiritual leaders/gurus who convince people that they have some special connection to God/the universe/spiritual realms, etc.
And people eat it up, it’s been a thing for literally thousands of years. We are primed to want to belive it, and when it comes with membership in an exclusive club of other “true believers” , that’s a winning formula.
Least surprising thing I’ve read about him
has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age,
The media keeps glazing him, because he keeps spending money on PR firms so that happens
If everyone keeps saying a capitalist CEO is a once in a life super genius…
The reason is so people invest in that company, not that the CEO is actually intelligent.
It’s the same shit Musk went thru, so people have no excuse falling for it again.
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.
this one is entirely driven by grifters with backgrounds in areas like Finance and Marketing
I worked for startups in the '90s and this describes all of them, too.
Your interesting use of Capitalization is odd.
It’s Trumptastic!
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
This guys a fucking psycho for real. Another robot man with too much money for his own good, or anyone’s good, really.
Sam Altman also raped his sister apparently
It’s a messy situation where nobody other than the two people involved will ever know the truth.
She claims it happened between 1997 and 2006 and she filed the lawsuit 19 years later in 2025. There won’t be any evidence remaining other than what she claims to remember. He won’t be able to clear his name by providing alibis for something that happened 20-30 years ago. Her family said it didn’t happen and that she has mental health issues. She says she has mental health issues due to the abuse. Her ultra-rich brother had been financially supporting her and the claims happened after she asked for more and he refused. The family is siding with Sam, but Sam is also an insanely wealthy and powerful man who is known to lie constantly, so maybe their reason for siding with him isn’t because they’re absolutely sure he’s right. And then there’s the fact that he’s gay, but sexual abuse isn’t necessarily about sexual desire.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say he definitely raped her. OTOH, it’s also not possible to say he’s definitely being falsely accused. It’s just a shitty situation.
Im partial to believing the victim over the billionaire
10 years of child sexual abuse is worse than just a single rape, if her reports are to be believed.
I mean… sure but thats a weird thing to say
