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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Does he even have any background in machine learning? I always found it bizarre that he was chosen to be OpenAI's CEO...

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On the Lex Fridman podcast, he pretty much admitted he's not an AI (per se) and isn't the most excited about the tech (as he could be).

> he pretty much admitted he's not an AI

Yeah, I also had a hunch he wasn't an AI. (I assume you meant "AI researcher" there :))

All joking aside, I wonder how that's affecting company morale or their ability to attract top researchers. I know if I was a top AI researcher, I'd probably rather work at a company where the CEO was an expert in the field (all else being equal).

I feel most CEOs are not top of their field but rather people who can take a vision and run with it.

It might be true in general; however, AI research laboratories are typically an exception, as they are often led by experienced AI researchers or scientists with extensive expertise in the field.

And that's why they have a hard time getting their stuff out there and getting the money they need. I mean, trying to run a business like a research lab is kind of flawed, you know? And you don't always want some Musk-like character messing around with the basics of the company

Honestly I'm not sure it matters that much. CEOs who are not experts or researches in a domain can still build great companies and empower their employees to do incredible work. Lots of tech people absolutely love to point out that Steve Jobs was not an engineer, but under his leadership the company invented three products that totally revolutionized different industries. Now, I'm not going to sit here and say Altman is Jobs, but running a company, knowing how to raise money, knowing how to productize technologies, etc are all very important skills that industry researchers aren't always good at.

I think Ilya leading the tech is plenty morale boosting

Ilya gives numerous talks and interviews, and he's well worth listening to about technical matters. I listened to many of his talks recently, and the main theme is that scaling up compute works, and will continue to do so. His optimism about the potential of scaling to support deep learning has clearly guided his entire career, starting with his early success on AlexNet.

I listened to that podcast but didn't catch the part where he says he isn't that excited. When was that?

He has background in CEO (smooth-talking charmer in the VC crowd). That's why he's CEO.

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