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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

In this case, I don't see as a flaw, but really as Sam's abilities to lead a highly cohesive group and keep it highly motivated and aligned.

I don't personally like him, but I must admit he displayed a lot more leadership skills than I'd recognize before.

It's inherently hard to replace someone like that in any organization.

Take Apple, after losing Jobs. It's not that Apple was a "weak" organization, but really Jobs that was extraordinary and indeed irreplaceable.

No, I'm not comparing Jobs and Sam. Just illustrating my point.

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What's the difference between leadership skills and cult of following?

I think an awesome leader would naturally create some kind of cult following, while the opposite isn't true.

Just like former President Trump?

There are two possible ways to read "the opposite" from the GP.

"A cult follower does not make an exceptional leader" is the one you are looking for.

While cult followers do not make exceptional leaders, cult leaders are almost by definition exceptional leaders, given they're able to lead the un-indoctrinated into believing an ideology that may not be upheld against critical scrutiny.

There is no guarantee or natural law that an exceptional leader's ideology will be exceptional. Exceptionality is not transitive.

Results

Leadership Gets Shit Done. A cult following wastes everyone's time on ineffectual grandstanding and ego fluffing while everything around them dissolves into incompetence and hostility.

They're very orthogonal things.

I also imagine the morale of the people who are currently implementing things, and getting tired of all these politics about who is going to claim success for their work.

Have you ever seen a useful product produced by a cult?

Can't you imagine a group of people motivated to conduct AI research? I don't understand... All nerds are highly motivated in their areas of passion, and here we have AI research. Why do they need leadership instead of simply having an abundance of resources for the passionate work they do?

As far as it goes for me the only endorsements that matter are those of the core engineering and research teaches of OpenAI.

All these opinions of outsiders don’t matter. It’s obvious that most people don’t know Sam personally or professionally and are going off of the combination of: 1. PR pieces being pushed by unknown entities 2. positive endorsements from well known people who are likely know him

Both those sources are suspect. We don’t know the motivation behind their endorsements and for the PR pieces we know the author but we don’t know commissioner.

Would we feel as positive about Altman if it turns out that half the people and PR pieces endorsing him are because government officials pushing for him? Or if the celebrities in tech are endorsing him because they are financially incentivized?

The only endorsements that matter are those of OpenAI employees (ideally those who are not just in his camp because he made them rich).

Someone has to set direction. The more people that are involved in that decision process, the slower it will go.

Having no leadership at all guarantees failure.

It's not hard to motivate them to do the fun parts of the job, the challenge is in convincing some of those highly motivated and passionate nerds to not work on the fun thing they are passionate about and instead do the boring and unsexy work that is nevertheless critical to overall success; to get people with strong personal opinions about how a solution should look to accept a different plan just so that everyone is on the same page, to ensure that people actually have access to the resources they need to succeed without going so overboard that the endeavor lacks the reserves to make it to the finish line, and to champion the work of these nerds to the non-nerds who are nevertheless important stakeholders.

Jobs was really unusual in that he was not only a good leader, but also an ideologue with the right obsession at the right time. (Some people like the word "visionary".) That obsession being "user experience". Today it's a buzzword, but in 2001 it was hardly even a term.

The leadership moment that first comes to mind when I think of Steve Jobs isn't some clever hire or business deal, it's "make it smaller".

There have been a very few people like that. Walt Disney comes to mind. Felix Klein. Yen Hongchang [1]. (Elon Musk is maybe the ideologue without the leadership.)

1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/20/145360447/the-...

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