If he followed the norms, he'd be a mid-level manager at FAANG company.
Imagine I win the lottery and hire really smart architects and tell them to make a revolutionary new building. They go on to make some amazing building that gets all sorts of awards and recognition. Is anyone really so naive as to suggest that I am deserving of any credit whatsoever? In the words of Urkel, "Did I do that?"
There are some leaders in the tech world who have clearly done something. John Carmack did something. Steve Wozniak did something. There are some questionable cases as well. As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit. I give them no respect, recognition, or credit. They were just wealthy people spending money. I seriously question the people who look at them positively in any way whatsoever.
I agree with your first sentence, but I am confused by your second sentence. Are you referring to this part? "Carmack and Woz are legends for a reason."
You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.
There's an obsession with trying to discredit people like Jobs (and their contributions), particularly among the hacker news crowd. Fundamentally it's because most hackers don't understand leadership, marketing, sales, etc.
In this thread you'll see people claim Elon Musk is non-technical. That's bordering on belligerent. A person would have to have avoided the dozens of YouTube interviews where he demonstrates his technical understanding to an elaborate degree. Musk is as technical as Bill Gates was in his post coding days at Microsoft (which spanned the bulk of his time at Microsoft) and I've never seen anyone on HN claim Gates as being non-technical. How it works is simple: I dislike this person, therefore I shall tear them down; I'm unable to be objective about the subject, so I shall be emotional and irrational instead.
He comes across as a guy who really wants to seem deep and cerebral, but his takes are pretty surface level compared to other tech CEOs. He couldn’t even give a high level explanation of Twitter’s “crazy” tech stack without having a meltdown.
He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.
Most code critics of Musk today criticize his poor coding skills due to him unable to migrate his skills from that era to today. But as CEO, he doesn't need to do that. I'm sure he understands the code on a shallow level, which is fine for his role.
We are talking about a guy who didn’t understand how to run a python script that the doge guy sent him.
Who among us WASNT writing crappy little programs in BASIC back then, a language aimed at children and microcomputing amateurs? If he had written a 2.5d raycasting game at 12 in C++, i would be impressed.
I knew guys in the 90s in high school who were writing exploits and cracking major software. For a layperson who isn’t a dev and didn’t run in those circles, it might seem impressive for a kid, but not for any of the kids I knew. Any kid with a basic understanding of programming could copy the code from a computer magazine line by line and edit it slightly . And just because he wrote it at 12 doesn’t mean he has actual coding skills as an adult, he has even said so himself he is not a “hardcore coder”. Considering there are kids like Mike Wimmer who were taking uni level robotics courses at 12, Elon is incredibly mediocre in comparison and only a simp would believe he was some kind of prodigy.
After all, we are talking about a guy who asked his engineers to print out code to show him to prove how productive they were, and who could not explain Twitter’s craaaaazy stack without telling off an actual dev. Who the F thinks the more lines of code you write the more productive you are? How deeply embarrassing.
Calling Twitter a “crazy stack” is hilariously laughable, serious junior dev energy, that at the very least he should be able to describe to another dev a) whats crazy about it b) what it looks like from top to bottom without insulting people for asking.
And that's a really common case.
It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.
The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).
Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.
The point is that this is a general problem that falls out of the structure of our economy and business enterprises. And it's one that's fixable with a little societal refactoring (changing the laws around business structures and how they're formed).
This example doesn't work, at least, since the industrial revolution. If an average person wins the lottery they would need to solve a lot (really a lot) of issues to move a business forward and most probably go bankrupt except if he/she puts the money in low risk financial instruments.
There is no "I do that" in the complex world of business. It is a nice Disney story with a few examples. Organization does the work and that includes anonymous engineers, not only CEOs and founders. The great ignition could start at a garage (e.g. Apple) but the road is long.
There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.
Money can only get you so far.
If everybody could do it, they would be doing it. Altman's abilities are every bit as rare as that of a 10x software developer. The same was true of Jobs, and the same is true of Musk (regardless of whether someone likes him or not; who cares if he's likable, it's an infantile emotional derangement to obsess so much over likability).
What specifically backs that up? Didn't others create the technology? Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with? By many accounts, he was just using OpenAI to further other businesses and investments.
Hire a top researcher? Ok, you could get lucky with a few. But keep? Good luck if you are an incompetent manager. If Sam Altman was the "know-nothing" that so many on HN claim him to be, then the top researchers would leave and go to Meta, Google Brain, etc. It makes no sense that this core research team has been so stable. Is this not evidence enough for you?
OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and a bunch of others left three years ago and started Anthropic.
Ilya Sutskever reportedly told the board before the coup that he’s so unhappy with Sam he was thinking about leaving. He might be out now.
I don’t know if Sam is the right leader for OpenAI - he might be. But it’s good that he’s being watched closely right now.
We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101. What makes you convinced all the rich "geniuses" who haven't revealed themselves to be idiots are actually smart for real this time?
Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.
Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.
If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.
I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.
Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.
This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.
They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).
What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring.
If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely delusional.
Elon Musk's involvement in design decisions was limited to the typical executive level involvement in hardware design, in the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.
Indeed, with SpaceX it's usually immediately obvious when Musk was involved: does something fail spectacularly in a way it wasn't supposed to? That was Musk, getting involved in something he didn't understand and overriding the engineers and other professionals. (Contrast the first Starship launch this year, which Musk micromanaged, vs the second launch in November in which he had minimal involvement due to being distracted by X and Tesla.)
I tried to a Google search for a source. I cannot find anything. Do you have a good source, or insider information?
>Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.
Which ones, specifically?
>the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.
Even if this were the only level of involvement, do you realize how important these are? Do you know how it would have worked out for the company if they focused on payload instead of reusability?
You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss the skills of the person doing that.
"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman."
Each one will end up pulling in their own direction, fighting with others over minor things, and nothing will ever get done.
Managing smart people, resolving conflicts, and making sure stuff gets done is a rare and underappreciated skill.
>claimed to have funded the invention of the piano and opera, financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and were patrons of Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.
Sure they didn't do the paintings but a lot of that stuff probably wouldn't have happened without them.
Why are you surprised by folks reaction? What did he successfully build before OpenAI? Nothing as far as I can tell? His main skill seems to be networking, not building product. Also, doing it fast, does not require lying, as seems his habit.
A lot can be accomplished by skirting pesky rules and regulations. It isn't something commendable.
I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).
There is nothing fallacious about my comment. Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous.
As another commenter said: he isn't unique.
You can compare him to other CEO but you have to justify why the comparison is valid.
You didn't do that.
If you want to directly claim that Sam did something illegal you need to show or say that.
Instead, what you did, is just point to someone else who did something illegal, and then criticize that other person, while vaguely implying that the criticism applies to Sam.
But the criticism doesn't apply to Sam, because you didn't demonstrate that Sam did anything illegal.
Well that depends.
Is the thing that is being accomplished very good and are the regulations bad?
For example, what if there is a law that was passed for the sole purpose of protecting a well connected monopoly, so that consumers have to pay more money, only so that this one monopoly could profit.
I'd say that such a law would be bad and should be under minded.
Hey, if you don't like Sam, that's fine. But that doesn't make him a sociopath.
This sort of misattribution seems to show up when you have individuals with sociopathic tendencies running firms that do cool things: Elon Musk is the king of this. The man has not, on his own, had any sort of good results on the world - Tesla and SpaceX seem to do a lot better when he steps away from them - but he has found ways to get himself into a position to take credit from the engineers who do. Hyperloops and Twitter are the results of Elon Musk's original work. That's not to say that the management is necessarily negative: someone needs to fund the work of the good engineers.
SpaceX and Tesla have the equivalent of the principals of each section of the orchestra feeding their conductor his cues and making sure he gets them right. Google has someone standing on the podium and bowing, but nobody waving the baton at all.
OpenAI is more of a research organization than a product company, and so it's hard to see where someone like Altman can contribute meaningfully to the direction.
It feels like he just wants to do 10 things at the same time.
If we followed the norms, he's be in prison. If you think fraud and self-dealing are justified if it moves a lot of value to shareholders, write to your senator. Until then the laws should be enforced against the rich as well as the poor.
Of course, I can't much bring myself to care in this case, because all that's at stake is a chatbot.