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Comment by apwell23 | Hacker News Reader

Her rise didn't make sense to me. Product manager at tesla to CTO at openAI with no technical background and a deleted profile ?

This is a very strange company to say the least.

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Agreed, when a company rises to prominence so fast, I feel like you can end up with inexperienced people really high up in management. High risk high reward for them. The board was also like this - a lot of inexperienced random people leading a super consequential company resulting in the shenanigans we saw and now most of them are gone. Not saying inexperienced people are inherently bad, but they either grow into the role or don’t. Mira is probably very smart, but I don’t think you can go build a team around her like Ilya or other big name researchers. I’m happy for her with riding one of wildest rocket ships in the past 5 years at least but I don’t expect to hear much about her from now on.

>Product manager at tesla to CTO at openAI with no technical background and a deleted profile ?

Doesn't she have a dual bachelors in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering?

Thats what is needed to get a job as a product manager these days?

Well that and years of experience leading projects. Wasn't she head of the Model X program at Tesla?

But my point is that she does have a technical background.

> Well that and years of experience leading projects. Wasn't she head of the Model X program at Tesla?

No idea because she scrubbed her linkedin profile. But afaik she didn't have "years of experience leading projects" to get a job as leadpm at tesla. That was her first job as PM.

A significant portion of the old guard at OpenAI was part of the Effective Altruism, AI Alignment, and Open Philanthropy movement.

Most hiring in the foundational AI/model space is very nepotistic and biased towards people in that clique.

Also, Elon Musk used to be the primary patron for OpenAI before losing interest during the AI Winter in the late 2010s.

Which has zero explanatory power w.r.t. Murati, since she's not part of that crowd at all. But her previously working at an Elon company seems like a plausible route, if she did in fact join before he left OpenAI (since he left in Feb 2018).

You have to remember that OpenAI's mission was considered absolute batshit insane back then.

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