Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts

Reminds me of Elon Musk. Grifting off of techno-futuro-optimism. Hyperloop, Boring tunnel, going to mars, self-driving cars, etc. Perhaps it's common to CEOs, lying/manipulating to people to create hype in order to convince them to give you money.

We need to start talking about people like this truthfully: they are sick. Fucked up. Broken. They do not deserve fame or fortune, they deserve a padded cell, close observation by psychologists and neurologists and try and figure out how we can stop it happening.

Horribly manipulative Smaug-likes who only care for themselves, why must the rest of us be beholden to them? To be victims to the havoc they wreak? Why do we put up with it?

> persuading people with money to give him more of it

A key skill nevertheless.

In my experience, all wealth comes down to either (1) producing and using something yourself, or (2) convincing somebody else to give it to you. Most of us trade labor or goods for wealth, convincing others that our stuff is worth the wealth they give.

If you want more wealth for your work, you need the other side to value it more. Better goods and labor are the obvious choice, but that's difficult. Better schmoozing is less effort and good payoff. Epstein was a paragon of this skill. Also companies that spend tons on advertising, like Coca Cola. Everyone knows their soda exists, but the ads are meant to convince you that you need one right now. No need to improve their product or innovate cheaper production. They just lean on the persuasion.

I can't think of a way to avoid this. If you want more money, it has to come from somebody. How could there be an unbiased and impersonal way of redistributing it?

This is a good example of Goodhart's Law: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". Money is supposed to be a measure of value exchanged; the idea is that if you aren't receiving something actually useful in exchange for your money, you don't spend it. This assumption breaks down as the economy grows in complexity and it becomes harder to judge what you're actually receiving. It becomes increasingly easy to game the process of convincing people to give you money. People who get good at this outcompete people who don't, and there is a lot of money floating around out there without much accountability.

This also suggests ways to reverse this: 1) reduce the complexity of the economy 2) have more repeated interactions, where you cannot simply stiff someone and go away to do it to someone else 3) have more information about who has stiffed people and gone away to do it to someone else 4) reduce the costs involved in the sale process, so that this can become a part-time job of someone actually providing the service, rather than having people whose dedicated role is to make the money change hands managing people whose dedicated role is to actually do the job.

> What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?

A wealth tax. Higher capital gains taxes. Closing tax loopholes.

But wealth is interchangeable with power so the wealthy will just undo any fixes we create to the structural inequalities of capital. The problem might just be intrinsic to human nature.

exactly. frankly its just a bunch of pissy holier than thou engineer thing. He seems to be pretty good at raising capital and selling dreams which his predominantly what Openai seemingly wants to be right now.

New Yorker article less so because its just a standard ceo profile piece that digs out pretty pertinent things for a ceo role

Well there's the whole issue that Open AI wasn't a "business" when it started, it was in fact a non-profit focused on safe AGI for humanity. That said the whole "He's a CEO thing" is a convenient escape hatch now that it's a for-profit business (just ignore the whole way it got there).

Just because you're a successful CEO doesn't mean you're not a shitty person or immune from so-called "hit pieces".

My tinfoil hat is that Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman for control of OpenAI, and when you are the richest man on earth, you can afford a lot of money on hit pieces.

Interestingly, the charge of "can barely code and frequently misunderstands technical concepts" is one that is often leveled at Elon Musk.

Perhaps that says less of altman and more of YC.

The definition of "good CEO" is too mercurial for that question to be answerable. A CEO can afford to make incredibly boneheaded decisions that others call genius, like Elizabeth Holmes or Sam Bankman-Fried did. Rushing to evaluate executive performance based on murky results or impressive transaction volume is how investors end up losing billions.

The title is indeed an obvious puff-piece, but it does reflect the general hatred towards America's professional liars. Maybe Sam has what it takes to be a great CEO, but posterity is already recording him as a dishonest sociopath and federal sycophant.

envy

I think it's a very small chance. Look at how many absolutely technically useless CEOs, such as Elon Musk, are still perceived by many in the industry and outside of it. The WeWork guy got funding for a new startup immediately post collapse. It takes a lot to reach SBF/Madoff levels.

Im going to get into trouble for saying this but many of these CEOs seem to be a mix of vertically challenged, challenged in terms of looks/social aura/charasima and so on. Perhaps these are necessary characteristics to have drive.. the problem is they end up taking out that energy on the rest of society. E.g. Zuck with "dumb fucks" and we've already seen Musk unmasked.

You never saw this kind of stuff with Steve Jobs who admittedly wasnt perfect - but he wasn't challenged physically / social standing. Perhaps that's why he wasn't a weirdo like the rest of them.

I think there's more nuance to it from what I can find on the internet.

Jobs definitely had knowledge about coding and other technical issues to do his job. Here's Eric Schmidt on this:

    He was exactly the same way he was at Apple: strongly opinionated, knew what he was doing. He was so passionate about object-oriented programming. He had this extraordinary depth. I have a PhD in this area, and he was so charismatic he could convince me of things I didn’t actually believe.

    I should tell you this story. We’re in a meeting at NeXT, before Steve went back to Apple. I’ve got my chief scientist. After the meeting, we leave and try to unravel the argument to figure out where Steve was wrong—because he was obviously wrong. And we couldn’t do it. We’re standing in the parking lot. He sees us from his office, and he comes back out to argue with us some more. It was over a technical issue involving Objective C, a computer language. Why he would care about this was beyond me. I’ve never seen that kind of passion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/magazine/eric-schmidt-on-steve-j...

(This comment has essentially been taken from reddit[0] @thirdxeye as I think that he summed it better than I could)

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/34y49x/did_steve_job...

Why would predictable blather be interesting?

This isn't Reddit, go back to Reddit if you want to default every conversation as a billionaire that isn't redistributing wealth = bad.

Apart from your last paragraph which is a little contentious, I agree with what you say.

I dont understand why people here require that every tech ceo to be some professional programmer or engineer. I don't think you _need_ to be that deep in it as the CEO. There are plenty of leaders at OpenAI that already fit the bill.

Sam is good at getting funding, seeing the bigger picture, and rallying towards a cause. That is the job of a CEO. It doesn't matter (imo) that he doesn't know how many parameters the next release will have. All that matters is he knows the impact of the new release and knows who to defer to for actual technical decisions.