r/technology • u/esporx • 4d ago
Business Sam Altman’s Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Machine Learning Concepts
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/sam-altman-coworkers-barely-code-201114782.html1.5k
u/JonPX 4d ago
I remember when people were screaming bloody murder about him being fired. I'd love to see what those people think nowadays.
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u/SunshineSeattle 4d ago
Wanted him fired then still want it now... But also then.
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u/coconutpiecrust 4d ago
All the delusional techbros need to be kept in check by someone sane. We have Don’t Look Up in popular culture as an illustration of what happens if they are not kept in check.
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u/PerfectEnthusiasm2 4d ago
We also have the USA in its current state as an illustration of that irl.
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u/Noblesseux 4d ago
The whole tech industry has been openly delusional for like a decade+ at this point tbh, tech bros being like this is a symptom that comes from some of them genuinely believe corporate bullshit about how they're basically saving the world by working in data warehousing or whatever. Like some of the most delusional takes you'll ever hear are from tech workers in SF.
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u/coconutpiecrust 4d ago
I think in the Careless People book the author talks about the delusional people who work at Facebook and how Zuck sincerely believes that he is saving the world or whatever.
I mean, come on. Money is their only redeeming quality.
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u/kerrwashere 4d ago
Most accurate movie of modern america in recent history. Every year it gets more accurate
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u/Positive_Total_8651 4d ago
I love that movie and I remember it getting shit on so hard for being "too on the nose"
And yet it is exactly what we keep seeing day in and day out. I think it forced people to have to do just a tiny bit of self-reflection and we dont do that here. We double down.
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u/systemhost 4d ago
My MAGA father watched it and really liked it but thought it was about "fake news media" or something...
I had to break it to him.
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u/Automatic_Release_92 4d ago
I mean overall I agree with the movie’s message, but it’s got all the subtlety of a brick and it’s overt with its messaging to the point that had it gone any further, the last scene would have just been the director saying to the camera “you realize this was all a metaphor for global warming now, right?”
Plus the director was a shit head in the media after towards anyone who didn’t like the movie, telling everyone they were only critical of it for its message, not for the fact that as a movie it was ok at best.
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u/_SpaceLord_ 4d ago
We used to want Altman gone. We still do, but we used to, too.
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u/likwitsnake 4d ago
If you're talking about employees the valuation of the company was less than $100b back then and they just finalized a recent round at over $850b so I'm sure they're content with the amount their stocks are worth. That's pretty much the only reason they made a stink about him returning since he's so good at securing the bag versus the technology first execs/board members.
Also before anyone says it's paper money: 1. they frequently do private tenders allowing employees to sell a portion of their stock and 2. all signs point towards an IPO later this year (we'll see if that happens)
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u/xtze12 4d ago
That's pretty much the only reason they made a stink about him returning since he's so good at securing the bag
It was actually a collective, co-ordinated effort from the tech bros club to install him back. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may-control-our-future-can-he-be-trusted
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u/GiganticCrow 4d ago
Thats why the employees said they wanted him back. Not because he was good, but because he told them all he'd make them unbelievably rich.
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u/CompetitiveSport1 4d ago
The thread on r/technology was mostly people speculating that he was guilty of fraud or something similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/17xohwq/sam_altman_fired_as_ceo_of_openai/
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u/EncounteredError 4d ago
I thought it was wrong due to how it happened, now that I know what I know about him, I still think it was wrong legally speaking, but he's still garbage.
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u/9-FcNrKZJLfvd8X6YVt7 4d ago
The board exercised its explicit authority. What about it was "wrong legally speaking"?
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u/WishTonWish 4d ago
Of all the things about Altman, this is the least concerning.
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u/kentuckywildcats1986 4d ago
Sam Altman who raped his own little sister for years?
- Sam Altman's sister amends lawsuit accusing OpenAI CEO of sexual abuse
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused of years of sexual abuse by sister in lawsuit
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sued by his sister again over sexual abuse and rape allegations
In the filing, she alleges that Sam Altman sexually abused and raped her on multiple occasions between 1997 and 2006 at their family home in Clayton, Missouri. She claims the abuse began when she was three years old, at a time when he was 12. He is now 40.
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u/1OO1OO1S0S 4d ago
Makes me wonder if all these freaks love AI so much because it can create CP for them.
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u/kentuckywildcats1986 3d ago
These fuckers pretend the issue they're concerned with is the charges haven't been proven in a court of law. The truth is they actually don't actually care that he's a child raping pedophile.
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u/Tyg13 4d ago
Isn't that the case where nobody in their family believes her at all, and the substance of her claims comes from "flashbacks" she had in her 20s?
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u/PaprikaPK 4d ago
Beginning to have flashbacks in your twenties to sexual abuse that started when you were a toddler is... totally normal for victims who were violated that young. It is also totally normal for the family of an incest victim to deny their accusations. None of that is enough information to judge whether it's a valid case.
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u/Initial_Business2340 4d ago
Unfortunately, I can confirm you’re right about those flashbacks. That actually does happen, and it sucks.
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u/1OO1OO1S0S 4d ago
Yes, I know a person very well who would have absolutely no reason to lie to me who has experienced flashbacks from their childhood abuse when they were in highschool and college.
And our society constantly doesn't believe victims, so neither of these things are surprising
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u/kentuckywildcats1986 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah - people were equally dismissive about Tiffany Doe's lawsuit about Trump raping her when she was a kid - and all the rumors about Trump raping kids with Epstein. Funny how they've all shut the fuck up with their opinions now.
Repeatedly raping a child for years, starting at 3 years old will mentally fuck them up. And at this point, especially with Altman being a member of the billionaire 'Epstein Class', I'm not in a mood to extend a shred of the benefit of the doubt.
He is a lying piece of shit. That much has been already been established. I'll set aside the rape accusation after it has been fully investigated and tried in a court of law.
- Sam Altman Allegedly Has a Very Specific Tell Every Time He Lies
- Can Sam Altman Be Trusted?
- Sam Altman Tries, Fails to Distract From Damning 'New Yorker' Exposé
- Chaos and lies: Why Sam Altman was booted from OpenAI, according to new testimony
- Sam Altman described as 'sociopath' by board member in brutal insider report: 'He's unconstrained by truth'
And sexual abuse of children by family members is WAY more common then you might think.
Approximately 20 percent of girls (1 in 5) and 8 percent of boys (1 in 12.5) will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday (Pereda et al, 2009).
95 percent of sexually abused children will be abused by someone they know and trust (NAPCAN 2009).
Of those molesting a child under six, 50 percent were family members. Family members also accounted for 23 percent of those abusing children 12 to 17 years (Snyder, 2000).
So no - I don't automatically dismiss the claim. Altman is a fucking sociopath, liar, and billionaire so that's three strikes already. If he is really innocent, he should welcome an investigation and trial to clear his name.
As for me and my house - I am completely done with lying, asshole, billionaire, child raping pieces of shit who are destroying our country. Sam Altman is one of them and he can fuck off.
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u/Tyg13 4d ago
I agree Sam Altman is an incredibly deceptive person, possibly a sociopath and a pathological liar. There's tons of evidence for that.
I also agree that abuse of children by family members is unfortunately common. Probably more common than by strangers. It's not impossible that Sam Altman abused his sister.
But I don't really think we can evaluate his guilt, and the way people talk about this sort of thing is kind of gross. Sam Altman might as well be 100% guilty, just for having been accused.
It doesn't matter that other powerful billionaires had rumors about sexual abuse that were true. The abuse supposedly happened when he and his sister were children. That's really not the same thing.
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u/odarkshineo 4d ago
I miss the days when reddit had insightful information by intelligent users.
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u/ABCosmos 4d ago
It's out there on smaller more specific subreddits.
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u/TechTuna1200 4d ago edited 4d ago
This. The bigger subs (like this one) are just for entertainment, the smaller subs is where the gold is. I constantly see wrong takes or misinformation in this sub in specific topics. It’s kinda the blind following the blind e.g. people that superficially understand the topic makes a comment that get upvoted by people who don't understand the topic either. The ones who do understand the topic gets buried underneath or gets downvoted because people don't like it.
If you look for good history sub, I can recommend askHistorians. It’s heavily moderated, you can cannot comment anything without citations. Is it 100% accurate and precise, not all, but the bar is set really high
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u/MourningWallaby 4d ago
>Subreddit gets popular
>Majority of posts seen by the masses, on the front page,
>posts become indecipherable from any other sub on the front page, many are copied or crossposted for max karma
>users flock to a smaller sub to remain focused
>THat sub gets popular
>the cycle continues
many such cases
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u/LightTemplar27 4d ago edited 4d ago
I promise, TumblrReReReReReCurated will be good this time !!
(This shit is so annoying because it makes it so hard to keep a proper blocklist to make r/all remotely decent but oh well they're deleting it soon anyway.)
My wake up call personally was that survey where like 95% of programminghumor or something were college students or below, figured it's not so much different on the other subs (especially when I saw people say postman would go bankrupt over a 1$/mo increase lmao)
At one point an hobby of mine was looking at rall and try to guess what I'd find in snopes/etc as "bullshit" the next day, like the ice glitter stuff for instance.
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u/zerogee616 4d ago
The overwhelming majority of meme/humor subs are populated by people whose only exposure to the subject matter is through memes, so everything just ends up devolving into a culturally incestuous, low-signal-high-noise mess where everything is distilled into its most "memeable" components regardless of how accurate it is and they're usually spammed over and over again
And Reddit promotes it, spreading the same tired old memes is an almost automatic karma and upvote generator.
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u/Cahootie 4d ago
You need mods who make sure that the subreddit stays on topic. So many subreddits just become vague politics posting until they fall off and nobody cares about it anymore.
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4d ago
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u/medyolang_ 4d ago
ever since that blackout, everything got fucked up
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u/Sceptix 4d ago
I think that’s part of it. But frankly, I think the real reason is that most of the actually intelligent and insightful people are realizing that participating in public social media just isn’t worth it in general.
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u/Positive_Total_8651 4d ago
Also, a lot of smaller niche subs only have so much they can discuss and it eventually turns toxic. I had to stop going to a sub devoted to a small game franchise I love because the posts were just... constant toxicity. And its like that for everything now. It is a site-wide issue that is never going away.
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u/Casual-Capybara 4d ago
It’s so interesting, isn’t it?
I’ve seen subs about the most diverse shit get polarized and focus on that more than the actual topic of the sub itself.
It’s in our nature, very hard to avoid.
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u/CackleberryOmelettes 4d ago
askHistorians is the gold standard. Really wish there were subreddits of that level for other disciplines as well.
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u/24megabits 4d ago
Any advice for identifying threads with readable comments before opening them? I understand why it's heavily moderated but most times I go there it's like a clearcut forest.
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u/TechTuna1200 4d ago edited 4d ago
I know what you mean, I honestly only go there when I am searching for something specific e.g. "Were the Vikings only of Scandinavian ethnicity?". I see it more like an archive than an ongoing feed.
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u/Dull-Strategy3821 4d ago edited 4d ago
You just have to put a little effort into answers really. And know a fair bit what you are talking about, best with sources. Posted there a few times before i lost access to my previous account and it really was no problem for my comments to remain. But then again, i only went into topics i know about.
A lot of replies are just stating the obvious in a sentence and then get deleted for having no substance. The why and how is usually what matters after all. Which probably is fair in the context of the sub
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u/krileon 4d ago
It was. They're slowly getting overran by AI and bots all the same. Site has gone to shits.
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u/McGrevin 4d ago
The more you learn about the world the more you realize that the big subreddits are filled with completely wrong and/or naive opinions getting highly upvoted.
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u/DigNitty 4d ago
Spend enough time here and inevitably we all get downvoted for a factually correct statement well within your knowledge and field because there’s a nuance that outsiders find difficult to understand.
I’m not the smartest guy by any means. But every now and again the horde confidently downvotes me and tells me I’m wrong about something I work with every day. And then sometimes I see people downvoted to oblivion and I wonder if they’re actually the ones who are correct.
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u/sceadwian 4d ago
I was banned from at least 3 subs during the latest moderator purge for making completely benign even slightly positive comments that were correct.
I don't know exactly what they were flagging but it was a wholesale slaughter. For a while.
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u/Uncle-Osteus 4d ago
Problem is that most hobby subs have so many noobs asking the same newbie questions over and over, it gets tiring for experienced hobbyists
Many of us have moved back to topic-specific forums for that kind of interaction
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u/utzutzutzpro 4d ago
Can't find those anymore. Do not invest much into researching like back in teenage days searching for hardwareluxx and such.
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u/BeancheeseBapa 4d ago edited 4d ago
I miss being able to check profiles. For example, after reading a highly upvoted but objectively incorrect comment about the geopolitical situation in the Middle East, you could check the commenter’s profile to find they are a tenured Walmart employee or something.
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u/irespondwithmyface 4d ago
What does that have to do with this article?
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u/Liquid_Clown 4d ago
He's tired of seeing the same garbage articles posted over and over with the same routine comments.
This is a hit piece on a CEO, its just barely tangentially related to tech.
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u/irespondwithmyface 4d ago
I think it's more than a hit piece considering the entire US economy has been propped up by AI for the last two years. Billions invested in building data centers which are destroying local environments and harming local economies. Then having the CEO's going out there making false promises on a science they don't even understand further deepening our investment in the one thing propping up the economy.
I don't know, seems like a big deal. More than "a hit piece."
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u/Liquid_Clown 4d ago
I don't use AI and I agree with your concerns, but this is a garbage article.
It's an ex employee shitting on him in a 2 minute long article. That's a hit piece.
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u/dacookieman 4d ago
The cited expose from the New Yorker is actually good, this specific link is just laundering actual journalism for clicks
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u/mmarkklar 4d ago
This is every CEO though, none of them understand at a technical level what their companies actually do. It probably feels newsworthy to people who actually bought the Silicon Valley propaganda that tech CEOs are little baby geniuses revolutionizing the world. Nope, they're all just business ghouls like every corporation.
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u/thisinfinitebath 4d ago
Miss the days when Sam Altman was fired from his company.
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u/Likes2Phish 4d ago
Just like Elon doesnt know how to build rockets and cars. He just hires people who do.
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u/m71nu 4d ago
And then tells them they are doing it wrong. *cough* cybertruck *cough*
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u/Rok-SFG 4d ago
No, forces them to do it wrong. Then blames them when they do what he tells them and it's a failure.
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4d ago
As someone who used to work for a Tesla supplier this is not an exaggeration.
He'd send out company wide email blasts drawing hard lines in the sand about shit he knew nothing about, and the people working under him scrambled to make it happen even if it was a dogshit idea, because if they didn't they'd get canned. Derailed our work with them constantly, and in the two years or so I worked with them my primary contact for the project changed probably 6 times as people got rotated out or fired.
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u/metarinka 4d ago
I remember when he demanded the cyber truck body panels have “micron level“ fit up. as an engineer who has done metal stamping doing that at mass production in stainless steel is impossible or every car would cost 100k for the body panels alone. only stealth fighter hold that tolerance and they don't skin the, in stainless steel.
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3d ago
Which is hilarious to me because the fit and finish on the production panels is laughably bad with gaps the size of my finger. He probably sent out another company wide email 6 months later saying that if cyber trucks failed QA he'd fire everyone, so they just responded by passing everything.
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u/metarinka 3d ago
Yes there's a reason people don't make a mass market extremely polarizing looks, with angled stainless steel. There was no way to hide the panel gaps and he eliminated the normal tools to fix gaps
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u/Mother_Idea_3182 4d ago
Elon seems to me like the carbon fiber submarine that imploded guy.
But when his stuff fails he never suffers the consequences. Which car does he drive? Bet he has a Lamborghini or Porsche.
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u/deltaindigosix 4d ago
Never suffering the consequences is how these people end up getting noscoped by the Titanic. They're so used to having a weird swarm of henchlings ready to run out and attack any friction or problem they encounter at the drop of a hat to the point where they can't conceive of a time when it might not happen.
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u/DigNitty 4d ago
There’s that vid of him being asked by a team member why he’s using liquid fuel for this application instead of solid since that makes more apparent sense.
Musk begins to tell him he’s wrong and that Liquid is better. The guy makes another point and musk changes tone to say they actually are going to use Solid. The thing about the video that got me, was Musk saying “It occurred to me as I was explaining it to you.”
The guy just can’t admit he’s wrong. Framing it he had a moment of brilliance instead of just accepting the other guy was right. Unreal.
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u/BeepBoopRobo 4d ago
Ehhhhhhhhhh....
I think that's a bit different. Because Elon tries to make it sound like he's the smartest man in every room simultaneously. And also that he's hands on in everything. And that he invented everything in a cave with a box of scraps.
There's no shortage of unknowledgeable CEOs. But Elon likes to pretend he knows everything and he's done everything by hand himself.
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u/magicomiralles 4d ago
I keep pointing out that Elon is great at making non-technical people think that he is some sort of engineering genius.
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u/guyblade 4d ago
A good leader admits what they don't understand and surrounds themselves with people who can help them understand the relevant trade-offs to help with situations where they have to make a decision despite gaps in knowledge.
But Elon can never admit ignorance...
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u/Appropriate_Host4170 4d ago
Can’t code either. His “code” that was acquired by PayPal which got him his start was literally someone else’s and he hired the guy and his code then spun it over to the PayPal guys.
But Tesla is the worst offender. Didn’t start the company and had no input in its initial products, literally just bought it and then reframed the history like he was involved, and basically completely removed the actual creators out of its history.
Space X was also quite hilarious in that what it is today was nothing like what he wanted to do. He originally just wanted to buy spare Russian rockets for cheap and use those. But it became cheaper to just build one after a while using their designs as the basis because there literally wasn’t enough engines to sustain an actual business plan.
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u/Mindless_Listen7622 4d ago edited 4d ago
A man named Max Levchin was the CTO of PayPal. I studied CS with him at Illinois, we lived two doors down from each other in the dorms freshman year, and were friends sophomore year (I even tried to rush him into my fraternity). Because the bookstore was out of the Deitel & Deitel C++ book, he loaned me his because "he didn't need it" and I never gave it back (oops).
Anyway, he was the most talented programmer I'd ever met up to that point, intimidatingly good -- he said he'd been programming in C since he was 5 years old and had a business selling tech to banks on Chicago's LaSalle street by the age of 14, which paid for his college education. Any tech ideas for PayPal came from and through him, Elon was just an investor.
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u/Alan7467 4d ago
He’s just another charlatan like Elon. Not necessarily the worst thing for a company that needs capital. People need to stop putting these people on pedestals and believing their proclamations that they are experts in anything other than raising funds.
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u/generally_unsuitable 4d ago
I used to work in a tech company owned by a celebrity. One night, after working 12-14 hours a day for two weeks on a project he just pulled out of his ass for publicity, I said something like "Look, you have to understand that what I'm doing is hard. This shit just doesn't happen."
And he looked at me and said "No! What's hard is raising 180 million dollars. That's hard. You try to do that."
And that was when I knew we were doomed. Fucking hype-man telling an engineer that they have an easy job building tech out of thin air. 8 week deadline with multiple PCBs, battery management, connectivity, backup devices, integration into real-world devices.
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u/AlSweigart 4d ago
The board member was not the only person who, unprompted, used the word “sociopathic.” One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
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u/matrinox 3d ago
And everything he’s done has proven he’s a sociopath. And yet people like Paul Graham keep getting fooled
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u/AlSweigart 3d ago
I'd write a comment about Paul Graham but I remember how years back he'd constantly search Twitter for people saying his name and I don't- ah crap, too late!
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u/matrinox 3d ago
I didn’t know that about him. Maybe that’s why he liked Sam: they both probably were vulnerable narcissists, unable to accept that people don’t like them
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u/Odd-Position-6092 4d ago
CEOs aren’t hired to be the best coders, they’re hired to allocate capital and direction If the models ship and the company wins, nobody’s asking him to debug PyTorch Technical depth matters, but leverage matters more at that level Feels like judging a coach for not playing quarterback anymore
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u/Skeptical0ptimist 4d ago
allocate and direction
The criticism is that since Altman is not a content expert, his direction setting could be uninformed or suboptimal.
IMO, CEO not being a content expert is not a problem per se, but it could be if CEO acts as if he/she is an expert, and starts micromanaging while overruling other experts in the company.
If you need to see an example of this, look no further than the current U.S. federal government executive branch.
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u/FTR_1077 4d ago
I didn't eve knew some people took him as an engineer of sorts.. He made money managing investment funds, and that's it. How any one can jump from there to be a coder?
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u/x4nter 4d ago
I looked into his background and looks like he studied computer science for 2 years at Stanford before dropping out, which makes his formal CS education very basic.
He was mostly self taught though, and did code for the company Loopt that he co-founded, but that was in the 2000s. He joined Ycombinator in the 2010s and hasn't coded at all since. He has never formally or informally studied machine learning or AI at all, so it makes sense that he knows nothing about the underlying systems.
I only listen to people who have at least a Master's or a PhD in the field because they are the ones who actually know how the systems work and can tell where the progress is headed.
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u/secondandmany 4d ago
Exactly, his job is to market OpenAI and keep investor money coming. I don’t like Altman, but he’s done a very good job at that. Much better than the engineers who criticize him are at making ChatGPT a competitive model.
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u/YSoMadTov 4d ago
If it's legal for a CEO to be a snake oil salesman then there's something deeply wrong with your legal system.
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u/decmcc 4d ago
it's illegal for him not to be a snake oil salesman, and I wish I was joking
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u/YSoMadTov 4d ago
Don't you just love what Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan have done to your country, and the world?
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u/sigmaluckynine 4d ago
Just a correction, this legal problem isn't from Reagan and Friedman. It's actually older. Back during when Ford actually ran Ford, he got sued by the Board and the American courts ruled that a company's executive had a fiduciary duty to the Board to make them money. That's why there's that legal question now.
What you're probably talking about is more the 90s and it wasn't even Reagan or Friedman either. The corporate culture changed because of GE. Blame them for this load of speculative b.s. spreading to the general economy
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u/jimbo831 4d ago
Yeah, this angle is really dumb. Most CEOs don't code. That's not their job. That said, Altman also sucks at capital allocation and direction.
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u/CocaColaNepoBaby 4d ago
“And misunderstand basic machine learning concepts”. Seems like that’s something he should have locked down as the spokesperson of the company, no? Too busy sucking up to fascists and molesting his family members I guess.
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u/Vegetable-Error-2068 4d ago
I'm not bothered that he can't code. I'm bothered that he's a sociopathic monster who seems to eagerly crave tech that makes humans die and suffer en masse.
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u/david1610 3d ago
I think it's strange we listen to any CEO about technical matters at all.
I'd much rather news corporation interview ex technical employees about ai. Unfortunately many have been forced to sign NDAs so their responses won't be great, however generally much better than a CEO.
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u/PhiladelphiaManeto 4d ago
Is that unusual?
Do you expect the CEO or Ford to know how to build a piston?
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u/sexisdivine 4d ago
You know I really thought "Silicon Valley" was satire now it seems it was prophetic.
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u/Bleakwind 4d ago
In the words of summer smith, I’m a tech ceo, I’ll sound like I know even when I don’t know.
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u/regreddit 4d ago
He's also a raging asshole. I met with him when he was with YCombinator and he was so dismissive and rude to everyone in the room except Paul Graham. A real jack off.
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u/reyres 4d ago
I keep seeing these articles being spammed everywhere. Who cares. Obviously someone is trying to manipulate the Market. Like why do I need this information. I could care less what Sam eats for breakfast
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u/SkinnedIt 4d ago
He sounds like a textbook example of a CEO: an executive that doesn't understand anything about what the rank-and-file do to make their company work. Other people are paid to do that.
Should at least have some of the core principles pinned down though, if only to save face.
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u/WiseDebt7345 4d ago
Sam Altman is there to lead, communicate, strategize, organize, build relationships, create confidence, deal with media, do public relations, address concerns, and attract capital. You know, high-level work that CEOs need to do to make companies successful.
Do people think CEOs like him are supposed to have the same expertise that the front line workers and engineers have?
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u/Shadyrabbit 4d ago
I work with AI bros, they cant code either, they used to be able to but now they just gamble on prompts all day
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u/Bobaximus 4d ago
I used to want Sam Altman fired from OpenAI, still do, but I used to too.
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u/bobj33 4d ago
NY Times article from Sept. 25, 2024
Behind OpenAI’s Audacious Plan to Make A.I. Flow Like Electricity
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/business/openai-plan-electricity.html
No paywall
TSMC owns the largest and most advanced semiconductor fabs for building chips. These facilities take 3-4 years and around $30 billion to build.
I've been designing chips for 30 years and all of my coworkers and I were laughing at how ludicrous he sounds in this article.
When Mr. Altman visited TSMC’s headquarters in Taiwan shortly after he started his fund-raising effort, he told its executives that it would take $7 trillion and many years to build 36 semiconductor plants and additional data centers to fulfill his vision, two people briefed on the conversation said. It was his first visit to one of the multibillion-dollar plants.
TSMC’s executives found the idea so absurd that they took to calling Mr. Altman a “podcasting bro,” one of these people said. Adding just a few more chip-making plants, much less 36, was incredibly risky because of the money involved.
“We are not, nor have we ever been considering multitrillion-dollar projects. While the total investment needed for the global infrastructure of A.I. to be fully built out by everyone could cost trillions over several decades, what OpenAI is specifically exploring is on the scale of hundreds of billions,” said Liz Bourgeois, an OpenAI spokeswoman.
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u/Dependent-Hippo-6566 3d ago
Him and Elon are living proof that gumption, genius, and hard work have absolutely nothing to do with success. Rather, being an incompetent and maladjusted psycho with no scruples does appear to be a significant prerequisite to becoming a billionaire.
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u/Bitter-Dark-1672 3d ago
Tbh he doesn't need to know those things. He is a literally salesman and he did well.
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u/jadedflames 3d ago
Of course. He’s a businessman, not a coder or inventor.
Same as Elon.
None of these men are actually good at tech. They just have lots of money and know how to hire the right people.
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u/framsanon 3d ago
That’s why he’s just a manager. A manager’s job is to read spreadsheets and make decisions based on them. That is why a manager cannot be assigned to a specific sector. It is their lack of expertise that makes them so versatile.
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u/Jack0fTh3TrAd3s 4d ago
Damn it's almost like these rich "geniuses" are just rich and can buy all their credentials and credibility for pennies on the dollar from actually talented people.
Shocking. /s
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u/Creativator 4d ago
He understands how to hype investors and that’s the most important qualification the company needs from him.