Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 204 posts

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#131

Post by AndrewKemendo »

bmitc wrote: post #50
hutzlibu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also this other bit was news to me: "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.” "

Why are these people so sycophantic, especially to such an inexperienced person?

The dirty truth is that the ideal Silicon Valley CEO is whomever can be a perfect sockpuppet for investors and still understand technical velocity.

The more ability you have to be kind of waterproof so to speak - like a duck - because of a mixture of positioning, ruthlessness, access, intelligence, perseverance, etc the better you are. Most importantly you have to regularly show allegiance to specifically investors over all other considerations, and boom you’re perfectly crafted.

Altman has brilliantly positioned himself as that perfect fulcrum between venture and technical skills such that he is (in his own mind and to a tiny subset of incredibly powerful people in SV) indispensable to the silicon valley crowd who doesn’t really know how to navigate the intersection between venture and technical skills.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#132

Post by infamia »

gkoberger wrote: post #7

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he fol…

> You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way.

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.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#133

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kevinventullo wrote: post #122
GCA10 wrote: post #60

I've seen variants of this in finance, where the strategy is called "outrunning your mistakes." There's an art to building a rapid growth trajectory, cutting all kinds of corners to ramp up your customers/assets/users/whatever -- and then pirouetting into a bigger new role, while leaving someone else to stabilize your unstable creation. Take it up a level, and the best practitioners are also very good at blaming thei…

does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? I think this is akin to asking if anyone in the software engineering community has the patience and humility to try to solve the software bugs problem.

Nope, those are very different. Fundamentally the reason that LLMs hallucinate is because they are predicting the next most likely word. It would be expensive to find a way to remove outputs where P truth is low, but it's not completely implausible like removing software bugs.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#134

Post by VirusNewbie »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #130
asfgkadnhiok wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own. 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 a…

> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101 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 d…

>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)

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(!!!).

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#135

Post by VirusNewbie »

Johnny555 wrote: post #51
Apreche wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is, what do you count as "doing"? 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…

>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? You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss th…

My question would be, is that what Sam does? I wasn't aware that he was involved in building the founding team. I think that's certainly a skill, but I haven't yet heard that's his secret sauce.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#136

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

haltist wrote: post #102

[flagged]

That honestly sounds like a faith based argument. Put your faith in the leader, pay no attention to the unbelievers!

Now, it's possible that this time this argument is correct, but the odds are against you.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#137

Post by Master_Odin »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #130
asfgkadnhiok wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own. 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 a…

> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101 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 d…

Do you have a source for saying the monetary outlook is good? As far as I'm aware, advertising dollars has always been the lion's share of revenue, and he's tanked that and the valuation of the site has readily dropped.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#138

Post by VirusNewbie »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #30
gkoberger wrote: post #7

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he fol…

Which makes me think... how much of the talent in middle management in FAANG could be actually useful in the world when applied somewhere else!

right now, I get a lot more use out of my iPhone, GMail, and Netflix than I do ChatGPT. Could change soon, but something to note.

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#139

Post by [deleted] »

gkoberger wrote: post #7

You don't have to like Sam. But people who do big things, by definition, have to get there by pushing things along at a cadence that differs from most other people. I'm not necessarily saying it's a good thing, but I don't get why every article about Sam seems to be surprised that the guy who helped build something nobody thought was possible (AI this decade) got there by doing things in a fast, unique way. If he fol…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends

#140

Post by Johnny555 »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #135
Johnny555 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? You should try hiring a group of really smart people and getting them to work together to create something great before you dismiss th…

My question would be, is that what Sam does? I wasn't aware that he was involved in building the founding team. I think that's certainly a skill, but I haven't yet heard that's his secret sauce.

I don't honestly know what he does, but given that he's got both investors and employees loyal to him makes me think that he does a lot more than say "Here's a pile of money, I'm going to lock you smart people in a room and take credit for whatever you come up with"
Post reply on HN