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

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

#181

Post by paulryanrogers »

Johnny555 wrote: post #140
VirusNewbie wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Employees faced losing their equity if the market got spooked, so not sure the petition is objective evidence of loyalty. Apparently some employees near him wanted him out.

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

#182

Post by 15457345234 »

akira2501 wrote: post #107
wslh wrote: post #18

After reading more articles about Sam it seems he is a genius in the game of power. Am I right? He is at the center of the stage and many powerful people and organizations trust on him beyond the "anecdotes". He will gain more power while he is an amplifier of capital and business opportunities. For an investor point of view he is a business ace and you just need to be careful about partnering with him because he wil…

You can literally just buy articles like this. The question that could be asked is the long term ROI here actually going to be worth it for Sam? The article talks about his "luck" in "surviving." Which is about all he has, apparently. No consideration for the future of the product, the company, or the industry. The triumphant conclusion of this article is "a bunch of CEOs pulled weight and Altman got his old job back…

> they seem more skilled at producing "internal drama"

My take on it is that they have an exceptionally skilled marketing department that's good at creating the impression that they've actually created an AGI, with stories trickling out to the press about ChatGPT 'getting lazy' or 'taking a break for the holidays' and other stuff that serves to humanise what is, at least for me, a product which routinely fails to accurately answer basic questions, the answers to which are contained in hundreds of blogs and forum postings.

If others are experiencing something different that's interesting. Personally I note that the 'I got this weird answer' posts are never accompanied by screenshots or any other evidence, they're just claims which all subsequent repliers appear to take as the unvarnished truth.

I congratulate their marketing team; I suspect that Mistral will ultimately present a far superior product.

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

#183

Post by dbuser99 »

darkwraithcov wrote: post #147
adventured wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not unfair in the case of Jobs & Woz. Wozniak represented a few years of Apple's earliest history. His contribution was similar to Paul Allen's contribution to Microsoft. Extraordinarily important in the first few years, and that was the end of that. The reality is, people broadly like Woz, and particularly among the HN crowd Steve Jobs is disliked; that's the explanation, it's purely emotional; so they want to…

What makes you think Musk is technical? I’ve seen tons of interviews and podcasts. He’s not as stupid as he comes across on Twitter, but he absolutely is not an engineer and couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He has an above average understanding of tech, but whenever seriously pressed —- rare because the media is absolutely terrified of pressing him and losing access —- he demonstrates a rudimentary understan…

That’s wildly inaccurate. Musk regularly displays a much higher level of tech skills compared to most CEOs, with the exception of a few, like maybe Jensen. You may not like musk, but musks way above someone like altman in technical skills

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

#184

Post by Johnny555 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #181
Johnny555 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Employees faced losing their equity if the market got spooked, so not sure the petition is objective evidence of loyalty. Apparently some employees near him wanted him out.

The petition sure didn't sound like employees trying to get away from Altman:

"We, the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman."

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

#185

Post by fakedang »

tim333 wrote: post #177
darkwraithcov wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think Musk is technical? I’ve seen tons of interviews and podcasts. He’s not as stupid as he comes across on Twitter, but he absolutely is not an engineer and couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag. He has an above average understanding of tech, but whenever seriously pressed —- rare because the media is absolutely terrified of pressing him and losing access —- he demonstrates a rudimentary understan…

>couldn’t code his way out of a paper bag He sold a game he programed at age 12, and wrote at least the initial code for zip2 which Compaq acquired for $307 million.

Exactly. People here think knowing how to code is spinning up 5 k8s clusters and running an ELK stack from scratch, when in reality, it can be much less. Musk was an intermediate level coder from his time, which, mind you, was a time where terms like Agile, code hygiene, etc, were non-existent.

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.

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

#186

Post by choppaface »

tim333 wrote: post #178
bmitc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is firing someone being sycophantic?

It is when your rich spouse asks you to do it and you do it despite attempting to pose as a leader in critical thinking in tech and potential counterbalance to your spouse. It’s an open admission that sama behaved blatantly unethically (perhaps illegally) but also pinned your financial opportunity cost so that you couldn’t play against him. Note that Loopt sold the profiles of poor people to low-income credit predators, and Sama did this to pay for his first pair of matching Mclarens (he literally bought the same car twice). Moreover pg claims he didn’t do it yet apparently flew back to CA from the UK to deal with it.

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

#187

Post by sudosysgen »

Timber-6539 wrote: post #167
pclmulqdq wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI did not become for-profit. OpenAI opened a limited-profit arm. The board of directors who fired Sam Altman is the board of the nonprofit.

> limited-profit arm. This is another one of those recent buzzwords that mean nothing. Like oil conglomerates making "green energy" donations and calling themselves low carbon emitters.

The point is that this was a subsidiary under the control of the non-profit. It was mostly there for tax reasons.

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

#188

Post by codingcroc20 »

It’s revealing that Chesky just needed to know Altman hadn’t done anything illegal, and that was enough to start his campaign to defend him. “Not illegal” is a low bar. Those 20 instances of lying/being deceitful could have been consequential. It’s also amazing how much much support from investors can insulate an unscrupulous CEO.

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

#189

Post by nucleative »

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!

The reddit fatfire sub is full of middle managers at FAANG who are pulling a few hundred k to a mil in W2 income for the foreseeable future. Their eyes are set on riding off into the sunset at the earliest opportunity. They would probably have more fun working harder if the results benefited them directly but I'm sure many aren't serious risk takers. For those who are, I think they are already off doing their own thing.

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

#190

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

Nevermark wrote: post #176
akira2501 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think being overly connected to the "silicon valley social graph" is particularly useful. I actually think it's probably going to be a negative drain on your time, or sacrificing that, a negative drain on your reputation.

At the level of corporate creation and management, your network (graph) doesn't drain you. It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities. A network of powerful people is like a collection of other threads, each with their own resources, that you can call. Literally. And put any number of those…

> At the level of corporate creation and management, your network (graph) doesn't drain you. It amplifies you. Speeds up big moves, acquisition of resources, hiring key people, etc. These are not loner (atom), team (list), or even top-down (tree), type activities.

Only if it’s a network fit for use and purpose though.

Most companies (are not, won’t be, shouldn’t be, can’t be, don’t want to be) [pick one] an SV behemoth. I once worked at a small organization that had direct connections with a certain former CEO that remains one of the planet’s wealthiest people, but it didn’t really do much either way for the organization.

Put another way focused on OpenAI: I would argue that despite Microsoft’s moves in support of Altman with OpenAI, it’s not like Satya Nadella needs Sam Altman because Sam Altman has something Nadella/MS doesn’t. Quite the opposite. In situations like that, the stability of the stock price and market perception are much more compelling drivers. Microsoft is only transactionally served by him. If he was more expensive to keep than the value derived from his ability to razzle-dazzle, they’d have simply kept quiet.

Edit: typo

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