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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

#51

Post by Johnny555 »

Apreche wrote: post #23
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…

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 the skills of the person doing that.

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

#52

Post by skullone »

kortilla wrote: post #43
pclmulqdq wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know a lot about Sam Altman's history, but I do know that there is a lot of misattribution in tech circles away from the doers and toward the managers. Has he had significant tangible results, or has he managed people who have had those tangible results? This sort of misattribution seems to show up when you have individuals with sociopathic tendencies running firms that do cool things: Elon Musk is the king o…

SpaceX is Elon’s original work. There was no preexisting company there.

[flagged]

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

#53

Post by bmitc »

foobaw wrote: post #36
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…

You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building. There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic. Money can only get you so far.

Is there an indication that Altman has a special talent for this over others?

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

#54

Post by Timber-6539 »

> “The senior leadership team was unanimous in asking for Sam’s return as CEO and for the board’s resignation, actions backed by an open letter signed by over 95% of our employees. The strong support from his team underscores that he is an effective CEO,” said an OpenAI spokeswoman.

This is where I stopped reading.

At the risk of sounding defensive of Sam Altman. If there's something so fundamentally wrong with him, why does he have such broad support? He's just one man, say that what this article alleges is true, how many tricks does he have up his sleeve to fool the entirety of Silicon Valley?

I mean, we can beat around the bush all day but he managed to get his old/new?? job back at OpenAI. This means to me that his ouster was either unwarranted or the board was acting blindly and should have stepped aside just on account of being clearly incapable of making sound decisions.

This article does not ask the right questions. Doesn't answer any questions either like the many articles written before it riddled with speculation about Sam's much belabored firing.

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

#55

Post by lacrimacida »

gkoberger wrote: post #32
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…

I don’t think you need to like the people you listed (I, for example, hate Musk). But you seem to have no curiosity around understanding the value non-technical people can bring to a project or company or innovation. You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.

But even all Wozzes out there who met their Jobs are still relegated to just Wozzes, all credit being vaccumed up by their respective Jobs. Not saying that their Jobs don’t deserve any the credit, i’m just pointing out the unfair pattern of how all the credit is being vaccumed up. One clearly needs the other but it doesn’t look like a two way street at all.

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

#56

Post by bmitc »

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…

> business ace

What business has he aced?

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

#57

Post by dbingham »

gkoberger wrote: post #32
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…

I don’t think you need to like the people you listed (I, for example, hate Musk). But you seem to have no curiosity around understanding the value non-technical people can bring to a project or company or innovation. You need both to do something great. And there’s thousands of Woz’s out there whose names we don’t know because they never met their Jobs.

The issue is that if you ask the average person on the street who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz. I'm not sure, but I think the financial compensation also carried that discrepancy.

And that's a really common case.

It is absolutely true that you need both technical and non-technical people to make a business work. There are lots of jobs to be done, hats to be worn, and they are all valuable - many are necessary.

The issue is that our society and economy massively overvalues two roles in particular: those who bring the capital and those who carry the title executive. It's not that those roles don't contribute, they do. But they currently get the vast majority of the generated wealth, credit, and recognition (which then translates into more opportunities to access more capital and thus into an exponential feedback loop).

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

#58

Post by blackoil »

richbell wrote: post #14
gkoberger wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it. I'm not saying Sam has never done anything illegal, but most of the outrage seems to be that he doesn't follow social/business norms (not that he doesn't follow rules/regulations/laws).

> This is a fallacy. You can't say "this other CEO did something" if you're trying to make a point about Sam. If you have a problem with Sam doing something illegal, say it. There is nothing fallacious about my comment. Saying I'm not allowed to compare him to other CEOs is ridiculous. As another commenter said: he isn't unique.

Not OP, but adding it is called false equivalence or commonly known as comparing apples and oranges. Just because two people are CEO doesn't relate them any more than a person with mustache to Hitler.

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

#59

Post by wslh »

bmitc wrote: post #56
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…

> business ace What business has he aced?

He helps business ace, not saying that he is a successful entrepreneur. We cannot say that OpenAI is unsuccessful either. We don't know if they will be as successful in the future but he helped in moving the gears.

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

#60

Post by GCA10 »

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 their successors for messing up a good thing. Also very good at cultivating a certain subset of journalists who will keep burnishing the legend, never stepping outside the bubble.

Loosely related: does anyone in the brave new AI community have the patience and humility to try to solve the hallucinations problem? Because it seems as if Sam & Co. are quite determined to ignore it, deny it or minimize it, while continuing to push for breakneck growth of products with a very troubling design flaw.

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