Altman is the perfect 3-letter inside man, that photo with Nadella towards the end of the article is the perfect representation of that (MS having won the race of "which IT company will the System choose to represent its tech interests?", ahead of Amazon and Alphabet).
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
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's an attempt to force, and has the same flaw as all attempts to force, which is: the other side might just call your bluff. "Oh you think that going ahead before a decision is made and just publish a post will get us to decide in your favor because we're afraid of looking like we're backtracking? How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? What you gonna do now?"
> How about we don't decide in your favor and delete your post? This response, the one YC went with, is milquetoast. It’s rational. But the true fuck you is to counter-programme and publicly call out the lie.
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Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#73After 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…
A combination of real drive and a tremendous amount of dumb luck. Never forget the dumb luck part though. Life isn't fair, ask Trevor Moore who wrote a song about that, oh wait, you can't, life isn't fair...
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#74Earlier 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…
> As far as Altman goes, I put him firmly in the same camp as Musk. They haven't done jack shit. What Musk did with SpaceX is in no way comparable to just paying an architect to build a building. Unless the entire biography from Isaacson was fabricated, he was extremely hands on in design decisions, company direction, and hiring. If you think none of those were relevant to the success of spacex, you’re completely del…
Per dozens of engineers at SpaceX...the biography from Isaacson contains numerous exaggerations and outright fabrications.
Elon Musk's involvement in design decisions was limited to the typical executive level involvement in hardware design, in the sense that he was presented multiple options by the engineers and designers and got to pick which one they went with.
Indeed, with SpaceX it's usually immediately obvious when Musk was involved: does something fail spectacularly in a way it wasn't supposed to? That was Musk, getting involved in something he didn't understand and overriding the engineers and other professionals. (Contrast the first Starship launch this year, which Musk micromanaged, vs the second launch in November in which he had minimal involvement due to being distracted by X and Tesla.)
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#75I'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…
Yeah, have worked for/been burned by a few of these types. It can be really demoralizing and sets a bad example for how to be successful. Over time I've decided that how I accomplish things matters just as much, if not more than, what I accomplish, and outrunning your mistakes is a terrible "how."
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#76Sam is great, some eggs might've been cracked along the way, but overall, very positive influence on the world.
You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake.
Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting to make up ridiculous positions and find them tenable (ie the company going kaput being in line with the mission, like srsly??)
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs was a human being. No human should be worshipped. Like all human beings, he wasn't a one-dimensional character from a crappy sitcom. He had negative and positive traits. Whatever one feels about him personally, it is absolutely a mistake to dismiss him. What he achieved -- multiple times -- puts him in extremely rarified air in the business world.
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> Being involved in a some impressive things doesn't excuse
It doesn’t. It also doesn’t negate those accomplishments. The world is a better and a worse place for him. This is humanity.
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#78Sam is great, some eggs might've been cracked along the way, but overall, very positive influence on the world. You could shine a light into most people's lives and find in most cases broken egg shells here & there. Fixating on them at the expense of the bigger picture is a mistake. Regarding the openai board, the problem imo is that too much weight was given to a nebulous & subjective mission, allowing those sitting…
Regarding your last point,
OpenAI going kaput might indeed be the best for humanity as a whole, only time will tell.
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#79> “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 makes people money. Plenty of terrible people commanded great loyalty. All the loyalty tells you is he’s a good leader. Not where he’s leading us. (Not saying anything about Sam. Just pointing out that loyalty is orthogonal.)
He should be making investors money. That's his #1 job.
Aside from that, who cares about loyalty to the CEO of a tech company. He's a replaceable employee and OpenAI should be able to continue without him.
What were his actual crimes. It's not clear from the previous board nor anyone who's spoken about the matter what those were.
Re: Sam Altman's knack for dodging bullets with a little help from bigshot friends
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 val…
> who the leadership behind Apple was, they would name Jobs, not Woz
Woz was critical to early Apple. He was not involved in its modern iteration. Also, plenty of important and influential people are unknown in the popular imagination.