Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the public face of ChatGPT, has carved out an image for himself as one of the preeminent AI whisperers of our age, whose influence supposedly extends to the White House on the strength of his ideas alone.
Or at least that’s the image he’s managed to cultivate. A new exposé in the New Yorker paints a different portrait, and it’s substantially more vexing. Drawing on interviews with numerous OpenAI insiders who worked with Altman, the article portrays the CEO not as a technical wiz, but as a skilled manipulator — and one with a surprisingly shallow grasp of the AI systems his company is building.
According to numerous engineers interviewed for the article, Altman lacks experience in both programming and in machine learning — a shortage of expertise that becomes obvious when the CEO mixes up basic AI terms.
It’s important to note that Altman dropped out of a Stanford computer science program after two years. We’re not here to shame anyone based on their education, but as the CEO of what may soon become the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company, the myth surrounding Altman matters. Cast as the chief acolyte of the “god of scale” or as a “genius of digital tech,” he enjoys a kind of cult credibility that lets him slip out of tight spots that might ensnare lesser entrepreneurs.
Former OpenAI researcher Carroll Wainwright, speaking to the New Yorker, put it plainly: “he sets up structures that, on paper, constrain him in the future. But then, when the future comes and it comes time to be constrained, he does away with whatever the structure was.”
This knack for papering over technical shortcomings with boardroom maneuvers earned Altman a reputation as a practitioner of “Jedi mind tricks,” one tech insider who worked with the CEO explained.
As one senior executive at Microsoft put it to the New Yorker: “I think there’s a small but real chance he’s eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff- or Sam Bankman-Fried-level scammer.”
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