The incentive structures are such that everyone sucks up to people in a position to give you a lot of money, so all these people with no real skills, talent or track record get regarded as “geniuses”, but like, even when you understand why this happens, it doesn’t make it any less rage-inducing.
What would have to change in this society for people who actually do shit to have a higher profile than people who just have a lot of money?
Idk if I had to be stranded on an island with either Elon or Sam, I think I'd rather be stuck with Elon.
What's with all the hit pieces on Sam Altman lately? He's a CEO, his job is to grow the business, not to code. That part is handled by the engineers that he hired. How many CEOs out there are also great programmers? Sure, I would prefer Sam Altman to have more technical depth given the business he is leading, but lack of technical depth doesn't make him a Bernie Madoff.
New Yorker article less so because its just a standard ceo profile piece that digs out pretty pertinent things for a ceo role
Also why is a low effort commentary piece of the NYT article on the HN front page?
It's not a small chance, it's close to 100%. If your bullshit detector is not going off, you have a serious problem.
the entire thing is built to collapse.
You never saw this kind of stuff with Steve Jobs who admittedly wasnt perfect - but he wasn't challenged physically / social standing. Perhaps that's why he wasn't a weirdo like the rest of them.
On the other hand, I'm probably just finding a generational distinction where there is none.
Edit: And anyway, SBF, Altman etc are not the same generation as Musk etc IIRC
Tons of people can code. Coding is not some sort of mythical skill. Millions of people can code.
For some reason, this narrative is almost always applying on people who are politically incompatible with the left like Elon and Sam.
I dont understand why people here require that every tech ceo to be some professional programmer or engineer. I don't think you _need_ to be that deep in it as the CEO. There are plenty of leaders at OpenAI that already fit the bill.
Sam is good at getting funding, seeing the bigger picture, and rallying towards a cause. That is the job of a CEO. It doesn't matter (imo) that he doesn't know how many parameters the next release will have. All that matters is he knows the impact of the new release and knows who to defer to for actual technical decisions.