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The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI. I’m not getting it. What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and ad
by eclectic29 3y ago
The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI. I’m not getting it. What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist.
- auggierose 3y agoIf you are driven by outside validation, definitely!
- fidotron 3y agoUnsurprisingly VCs view VCs as the highest form of life, and product managers are temporary positions taken on the way to ascending to VC status. I have said recently elsewhere SV now devalues builders but it is not just VCs/sales/product, a huge amount is devops and sre departments. They make a huge amount of noise about how all development should be free and the value is in deploying and operating the developed artifacts. Anyone outside this watching would reasonably conclude developers have no self respect, hardly aspirational positions.
- drawkbox 3y agoDevelopers are clearly the weak link today, have given up all power over product and it is sad and why software sucks so bad. It pains the soul that value creators have let the value extractors run the show, because it is now a reality TV / circus like market where power is consolidating. Developers and value creators with power are like an anti-trust on consolidation and concentration and they have instead turned towards authoritarianism instead of anti-authoritarianism. What happened? Many think they can still get rich, those days are over because of giving up power. Now quality of life for everyone and value creators is worse off. Everyone loses.
- dinvlad 3y agoI suspect it's because they're happy with SV salaries they got. They think it's actually a good deal for them, and a signal they're "valued"
- bluecheese452 3y agoDevelopers spend all day building. Pms spend all day playing politics. It is no surprise pms get all the power.
- dacryn 3y agohe tells a good story, no matter if its true or has any scientific foundation or not. He tells what others like to hear, and manages to gain money out of it
- ensocode 3y agothis - a good, charismatic salesman
- 93po 3y agoStory telling is the fabric of society in general. It’s why paper money works.
- cableshaft 3y agoHalf of being a good CEO is telling a good story, so that's not surprising.
- matwood 3y agoHalf? 90% of a what a good CEO does is tell the story of why the company is important to it's customers and the market it serves. This story drives sales, motivates people internally, and makes the company a place people want to work.
- nbanks 3y agoSam Altman has done in four days what it took Steve Jobs 11 years to do! I'm impressed.
- eclectic29 3y agoI'm sorry, impressed by what?
- nix-zarathustra 3y agoSteve Jobs got fired from Apple, but was rehired 11 years later.
- MichaelRazum 3y agoYou could say the same about any person on the top. In general CEO's do not do research. Still they are critical for success. By the way the AI scientists get a lot of respect and admiration see Ilya for example.
- seydor 3y agohe was very well known long before openAI
- ben_w 3y agoHe says nice things about his team (and even about his critics) when in public. But my reading of this drama is that the board were seen as literally insane, not that Altman was seen as spectacularly heroic or an underdog.
- stingraycharles 3y agoMy reading of all this is that the board is both incompetent and has a number of massive conflicts of interests. What I don’t understand is why they were allowed to stay on the board with all these conflicts of interests all the while having no (financial) stake in OpenAI. One of the board members even openly admitting that she considered destroying OpenAI a successful outcome of her duty as board member.
- Sebb767 3y ago> One of the board members even openly admitting that she considered destroying OpenAI a successful outcome of her duty as board member. I don't see how this particular statement underscores your point. OpenAI is a non-profit with the declared goal of making AI safe and useful for everyone; if it fails to reach that or even actively subverts that goal, destroying the company does seem like the ethical action.
- DebtDeflation 3y agoThis just underscores the absurdity of their corporate structure. AI research requires expensive researchers and expensive GPUs. Investors funding the research program don't want to be beholden to some non-profit parent organization run by a small board of nobodies who think their position gives them the power to destroy the whole thing if they believe it's straying from its utopian mission.
- ethanbond 3y agoThey don’t “think” that. It does do that, and it does it by design exactly because as you approach a technology as powerful as AI there will be strong commercial incentives to capture its value creation. Gee wiz, almost… exactly like what is happening?
- TrackerFF 3y agoIt's the cult of the CEO in action.
- _giorgio_ 3y agoTo talk about OpenAi, Ilya Sutskever and Andrej Karpathy are much more known than Sam Altman. I'm sure that if Ilya had been removed from his role, the revolt movement would have been similar. I've started to like Sam only when he was removed from his position.
- seydor 3y agothe media is the media
- hdivider 3y agoThis, 100%. Sam pontificated about fusion power, even here on HN. Beyond investing in Helion, what did he do? Worldcoin. Tempting impoverished people to give up biometric data in exchange for some crypto. And serving as the face of mass-market consumer AI. Clearly that's more cool, and more attractive to VCs. Meanwhile, what have fusion scientists and engineers done? They kept on going, including by developing ML systems for pure technological effect. Day after day. They got to a breakthrough just this year. Scientists and engineers in national labs, universities, and elsewhere show what a real commitment to technological progress looks like.
- otteromkram 3y ago> This, 100%. When do new HN users get the ability to downvote?
- bryancoxwell 3y ago501 karma.
- deely3 3y agoDepends on karma and other hiddens parameters.
- qup 3y agoYou're on pace for about two years in
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Scientists and engineers in national labs, universities, and elsewhere show what a real commitment to technological progress looks like. And everywhere. You've only named public institutions for some reason, but a lot of progress happens in the private sector. And that demonstrates real commitment, because they're not spending other people's money.
- walthamstow 3y agoIf the ZIRP era has taught us anything, it's that private companies can spray other people's money up the wall just as well as anyone
- serial_dev 3y ago> It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist. In my experience, product people who know what they are doing have a huge impact on the success of a company, product, or service. They also point engineering efforts in the right direction, which in turn also motivate engineers. I saw good product people leaving completely destroy a team, never seen that happen with a good engineer or individual contributor, no matter how great they were.
- jpgvm 3y agoDepends why/how they left. I have seen firing a great/respected/natural leader engineer result in pretty much the whole engineering team just up and leaving.
- cableshaft 3y agoNo see, it doesn't matter, engineers are all cogs and easily replaceable. I'm sure they just dialed the engineer center and ordered a few replacements and they started 24 hours later and were doing just as good of a job the next day. /s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- serial_dev 3y agoYes, that matches my experience as well, that's why I mentioned "individual contributors", maybe it wasn't clear. It's different with engineering managers (or team leads, lead engineers, however you want to call it). When they leave, that's usually a bad sign. Though also quite often when the engineering leaders leave, I think of it as a canary in the coal mine: they are closer to business, they deal more with business people, so they are the first to realize that "working with these people on these services is pointless, time to jump ship".
- Draiken 3y agoInteresting. I had the opposite experience. All of the product suite having no idea about what the product even is, where it should go, making bad decisions over and over, excusing their bad choices behind "data" and finally, as usual, failing upwards eventually moving to bigger startups. I have yet to find a product person that was not involved in the inception of the idea that is actually good (hell, even some founders fail spectacularly here). Perhaps I'm simply unlucky.
- tim333 3y agoI don't think the media are treating him as a "hero and savior of AI". However OpenAI and ChatGTP have undoubtedly been successful and he seems popular with his people. It's human nature to follow the top person as figurehead for an organisation as we or journalists don't have time or info to break down what each of the hundreds of employees contributed. I actually get the impression from the media that he's a bit shifty and sales orientated but seems effective at getting stuff done.
- ethbr1 3y ago> but seems effective at getting stuff done. Sales usually is. It's the consequences, post-sale, that they're usually less effective at dealing with.
- otteromkram 3y ago[flagged]
- Perz1val 3y agoPlease be nicer, this was just a litte error probably caused by typing too fast, it doesn't mean that they lack knowledge. Attacking people for such minor mistakes is not what this community is about. Rushing to downvote (your other comment)/critique is overall detrimental. Slow down, think, have a discussion about stuff that matters. I know that's not how the internet is usually, we're trying to be better here
- kridsdale1 3y agoPlease relax.
- logicchains 3y ago>Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support Google's full of top researchers and scientists who are at least as good as those at OpenAI; Sam's the reason OpenAI has a successful, useful product (GPT4), while Google has the far less effective, more lobotomized Bard.
- gumballindie 3y ago> What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? He’s serving the right people by doing their bidding.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoAltman seems to be a extraordinary leader, motivator, and strategizer. This itself is clear by the fact that 90% of the company was willing to walk out over his retention. Just think about that for minute.
- csunbird 3y agoNo, the 90% of the employees were scared that their million $ salaries are going away along with Sam Altman.
- __loam 3y agoYeah, it should be extremely obvious the reason most of the employees were willing to walk is they've hitched their wagons to Altman. The board of openai put the presumed party day all of them were anticipating in jeopardy. Not all of us live in this god forsaken place to "work with cool tech".
- JansjoFromIkea 3y agostock options were probably the focus rather than the salaries
- mousetree 3y agoThere was about to be a secondary stock purchase by Thrive where employees could cash out their shares. That likely would've fallen apart if the board won the day. Employees had a massive incentive to get same back.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoSounds like a good way to to secure your position as leader. My job also secures my loyalty and support with a financial incentive. It is probably the most common way for a business leader to align interests. Kings reward dukes, and generals pay soldiers. Politicians trade policies. That doesn't mean they arent leaders.
- asimpletune 3y ago
- yodsanklai 3y agoHuman nature, some people do love charismatic leaders. It's hard to comprehend for those of us with a more anarchist nature. That being said, I have no idea of this guy's contributions. It's easy to dismiss entrepreneur/managers because they're not top scientists, but they also have very rare skills and without them, projects don't get done.
- 93po 3y agoSam is crazy accomplished and it’s easy to search why
- gabrielgio 3y ago> What has he done in life and/or AI to deserve so much respect and admiration? Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? This has been the case for all achievement of all major companies, the CEO or whoever is on top gets the credit for all their employee's work. Why would be different for OpenAI?
- giamma 3y agoWell there are notable cases in which the CEO had a critical role in the product development. Larry Ellison coded himself the first versions of Oracle database and was then CEO up to 2014. Shay Banon wrote Elasticsearch and was Elastic CEO for some time.
- gabrielgio 3y agoPerhaps, those are exception that proves the rule? But whether it is deserved or not, it is never the question when congratulating a CEO for an achievement.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sensanaty 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Sam and his other ultra-rich buddies like Satya had their fingers deep in the pockets of all the tech journalists that immediately ran to his defense and sensationalized everything. Every single news source posted on HN read like pure shilling for the Ponzi sch- uh, I mean Worldcoin guy and hailing him as some sort of AI savant.
- egKYzyXeIL 3y agoThis reads like a far-fetched conspiracy theory
- iteratethis 3y agoReally? It's well documented and even admitted that Apple has a set of Apple-friendly media partners.
- YourCupOTea 3y agoEven the Federal Reserve has the “Fed Whisperer” Nick Timiraos. Pretty much an open secret he has a direct line.
- fakedang 3y agoYou do know PR firms exist, right? Or have you been living under a rock since the dawn of the 20th century?
- cyanydeez 3y agoWell, it's been exposed multiple times that money, egos and the media that needs to report about them create a school lunch table where they simply stroke each other's ego and inflate everything they do. No need for a conspiracy, everyones seen this in some aspect, it just gets worse when these people are throwing money around in the billions. all you need to do is witness someone Like Elon musk to see how disruptive this type of thing is.
- objektif 3y agoYou are delusional if you think YC folks does not have a wide network of tech journalists who would side with them when they need.
- busyant 3y ago> Why don’t top researchers and scientists get equivalent (if not more) respect, admiration and support? I can't believe I'm about to defend VCs and "senior management" but here goes. I've worked for two start-ups in my life. The first start-up had dog-shit technology (initially) and top-notch management. CEO told me early on that VCs invest on the quality of management because they trust good senior executives to hire good researchers and let them pivot into profitable areas (and pivoting is almost always needed). I thought the CEO was full of shit and simply patting himself on the back. Company pivoted HARD and IPOed around 2006 and now has a MC of ~ $10 billion. The second start-up I worked with was founded by a Nobel laureate and the tech was based on his research. This time management was dog-shit. Management fumbled the tech and went out of business. === Not saying Altman deserves uncritical praise. All I'm saying is that I used to diminish the importance of quality senior leadership.
- rtsil 3y ago> IPOed around 2006 and now has a MC of ~ $10 billion. The interesting thing is you used economic values to show their importance, not what innovations or changes they achieved. Which is fine for ordinary companies, but OpenAI is supposed to be a non-profit, so these metrics should not be relevant. Otherwise, what's the difference?
- matwood 3y ago> OpenAI is supposed to be a non-profit, so these metrics should not be relevant You're doing the same thing except with finances. Non-profit doesn't mean finances are irrelevant. It simply means there are no shareholders. Non-profits are still businesses - no money, no mission.
- brookst 3y agoWell said. And to extend, there being no shareholders means that no money leaves the company in the form of dividends or stock buybacks. That’s it. Nonprofit corporations are still corporations in every other way.
- dangerface 3y agoYea its a bit much he obviously doesn't deserve the admiration that he is getting. That said he deserves respect for helping bring ChatGPT to market, he deserves support because the board have acted like clowns and justified it with their mission of public accountability, but have rejected the idea that the board itself should be publicly accountable.
- alentred 3y ago> treating Sam like some hero Recent OpenAI CEOs found themselves on the protagonist side not for their actions, but for the way they have been seemingly treated by the board. Regardless of actual actions on either side, "heroic" or not, of which the public knows very little.
- prepend 3y agoI don’t get that at all. The OpenAI board just seems irrational, immature, indecisive, and many other stupid features you don’t want in a board. I don’t see this so much as an “Altman is amazing” outcome so much as the board is incompetent and doing incompetent things and OpenAI’s products are popular and the boards actions put this products in danger. Not that Altman isn’t cool, I think he’s smart, but I think a similar coverage would have occurred with any other ceo who was fired for vague and seemingly random reasons on a Friday afternoon.
- Kinrany 3y agoThe board is not supposed to be good at executive things, that's why they have CEOs
- gandutraveler 3y agoThere is a reason why the top researchers and engineers at OpenAI stood behind Sam. Someday you will learn the value of good leader
- bart_spoon 3y agoStock options?
- redserk 3y agoUnfortunately the engineers aren’t usually the ones getting the praise but CEO or other singular figurehead.
- 627467 3y agoA CEO is not a researcher. A researcher can be a CEO but in doing so stops being a researcher. Maybe (almost certainly) Sam is not a savior/hero, but he doesn't need to be a savior/hero. He just needs to gather more support than the opposition (the now previous board). And even if you don't know any details of this story, enough insiders who know more than any of us of what happens inside oai - including hundred of researchers - decided to support the "savior/hero". It's less about Sam and more about an incompetent board. Some of those board members are top researchers. And they are now on the losing camp.
- ur-whale 3y ago> It looks like one should strive to become product manager, not an engineer or a scientist. If you look at who's running Google right now, you would be essentially correct.
- smrtinsert 3y agoThe service itself has an incredible amount of utility and he will make them all wealthy. Seems like a no brainer to me.
- throwaway318 3y agoEither: Incubation of senior management in US tech has reached singularity and only one person's up for the job. Doom awaits the US tech sector as there's no organisational ability other than one person able and willing to take the big complex job. Or: Sam's overvalued. One or the other.
- iteratethis 3y agoApparently he has a massive role in VC, and since this community, tech twitter, etc. all circle around that, he is unconditionally praised. Further, the current tech wave is all about AI, where there's a massive community of basically "OpenAI wrapper" grifters trying to ride the wave. The shorter answer is: money.
- emodendroket 3y agoThen again wasn't that always true? What did Steve Jobs really build?
- turtle_ 3y agoIf you grew up in the 90s, you’ll understand: Don’t hate the player, hate the game
- latexr 3y agoThe “game” only continues to exist as long as there are “players”. You’re perfectly justified to be discontent with the ones who perpetuate a system you disagree with. That phrase is nothing more than a dissimulated way of saying “tough luck” or “I don’t care” while trying to act (outdatedly) cool. You don’t need to have grown up in any specific decade to understand its meaning.
- notesinthefield 3y agoThe CEO is the face of the company, rarely does the public care about the scientists or engineers. This isnt a new concept, its always happened.
- mikpanko 3y agoOne of the most important things I've learned in life is that organizing people to work toward the same goal is very hard. The larger the group you need to organize, the harder it is. Initially, when the idea is small, it is hard to sell it to talent, investors and early customers to bring all key pieces together. Later, when the idea is well recognized and accepted, the organization usually becomes big and the challenge shifts to understanding the complex interaction of various competing sub-ideas, projects and organizational structures. Humans did not evolve to manage such complex systems and interacting with thousands of stakeholders, beyond what can be directly observed and fully understood. However, without this organization, engineers, researchers, etc cannot work on big audacious projects, which involve more resources than 1 person can provide by themselves. That's why the skill of organizing and leading people is so highly valued and compensated. It is common to think of leaders not contributing much, but this view might be skewed because of mostly looking at executives in large companies at the time they have clear moats. At that point leadership might be less important in the short term: product sells itself, talent is knocking on the door, and money is abundant. But this is an unusual short-lived state between taking an idea off the ground and defending against quickly shifting market forces.
- sealthedeal 3y agoSimply put Altman is now the face of AI. If you were to ask Altman himself though im sure he would highlight the true innovators of AI that he holds in high respect.
- lacrimacida 3y agoHe is but with a caveat. In this 5D chess game of firing him and getting him back into OpenAI put all the spotlights on him.
- erickhill 3y agoRead up on the John Sculley/Michael Spindler days of Apple, and Jobs' return. I think that's what may be in the minds of several people eagerly watching this eventually-to-be-made David Fincher movie.
- gfiorav 3y agoIMO: They fired the CEO and didn't even inform Microsoft, who had invested a massive $20 billion. That's a serious lapse in judgment. A company needs leaders who understand business, not just a smart researcher with a sense of ethical superiority. This move by the board was unprofessional and almost childish. Those board members? Their future on any other board looks pretty bleak. Venture capitalists will think twice before getting involved with anything they have a hand in. On the other side, Sam did increase the company's revenue, which is a significant achievement. He got offers from various companies and VCs the minute the news went public. The business community's support for Sam is partly a critique of the board's actions and partly due to the buzz he and his company have created. It's a significant moment in the industry.
- snickerbockers 3y agoJournalists really want everything to have a singular inventor. The concept of an organization is very difficult for them to grasp so they attribute everything to the guy at the top. Sam Altman is the latest in a long line of "inventors" which also includes such esteemed personalities as Elon musk, Steve Jobs, etc.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> The media and the VCs are treating Sam like some hero and savior of AI I wouldn't be so sure. While I think the board handled this process terribly, I think the majority of mainstream media articles I saw were very cautionary regarding the outcome. Examples (and note the second article reports that Paul Graham fired Altman from YC, which I never knew before): MarketWatch: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-openai-debacle-shows-silicon-valley-will-never-police-itself-1bf27b58 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-openai-debacle-shows-s... Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-altman-fired-y-combinator-paul-graham/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/22/sam-alt...
- RockyMcNuts 3y agoBelow is a good thread, which maybe contains the answer to your question, and Ken Olsen's question about why brainiac MIT grads get managed by midwit HBS grads. https://twitter.com/coloradotravis/status/1726060305736687903 https://twitter.com/coloradotravis/status/172606030573668790... A good leader is someone you'll follow into battle, because you want to do right by the team, and you know the leader and the team will do right by you. Whatever 'leadership' is, Sam Altman has it and the board does not. https://www.ft.com/content/05b80ba4-fcc3-4f39-a0c3-97b025418b3c https://www.ft.com/content/05b80ba4-fcc3-4f39-a0c3-97b025418... The board could have said, hey we don't like this direction and you are not keeping us in the loop, it's time for an orderly change. But they knew that wouldn't go well for them either. They chose to accuse Sam of malfeasance and be weaselly ratfuckers on some level themselves, even if they felt for still-inscrutable reasons that was their only/best choice and wouldn't go down the way it did. Sam Altman is the front man who 'gave us' ChatGPT regardless of everything else Ilya and everyone else did. A personal brand (or corporate) is about trust, if you have a brand you are playing a long-term game, a reputation converts prisoner's dilemma into iterated prisoner's dilemma which has a different outcome.
- eddtries 3y agoIMO and experience a good product manager is far more important than a good engineer or good scientist Elon Musk’s neuralink is a good example - the work they’re doing there was attacked by academics saying they’d done this years ago and it’s not novel, yet none of them will be the ones who ultimately bring it to market.
- dandanua 3y agoCEO is a ruler, scientist is a worker. The modern culture treats workers as a replaceable matter, which is redundant after the work is done. They are just tools. Rulers, on the other hand, take the all praise and honors. It's "them" who did the work. Musk is an extreme example of this.
- jacquesm 3y agoResults matter.