[throwaway35934]

I work for a Fortune 500 company. One of our senior technology execs was just listed on Business Insider's "Top 100 people in AI". Our company has no products that use AI. The closest we have come to actually doing anything with AI is a tiny trial of GitHub Copilot.

[BiteCode_dev]

15 years ago I worked with a guy on NGO projets in Africa.

The projects were either prototypes, concepts, in testing, or small scales. Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing so I wouldn't say he was much involved in them apart from claiming he was doing good.

Well, it worked because he was in the top 100 people of Time magazine the year after for "saving millions of children".

That was my wake up moment about the medias.

[nonameiguess]

It's pretty interesting to me to see these patterns of who gets credit and who doesn't. My ex-wife got off of active duty and joined the national guard to go to college nearly 20 years ago before she got back in as an officer through ROTC. While she was in the guard, she deployed with a civil affairs unit to Djibouti, which we have always maintained a permanent presence in to secure shipping lanes for oil. She was their supply sergeant and she identified a problem with the local water supply and got them all the equipment they needed to fix it, and in the process probably legitimately saved at least thousands of lives. She got a bronze star for it, but certainly no magazines will ever have heard of her.

It's even more interesting that she got branch-detailed to the field artillery when she got back in, and I'm pretty sure she became the first female to ever command a combat unit in the Army when she filled in as XO of a forward line battery and they lost their permanent commander. But you'll never see her in a history book or read about her on Wikipedia because it was still illegal at the time for women to serve in combat units at all, and officially she was on the books as part of the brigade headquarters company, only filling in because they were severely understaffed.

I try to keep her in mind when I feel like I'm being slighted at work and not getting sufficient recognition for accomplishments as I earn a salary triple what she gets as a Lieutenant Colonel now.

[_ea1k]

Now imagine what it is like when they have someone that they dislike.

[rchaud]

> Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing

Well yeah, who else would the media think to profile?

When the media profiles OpenAI, most of the coverage will be on the CEO, who is more of a 'serial entrepreneur' than an AI specialist.

[Anthony-G]

Every now and again, I think I'm in danger of becoming too cynical. It seems that I still have some way to go before my naïvety is properly calibrated to the real world.

[sanderjd]

I'm sure this would out your company, but if you can say, I'm curious what the blurb said about why they were included in the list. I mean, I'm sure the real reason is "a PR person with good contacts at Business Insider", but I think it would be illuminating to know what the BS reason they wrote up is.

[dboreham]

Spoiler: all such "Top N people in X" lists are fake and somehow serve someone's business model.

[ska]

I thought all those lists are marketing exercises, no?