[goldinfra]

It's completely ignorant to discount all organizational leaders based on your extremely limited personal experience. Thousands of years of history proves the difference between successful leaders and unsuccessful leaders.

Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

Everyone has their flaws, and I'm more of a Sam Altman hater than a fan, but even I have to admit he led OpenAI to great success. He didn't do most of the actual work but he did create the company and he did lead it to where it is today.

Personally, If I had stock in OpenAI I'd be selling it right now. The odds of someone else doing as good a job is low. And the odds of him out-competing OpenAI is high.

[cthalupa]

> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

I'm not sure this is actually the case, even ignoring the non-profit charter and the for-profit being beholden to it.

We know that OpenAI has been the talk of the town, we know that there is quite a bit of revenue, and that Microsoft invested heavily. What we don't know is if the strategy being pursued ever had any chance of being profitable.

Decades-long runways with hope that there is a point where profitability will come and at a level where all the investment was worth it is a pretty common operating strategy for the type of company Altman has worked with and invested in, but it is less clear to me that this is viable for this sort of setup, or perhaps at all - money isn't nearly as cheap as it was a decade ago.

What makes a for-profit startup successful isn't necessarily what makes a for-profit LLC with an operating agreement that makes it beholden to the charter of a non-profit parent organization successful.

[glitchc]

> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.

In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.

[goldinfra]

If you want to get really basic: there's no OpenAI at all without Sam Altman, which means there's no ChatGPT either.

There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.

And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.

The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.

[glitchc]

To pin OpenAI's success completely on Sam is disingenuous at best, outright dishonest at worst. Incentives don't build ML pipelines and infrastructure, developers and scientists do.

This visionary bullshit is exactly that, bullshit.

[goldinfra]

A leader can't do anything on their own, they need people to lead. And those people deserve recognition and rewards. But in most cases there's no one more important than the leader. And thus, no one that deserves more credit than the leader.

I'm absolutely not comparing Sam Altman to any of these leaders, but just to illustrate how much vision and leadership does matter. Consider how stupid these statements sound:

"Jesus didn't build any churches, those were all built by brick layers and carpenters!"

"Pharaohs didn't build a single pyramid, those were all built by artists and workers!"

"Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves, he didn't break the chains of a single slave, that was all done by blacksmiths!"

"Martin Luther King Jr. didn't radically improve civil rights, he never passed a single law, that was all done by lawmakers!"

"Sam Altman didn't build ChatGPT, he didn't create a single ML pipeline, it was all done by engineers!"

It's a hard fact of life that some specific individuals play more important roles in successful projects than others.

[glitchc]

Such grand examples that are unfortunately a poor fit for Sam.

It's Ilya who conceived of the vision for ChatGPT. Sam is a sales and fundraising guy. He was endorsed by Thiel and Musk.

While raising money is certainly important, let's not confuse that for product vision. There are enough guys that can do what Sam does.

[strikelaserclaw]

Whoever had to do with ChatGPT most is the reason OpenAI is where it is today.