[Skyy93]

This is very US-centric thinking. For me he is just a CEO and completely exchangeable. The only thing I really remember is that the last thing he did was crawl in front of the EU and ask them not to regulate his AI business too much.

He did none of the research that fuels OpenAIs ambitions and future prospects, thats mostly done by people like Sutskever, Radford and many more brilliant scientist.

[bezalmighty]

“Completely exchangeable” Obviously people are not fungible, replacing one person with another will never provide the exact same results. The question in each case then is how different would the results be, and would the replacement be better or worse? For a very simple job, perhaps pressing a single button, the results may only be subtly different. But what happens when it’s a complex job with no right and wrong answers, where work input is affected by output (like a chaotic system), spanning multiple areas of influence? The work output of the individual changes drastically, and just like in a chaotic system, the results to the organization vary increasingly over time. Nobody is fungible, but of all people, decision makers like politicians, CEOs etc are the butterfly wings flapping in New York that causes a cyclone in Japan. The only real way to evaluate if their impact is likely to be positive is looking at previous results. Due to rarity of top performers and importance to systems, they have negotiation power.

Dependable leaders really do have that much value to their organizations. This is similar to why in critical areas like medicine, old-and-dependable things are valued over new and shiny. The older things have lower risk, and a strong track record. That added dependability is more important than being the newer “better” but riskier option. Back to this topic, how many CEOs with track records managing 80 billion revenue AI organizations are ready to replace Altman? Because Open AI is well ahead in the field, they don’t need big risky changes, they need to reliably stay the course.

[ipaddr]

His star power is much higher than you give him credit for. It's like saying you can replace Brad Pitt with an average actor because the writers are the ones responsible for the script.

You lose other actors who only joined to work with Brad for one. You lose part of your audience and you lose distribution and press opportunities.

If it wasn't for Sam pushing for a version that became gpt3.5 and the popularity that followed and most recently gpt 4 push we would still be waiting for the brilliant people . Google was way ahead in this space but failed to release anything.

As a developer I understand belittling the business side as providing little value but as someone who has tried to get the masses to adopt my software my respect for their ability to solve non-technical problems has grown.

[andy99]

> completely exchangeable

Apparently not

[threeseed]

> This is very US-centric thinking

I am not American and have no idea what you are talking about.

Sam Altman channeled what was great research into a dominant $100b business in record time.

That is not trivial and not every CEO can do that.

[yowlingcat]

> For me he is just a CEO and completely exchangeable.

Are you part of OpenAI governance, or any company's governance structure? If not, does it really matter whether someone is exchangeable or not for you?