[Solvency]

What am I missing here: Sam Altman has zero charisma or cool factor. Every talk I've seen him in, he comes off as lethargic and sluggish. I get zero sense of passion or rallying drive around the hype of AI from him. He's not an AI visionary. He's not a hype man. He simply "is", and just because he happens to have been the CEO he's been thrust into the spotlight, but there's literally nothing interesting about him.

[fallingknife]

What you are missing is his record of success and making the people under him rich. That's the kind of person people to work for. They want to make money, not to work for someone who looks good on camera.

[aleph_minus_one]

Your comment was the first about sama's "charisma" where the puzzle pieces fit together. :-)

[sumitkumar]

Is is not generic charisma. It is specific to who he can attract to work with him. You and I cannot figure it out just by going through how we perceive him from a distance. The average AI researcher/investor isn't looking for traditional charisma. In the interview with Lex Friedman he comes across as just the right person to lead the current GPT based products. Anyone else would be too traditional for this nascent product suite.

[leobg]

Read what pg has to say about him. He named Altman as one of the top 5 most interesting founders of the last 30 years.

> startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.

http://www.paulgraham.com/5founders.html

[rramadass]

This was one of the stupidest things PG had said/written. Sam Altman's first company "Loopt" was a YCombinator startup and hence i suspect PG was building him up for business reasons.

The rest is "Halo Effect" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

[bmitc]

Paul Graham has a lot of things to say about a lot of things. It doesn't make what he writes right.

[leobg]

Wasn’t saying that. In fact, I was quite puzzled. Altman hasn’t started any SpaceX, NVIDIA or even Stripe.

However, pg has been working with many founders. And he has been working with Altman. I haven’t.

So while it may puzzle me, I do have to wonder what there is that I may be missing.

[feraloink]

Agreed. I like your adjectives of lethargic and sluggish. I have read all the responses to you and a few others who made a similar observation. I remain unconvinced about what is so essential about Sam Altman to OpenAI. I just don't get it.