[gkoberger]

If he was brilliant and high agency, rather than a sociopath, what would be doing differently right now? The phrase "wheeler and dealer" rarely applies to people who have genuinely changed the world forever; why do you put him in that category when he clearly has had tangible results?

Hey, if you don't like Sam, that's fine. But that doesn't make him a sociopath.

[fvbcds]

Brilliant and high agency people don’t shill for big companies. I am not trying to be a dick but agency == honesty.

[pclmulqdq]

I don't know a lot about Sam Altman's history, but I do know that there is a lot of misattribution in tech circles away from the doers and toward the managers. Has he had significant tangible results, or has he managed people who have had those tangible results?

This sort of misattribution seems to show up when you have individuals with sociopathic tendencies running firms that do cool things: Elon Musk is the king of this. The man has not, on his own, had any sort of good results on the world - Tesla and SpaceX seem to do a lot better when he steps away from them - but he has found ways to get himself into a position to take credit from the engineers who do. Hyperloops and Twitter are the results of Elon Musk's original work. That's not to say that the management is necessarily negative: someone needs to fund the work of the good engineers.

[Method-X]

What do you think the leader of multiple billion dollar companies would be doing exactly? People like Musk are like conductors of an orchestra. That's not easy, especially with multiple successful companies.

[pclmulqdq]

The conductor of an orchestra, and the leader of a company, sets the vision and direction. Steve Jobs was exceptional at this. Two examples, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, are clearly not particularly adept at this.

SpaceX and Tesla have the equivalent of the principals of each section of the orchestra feeding their conductor his cues and making sure he gets them right. Google has someone standing on the podium and bowing, but nobody waving the baton at all.

OpenAI is more of a research organization than a product company, and so it's hard to see where someone like Altman can contribute meaningfully to the direction.

[kortilla]

SpaceX is Elon’s original work. There was no preexisting company there.