[foobaw]

You're implying that you knew how to hire and identify smart architects and provided them the right vision to build a good building.

There wouldn't be a counterfactual in your hypothetical scenario, but I'm confident that the difference between someone that got lucky and hired "smart" architects versus a visionary doing the same task would be drastic.

Money can only get you so far.

[bmitc]

Is there an indication that Altman has a special talent for this over others?

[adventured]

Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

If everybody could do it, they would be doing it. Altman's abilities are every bit as rare as that of a 10x software developer. The same was true of Jobs, and the same is true of Musk (regardless of whether someone likes him or not; who cares if he's likable, it's an infantile emotional derangement to obsess so much over likability).

[bmitc]

> Yes, the accomplishments of OpenAI represent that in action. It's an exceptional outcome to say the least.

What specifically backs that up? Didn't others create the technology? Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with? By many accounts, he was just using OpenAI to further other businesses and investments.

[throwaway2037]

> Is it that hard to hire and organize when you've got a top researcher that everyone wants to work with?

Hire a top researcher? Ok, you could get lucky with a few. But keep? Good luck if you are an incompetent manager. If Sam Altman was the "know-nothing" that so many on HN claim him to be, then the top researchers would leave and go to Meta, Google Brain, etc. It makes no sense that this core research team has been so stable. Is this not evidence enough for you?

[p1esk]

this core research team has been so stable

OpenAI VP of research Dario Amodei and a bunch of others left three years ago and started Anthropic.

Ilya Sutskever reportedly told the board before the coup that he’s so unhappy with Sam he was thinking about leaving. He might be out now.

I don’t know if Sam is the right leader for OpenAI - he might be. But it’s good that he’s being watched closely right now.

[asfgkadnhiok]

That's extremely easy. There are awards and magazines and Wikipedia. Smart architects are smart because they're able to come up with the "right vision" all on their own.

We know it's possible for someone with no technical ability to look like genius just by having lots of money. I knew people who believed Musk was going to bring about an AI revolution all on his own because of his very special brain, but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101. What makes you convinced all the rich "geniuses" who haven't revealed themselves to be idiots are actually smart for real this time?

[jokethrowaway]

> but his tenure at Twitter was laughable to anyone who has passed CS 101

Honest question: why? Just because your bubble denounces him and he's doing things differently than other big tech, in a way that upset developers / managers that doesn't mean he's automatically wrong.

Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great). Probably if we didn't have a board of do-nothing for years twitter could have turned into the Line of the west. Maybe it could have captured all the profits which ended up on patreon and onlyfans.

If it wasn't for his anti remote stance and general disregard for life-work balance I'd love to work for him. Finally, an organisation when things get done with few hard working people, and not hundreds of drones collecting a paycheck and slowing me down and complaining all the time.

[Master_Odin]

Do you have a source for saying the monetary outlook is good? As far as I'm aware, advertising dollars has always been the lion's share of revenue, and he's tanked that and the valuation of the site has readily dropped.

[VirusNewbie]

>Twitter is still running and it has a business trajectory that looks positive (subscriptions are great)

I'm generally a fan of Musk, I'm glad he bought Twitter, I drive a Tesla etc. but this looks like delusion to think this.

Twitter is not doing well. Musk cut too fast and too deep, and it shows with the number of outages and problems Twitter has had. It wasn't a few months ago that they had to rate limit everyone from scolling their feed for a day, they had hours of downtime this last month alone.

This is not good for a company that makes its money by serving ads, which it also has seemed to be bad at. Running a blogging site isn't that hard, but runnign your own adnetwork is, and Twitter is doing a pretty bad job.

They are losing quite a lot of moeny according to Musk(!!!).