To carry on, this is because they're both very interested in "knowledge in depth", rather than because of what they actually work on day-to-day. They've both made careers out of knowing what's going on with the thing they're building down to the most basic level possible.
Actually he recently founded an AGI company. But this post is about optimization more than AI, which he is definitely good at (though he doesn't claim to be the best).
For someone to optimize something they need to have a good domain understanding. I do not buy that someone who developed games before just becomes an expert in LLMs overnight.
Sorry, it's definitely not true that you need to be an expert in LLMs to optimize BLAS kernels. Also, he started working on AI at least five years ago, which is a long time in AI world, probably before Justine Tunney started actually. And he's been optimizing code his whole life.
I was part of the Google Brain team working on TensorFlow back in 2015. Please note that doesn't mean I understand how LLMs work. Although I do know how matrix multiplication works now. At least until I apply my focus to the next area of impact and forget everything I just learned.
He literally squandered the last 10 years of his life working on absolutely nothing for Zuckerberg. And only after the rest of the world innovated on AI (transformers, etc) did he clearly feel embarrassed and had to proclaim he's going to focus on AGI in a "one-up" way.
He got paid a lot to do something he was presumably passionate about and enjoyed. It also might surprise you to find out that there's quite a lot of people that just work as a means to an end, and find value and enjoyment primarily from other parts of their life.
that's great for him. i'm glad he enjoyed the $$$ playing with VR. that has nothing to do with my point about his irrelevance to this LLaMa discussion.
He's not irrelevant, though. Literally the first thing he did after leaving Meta was start an AI business, and the original point wasn't even necessarily about AI. They just said they wanted to see two engineers in conversation, and you used it as an opportunity to denigrate one of their previous employers. That's bewilderingly irrelevant.
Altman isn't even relevant here. He is focusing on LLM's instead of a framework that gets us to AGI. He can't describe how we get there or any such theories around AGI. It's a complete failure.