He's secured the resources and partnerships to grow a $100B company virtually overnight, but he hasn't done anything noteworthy or laudible?
HN takes are the best. Humor really is the best medicine.
The answer to the question is - even people who don't like him realize he's a smart guy and this was a dumb move, and it was done in an amateurish way by a board out of their depth.
No mention of the people actually responsible for any of this? Y'know, the scientists and engineers that actually had to do something to create the crazy technology he's taking credit for, the noteworthy dude is the generic MBA C-suite type that managed to not screw the pooch when given a team of the brightest minds out there?
Notice how in shock everyone was that a CEO was fired the same way us regular peasants are fired everyday.
Copying and pasting code from ChatGPT, I created a functional iOS app today based on my design. I have never before written a mobile app, any Swift code, or much of any code aside from Power Apps, in at least 15 years.
I am on that hype train.
> The fact that you think “non-technical” people don’t contribute meaningful value to anything means you are stupid
Happy to call myself an imbecile in this case!
And again, what exactly has Sam himself done to bring about the tech? Without Ilya and the rest of the engineers and researchers you wouldn't have been able to copy/paste the code, why exactly is Sam the one that gets the credit here?
They all want to get the big payday, including Microsoft.
People are in the startup game for the big payday. And Sam Altman is the best person given where OpenAI is at right now.
I use it probably 20 times a day at this point.
example: "I ran performance tests on two systems, here's the results of system 1, and heres the results of system 2. Summarize the results, and build a markdown table containing x,y,z rows."
"extract the reusable functions out of this bash script"
"write me a cfssl command to generate a intermediate CA"
"What is the regex for _____"
"Here are my accomplishments over the last 6 months, summarize them into a 1 page performance report."
etc etc etc
If you're not using GPT4 or some LLM as part of your daily flow you're working too hard.
Get GPT4All (https://gpt4all.io), log into OpenAI, drop $20 on your account, get a API key, and start using GPT4.
We're just seeing a variation of that playing out live. There are multiple teams working on AI, ChatGPT got "there" first and now we have a single heroic figure to worship. Personality cults seem to be a part of the quintessential human condition.
But still, irrelevant, I didn't comment on whether it's good or bad, I just said it's overhyped, and comments like these never fail to come up when someone says anything even slightly negative about the tech.
Plus, the tech scene is extremely prone to hopping on trends and then taking it way too far. If you want some real cringe, check out @varun_mathur's long Twitter post from Nov 18th.
Although at its core, firing Altman under current circumstances was still a poorly thought-out decision which evidently caused the event itself to become a major centre of attention.
I am not necessarily an Altman hype man. As an obvious outsider, my best bet as to why he came back so strong was because apparently many researchers (employees) said they would leave as well. I can't read peoples' minds but I can infer a a bit based on human financial interest.
The employees with equity were very close to a liquidity event at a valuation of $86B. That is likely life changing money for many, and this whole Altman getting fired mess put that life changing money on hold.
I wonder if his ouster had been done in a more sane/stable way, if things could have kept chugging along without him.
As far as the average HN opinion, I donno, I have seen many upvoted comments saying... yeah, he's just the CEO.
Yes, exactly.
Strong qualifications, strong execution, strong results
But I don't know if this is truly the case.