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Comment by lizknope | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the chip design industry. After reading Altman's comments in this article and thread last year I realized that he is not as smart as he thinks he is.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/tsmc-execs-allege...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41668824

Ultimately another company finding a better cheaper way to do AI is good for everyone. We were reading how it will be hard for new companies to catch up but but the existing big companies are now going to have to catch up. We were seeing a lot of stories about fab capacity and new power plant construction just for AI. I've been waiting for the AI bubble to pop just like the dot com bubble popped when investors finally started demanding companies show profitability. AI is certainly useful but at some point companies have to start showing how to make a profit rather than just hype.

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Best to assume that CEOs don't speak candidly when addressing the public. Wasn't he fired from OpenAI due to a lack of open/honest communication? In any case, he's incentivised to tailor his words and views to reduce competition, reduce investment in competitors, and generally improve his company's position. I would be sceptical of anything publicly stated that directly impacts the public's perception of OpenAI or him personally

Glad to see that other folks are coming around on Sam Altman being a professional liar.

> I realized that he is not as smart as he thinks he is

This applies to the vast majority of startup CEOs in the tech industry.

Our overlords are selecting for risk tolerance in leadership moreso than smarts.

I wouldn't even call it "risk tolerance". Assuming that they weren't complete idiots with the money - which, admittedly, is quite an assumption at times - the backing of a SV VC should theoretically set up a person for a comfortable living for quite a while, regardless of the success of the venture itself.

Psychopathy - the willingness to see humans as little more than what they can give you in your quest for self-fulfillment - is a far better measure for this kind of work.

I'm not sure these CEOs are assuming any personal risk in most cases. Altman's most recent venture before OpenAI took off was overseeing a failed cryptocurrency. Adam Neumann walked away from the steaming wreckage of WeWork still worth a billion or three. These guys are teflon...

The point of a corporation is to make you teflon.

I'm not sure _anyone_ is as smart as most of them seem to think they are, if we're measuring by how much their success should be attributed to their intelligence compared to other factors.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect[1] isn't just about newspapers getting subjects wrong, it can apply to CEOs, too. When you are an expert in some topic and you hear a CEO talk about it and get everything wrong, you should also consider that the CEO is likely wrong about other topics, too.

1: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

He's just trying to discourage competition. Good luck with that.

It's important to understand that most CEOs (the good ones and the bad ones) are dilettantes. This doesn't mean you should ignore them, but it's worth running their "takes" past actual subject matter experts who can provide a more nuanced perspective.

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