HACKER Q&A
📣 ThinkBeat

What does Sam Altman do best?


I have not paid much attention to Altman before the shocking sequences of events recently.

I did not know much about the structure of OpenAI eiter.

I have followed what they have made available to the public and that has been quite interesting.

I have certainly noticed Altman being a most popular figure in the media (or often invited to speak at least) and an all-around genius.

When it comes to cutting edge research and development of AI I think that involves a hell of a lot of math that I probably could not understand.

I have a lot of PhD and post doc level research.

Being naive I figured the entire C* stack at OpenAI held PhDs in related fields.

I was thus surprised to read that Altman and another co-founder both dropped out of prestigious university early on in their degrees.

I discovered that the CTO had a bachelors but seemed to have started her career in quite a different field.

Now a -LOT- of founders are the same way. Thinking about it know if to onder if not the majority of founders are.

I can follow what Bill Gates and Woziak did. Though clearly I lack their genius.

I am not able to follow AI research papers at all.

Altman must have hired a lot of outstanding people to execute his vision. and is that the most important quality he brings to OpenAI? A vision and a drive and ability to execute?

Or is he a self-thought genius who can get into the trenches at a theoretic level?

Or am I overcomplicating the skills and education needed to produce GPT (among other things)

  👤 gcheong Accepted Answer ✓
"Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications."

Filed under "Naughtiness" at http://paulgraham.com/founders.html

👤 aristofun
You don’t have to do anything outstanding or be unique at something to get into right place in the right time.

And for being at the center of media you even better not be good or great at doing something.

Take every second social media celebrity, wikipedia even had to invent a new “job” for them - “media personality”.

This doesn’t mean Sam is not great at something or lack unique skills. Hardly so.

But it means there is no direct cause-effect relationship between someone’s skills and outcomes far bigger than a specific skillset or character traits.

It makes zero sense try to find it. Unless you writing another garbage self help book.

👤 solardev
He's pretty good at upsetting the board, for one.
👤 justanotherjoe
he's a ceo. Its not a given they have to do anything. Sometimes you just let your boys cook and thats it.