> Sam Altman has been an objectively successful leader of OpenAI.
In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.
If you want to get really basic: there's no OpenAI at all without Sam Altman, which means there's no ChatGPT either.
There are much larger armies of highly qualified scientists and engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other companies and none of them created ChatGPT. They wrote papers and did experiments but created nothing even remotely as useful.
And they still haven't been able to even fully clone it with years of effort, unlimited budgets, and the advantage of knowing exactly what they're trying to build. It should really give you pause to consider why it happened at OpenAI and not elsewhere. Your understanding of the dynamics of organizations may need a major rethink.
The answer is that the CEO of OpenAI created the incentives, hiring, funding, vision, support, and direction that made ChatGPT happen. Because leadership makes all the difference in the world.
To pin OpenAI's success completely on Sam is disingenuous at best, outright dishonest at worst. Incentives don't build ML pipelines and infrastructure, developers and scientists do.
This visionary bullshit is exactly that, bullshit.
A leader can't do anything on their own, they need people to lead. And those people deserve recognition and rewards. But in most cases there's no one more important than the leader. And thus, no one that deserves more credit than the leader.
I'm absolutely not comparing Sam Altman to any of these leaders, but just to illustrate how much vision and leadership does matter. Consider how stupid these statements sound:
"Jesus didn't build any churches, those were all built by brick layers and carpenters!"
"Pharaohs didn't build a single pyramid, those were all built by artists and workers!"
"Abraham Lincoln didn't free any slaves, he didn't break the chains of a single slave, that was all done by blacksmiths!"
"Martin Luther King Jr. didn't radically improve civil rights, he never passed a single law, that was all done by lawmakers!"
"Sam Altman didn't build ChatGPT, he didn't create a single ML pipeline, it was all done by engineers!"
It's a hard fact of life that some specific individuals play more important roles in successful projects than others.
In what way, exactly? ChatGPT would have been built regardless of whether he was there or not. It's not like he knows how to put a transformer pipeline together. The success of OpenAI's product rests on its scientists and engineers, not the CEO, and certainly not a non-technical one like Mr. Altman.