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I thought Alex Wang was a very curious choice. There are so many foundational AI labs with interesting CEOs... I get that Wang is remarkable in his own right, b
by bobxmax 11mo ago
I thought Alex Wang was a very curious choice. There are so many foundational AI labs with interesting CEOs... I get that Wang is remarkable in his own right, but he basically just built MTurk and timed the bubble.
Doesn't really scream CEO of AGI to me.
- thereitgoes456 11mo agoThe reportings at the time said that he was Mark’s 5th choice or similar. It is fairly clear he would prefer Ilya, Murati, Mark Chen, and perhaps others, but they said no, and Alex Wang was the first one to say yes.
- arthurcolle 11mo agoThe self-supervised mesa-optimizer strikes again
- tsunamifury 11mo agoWhy in the world would he want Murati? She has absolutely no technical chops and was not functionally CTO of OpenAI.
- shuckles 11mo agoBecause she was CTO of OpenAI.
- CuriouslyC 11mo agoPretty ironic when access to trade secrets and people skills is seen as more important in a technical field than technical competence.
- shuckles 11mo agoFor the record, I doubt the CTO of OpenAI is the best person to fund if you're looking for trade secrets on training and deploying SOTA LLMs. They are two levels too far from reality to know anything useful.
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo ago> was not functionally CTO of OpenAI. Why do you say that?
- tsunamifury 11mo agoHer history was entirely non technical up until openAI.
- hn_throwaway_99 11mo agoI think that's total BS, based on this article about her, https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/mira-murati-career-ai-thinking-machines-goldman-sachs-tesla-leap-openai/ https://fortune.com/2025/10/03/mira-murati-career-ai-thinkin... 1. She has 2 BAs, one in math and one in mechanical engineering. 2. She was an "Advanced Concepts Engineer at Zodiac Aerospace from 2012 to 2013". 3. She was a product manager at Tesla on the Model X 4. She was VP of product and engineering at Leap Motion. Going from that fact that she wasn't a deep learning researcher to "her history was entirely non technical up until Open AI" is plain false. And plus, the job of CTO is 90%+ people management, and she appears more than smart enough and experienced enough to evaluate technical decisions of her team.
- tsunamifury 11mo agoI think you havent been in tech long enough to know what that resume is.
- bobxmax 11mo ago[dead]
- bobxmax 11mo agoWhat technical chops does Sam Altman have?
- tsunamifury 11mo ago[flagged]
- bobxmax 11mo ago[dead]
- seanmcau 11mo agoHe started coding at age 8
- godelski 11mo agoA lot of people also don't know that many of the well known papers are just variations on small time papers with a fuck ton more compute thrown at the problem. Probably the strongest feature that correlates to successful researcher is compute. Many have taken this to claim that the GPU poor can't contribute but that ignores so many other valid explanations... and we wonder why innovation has slowed... It's also weird because if compute was all you need then there's a much cheaper option than Zuck paid. But he's paying for fame.
- rhetocj23 11mo agoFrankly this is the reason why Im not convinced the current movement of LLMs will yield anything close to the dream. The right people to deliver immense progress dont exist right now.
- godelski 11mo ago> The right people to deliver immense progress dont exist right now. I wouldn't go this far. But I would say that we're not giving them a good shot. The people are always there, you just need to find them and enable them. How do you manage genius? You don’t. — Mervin Kelly
- BobbyTables2 11mo agoIt’s funny. I learnt the hard way that communications/image/signal processing research basically doesn’t care about Computer Architecture at the nuts and bolts level of compiler optimization and implementation. When they encounter a problem whose normal solution requires excessive amounts of computation, they reduce complexity algorithmically using mathematical techniques, and quantify the effects. They don’t quibble about a 10x speed up, they reduce the “big O()” complexity. They could care less whether it was implemented in interpreted Python or hand-optimized assembly code. On one hand, I know there’s a lot of talent in AI today. But throwing hardware at the problem is the dumbest way forward. WiFI adapters would be wheeled luggage if we had the same mentality during their development.
- 11mo ago
- tsunamifury 11mo agoAlexandr Wang is not interesting and a few steps short of a fraud that Mark had to bail out because he was so co invested. Shareholders should be livid if they knew a single thing about what was going on.
- typpilol 11mo agoTell me more
- tsunamifury 11mo agoScale promised cutting-edge data pipelines and model-training infra but mostly sold outsourced labeling with a tech veneer. Great margins, weak moat — classic Valley overclaim, not outright fraud.