Now imagine the weekend for those fired and those who quit OpenAI: you know they are talking together as a group, and meeting with others offering them billions to make a pure commercial new AI company.
An Oscar worthy film could be made about them in this weekend.
Sad thing so, if they find enough people to continue investing, they will ultimately launch a product, most likely the early employees and founders will sell of their shares, become instant millionaires in the three figures and be hailed as thebtrue geniuses in their field... What an utter shit show that was...
Funnily enough I also worked for a CEO that hit the lottery with timing and became a millionaire. He then drank his own kool-aid and thought he was some sort of Steve Jobs. Of course he never managed to build anything afterwards. But he kept making a shit ton of money, without a doubt.
After they get one position in that echelon, they can keep failing upwards ad nauseam.
I don't get the cult part though. It's so easy to see they're not even close to the geniuses they pretend to be. Just look at the recent SBF debacle. It's pathetic how folks fall for this.
Getting a company to that size is a lot.
Well, I'm happy to work with adults again, in a sane environment with people that known their job. It was a very, very useful experience so, and I wouldn't miss it.
And many times even when they do blow it, it's handwaved away as being something outside of their control, so let's give them another shot.
The idea that success at it shouldn’t be grounds for the genius label is absurd.
And also destroy more. The line between is very thin and littered with landmines.
Of course it's not a boolean, it's a spectrum. But the point remains: valuing lucky rich people with connections as geniuses because they are lucky, rich and connected is nonsensical to me
So by your standard SBF is an absolute genius.
Some founders don’t do much, and some are violently toxic (Lord knows I worked for many), but it’s rarely how they gather big financing rounds. At least, the terrible ones I know rarely did.
CEOs… I’ve seen people coast from Consulting or Audit into very mediocre careers, so I wouldn’t understand if Conway defended them as a class. The Cult for Founders has problems (for the reasons you point out, especially those who keep looking for ‘technical cofounders’ for years), but it’s not as blatantly unfounded.
It's such a small cohort that when someone doesn't completely blow it, they're immediately deemed as geniuses.
Give someone billions of dollars and hundreds of brilliant engineers, researchers and many will make it work. But only a few ever get the chance, so this happens.
They don't do any of the work. They just take the credit.