Where did the myth of Sam "not being technical at all" come from?

Patrick Collison seemed satisfied with Sam's tech chops [1]. If that isn't enough of a vouch, god help the rest of us.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Is-Sam-Altman-highly-technical-Has-he-...

I had a look at the Collison response and it read strongly like "mate puts in a good word when asked to" for me. An impression that was reinforced by the 'like' that Sam put on the answer.

Also, I wouldn't call it a myth. I would call it 'questions around his technical knowledge'.

The best way to answer those questions would be for direct evidence of his technical ability to be shown, not references from mates (just as any interview for a tech position requires direct evidence).

I agree, I could have stated myself more clearly. Sutskever is a world-class domain expert in AI. Altman surely is intelligent and has some technical skills, but isn't the doing the groundbreaking technical work at OpenAi. My point was that it seems highly unlikely that Altman was canned for knowing technical secrets from the board (about Q* specifically) that Sutskever didn't know even better.

This kind of myth happens to almost every successful person. The more hatred on the person, the less technical they become.

"Elon Musk doesn't know how to code" is my fav. It's as if coding is some sort of mythical and rare skill. A new grad who just learn to code a year ago is able to intern at FAANG, but Elon Musk cannot possibly learn how to code for some reason.

It makes no sense because nobody but Sam and the board knows what actually happened.

My guess is that they arrived to an inflection point. The company was on the cusp of taking an investment which would have valued it at 80 billion. One of the board members mentioned that self destruction would have been in line with their mission of safety for humanity. It seems like at some point you have to ditch the "we're doing this for the benefit of humanity" act and act like a profit hungry machine with a startup CEO going balls out. In this case, "balls out" won. The board was way too late. The AGI escaped with the creation of the for-profit company.

Maybe it wasn't secret, and Ilya wanted to bring it to the board but Sam fought him.

Excellent point. I hadn't thought of that.

It obviously wouldn't. What makes the most sense is that Altman's ousting was orchestrated by Sutskever but he is too important to let go to another project or he would already be gone.

Would have hardly been a shock that "after an exhaustive search for the next CEO, we have decided the most capable person to replace the interim CEO is low and behold Ilya Sutskever."

The fact even I know Sutskever signed the petition is just another aspect of this Shakespearean drama, Sutskever doth protest too much me thinks.

how do we know he really signed that petition? it's not like he posted about it, no?

// nitpick, it's lo (from look) not low

He did, he made a public Twitter post saying he regretted his original actions and wanted the company back together now.

which is ridiculous washing of his hands. he was on the board as chairman. he could have issued a dissenting statement on Friday, etc. that tweet that late was at best very weird and useless