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.