So Sam Altman admitted that he isn't so smart after all? :-)
IOW, who will be fired for getting this wrong? Answer: nobody.
Some small AI-based companies will tank, but all the leaders in F500 companies know how to survive. If the emperor has no clothes, they'll all have collective amnesia and say they knew it the whole time. A few quotes to the press here, a few emails there, and they will move on with their BSing and talk about "what we learned."
I'll give Cook a lot of respect since he knows supply chains and manufacturing in particular deeply and that's really been his job post Steve Jobs.
But what value does Sundar or Satya add, really? I've not heard a single super insightful comment come out of their mouths. You could replace them and not notice a difference in financial performance.
There's never any accountability for the bad—sometimes destructively, catastrophically bad—decisions of managers and executives. And frankly, this is part of what is causing serious problems for our society.
It breeds a class of people who genuinely believe that either a) they are truly always right, always the smartest ones around, and any mistakes or failures are because of all the people around them, or b) it doesn't matter how often they're wrong; they're entitled to always be taken seriously and get their full bonuses, no matter how badly things are falling apart because of their decisions.
Now, part of this is because our corporate world is really really bad at assessing the outcomes of decisions like these (and this is not wholly unrelated to the fact that proper assessment would reveal the levels of incompetence in many C-suites). But part of it is simply because we have built a culture that says these people are never to be questioned.
And that's toxic to any attempts to actually build something better.
In my daily use cases I only see regressions.
That does not seem like a valid conclusion to draw from the observations in the article.
aleph_minus_one•22h ago