According to Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI (ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E), telework is an invention that destroys startups.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (ChatGPT, GPT-4, DALL-E), flatly rejects telecommuting. As Fortune reports, the OpenAI boss said working from home is a big mistake: “ I think one of the worst mistakes the tech industry has made in a long time was assuming that everyone can work remotely forever and that startups don’t have to meet in person and there’s no would have no loss of creativity. “.
Sam Altman thinks telecommuting was a mistake and that experiment is over. During a discussion in San Francisco, he said the technology was not yet good enough to enable full-time telecommuting, especially for startups.
An apocalyptic disaster for creativity and innovation
Ah, telecommuting, that diabolical invention that freed so many employees from having to go to the office every day. For some, it was the best thing that ever happened to their careers, but for others, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it’s tantamount to an apocalyptic disaster for creativity and innovation. .
Indeed, how dare we imagine that an environment without distractions and with more flexibility engenders revolutionary ideas? It is unthinkable! Of course, the only way to ignite real nuggets of innovation is to bring people together in an enclosed, often noisy space, where co-workers regularly stop to chat about the weather or the latest episode of their favorite TV show.
Sam Altman seems to believe that startups are delicate creatures that need special treatment to survive. According to him, employees must be in constant contact with each other for the alchemy to work and ideas to flow. Distance would therefore be the worst enemy of innovation. But let’s not be too hard on him. After all, he’s not the only one who thinks working from home is the antithesis of productivity. Many leaders share his opinion and lament this fashion.
Sam Altman is not the only one to have made such a statement. Elon Musk made the same statement. How ironic, because these two men don’t really like each other, and yet they are united in their quest to expose the scourge of working from home. In a scathing email to all Tesla employees in 2022, Elon Musk teased those companies that revel in mass telecommuting, questioning with a hint of irony the last time they released a product. worthy of the name.
Be that as it may, it is clear that the debates on teleworking are far from over. In the meantime, perhaps we should remind Sam Altman and his like-minded colleagues that if GPT-4 and Dall-E were developed during a pandemic-related period of telecommuting, that probably means that the experience was not a total failure. Unless, of course, they are exceptions to the rule.
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