Of all the world-altering things possible in our new AI era, one decidedly old-fashioned thing is not going anywhere: the personality hire. A " " is someone who contributes to a team with soft skills like their dazzling charm. There's a connotation that personality hires might not actually be good at their jobs, that they're just fun to have around the office.
But they arguably serve an incredibly important function in the health of an organization. In the field of AI, it's useful to lightly stretch the definition of "personality hire" to include someone who is really, really good at selling themselves, a product, or simply the of AI as this all-powerful entity that will completely change everything about life as we know it, for better or worse (hopefully, for the better if you heed their advice). They're hype men (or women), you might say.
This is because a lot of what's going on with AI right now is . The greatest of all these, of course, is , CEO of OpenAI. This week, reported on Altman's rise within Silicon Valley, starting from founding a mediocre social networking app at age 19 to becoming the head of the most exciting company in tech.
Altman founded Loopt, a pre-smartphone social location app in 2007. He charmed and networked with important tech and venture-capital power players, and was personally tapped to be at age 29. He was a savvy and successful investor (even still, he has , some of which do business with OpenAI, according to , which has raised some eyebrows abo.