Well that's just wrong. Before OpenAI I would've agreed with you, but since OpenAI's rise to prominence there has been a noticeable increase in its coverage in mainstream media outlets featuring Sam. People still read the Times.
I received messages from a physician and a high school teacher in the last 24 hours, asking what I thought about "OpenAI firing Sam Altman".
I've been deeply "in tech" for 40 years, and never heard of Sam Altman until he was fired from OpenAI. "Tech" isn't one thing though, it's a very diverse thing with many different areas of interest. I'm not really that interested in AI, so no, I'm not going to care who the players are in that arena. My interests lie in other "tech".
I think it depends on what you mean by ‘non-tech’ and ‘knows’. Reasonable interpretations of those words would see your statement as obviously false.
I agree that he doesn’t have a huge amount of name recognition, but this ousting was a front-page/top-of-website news story so people will likely have heard about it somewhat. I think it’s in the news because of the AI and company drama aspects. It felt like a little more coverage than Bob Iger’s return to Disney got (I’m trying to think of an example of a CEO I’ve heard about who is far from tech).
I think it is accurate to say that most people don’t really know about the CEOs of important/public companies. They probably have heard of Elon/Zuckerberg/Bezos, I can think of a couple of bank CEOs who might come on business/economics news.
My 60-year-old mom isn't tech savvy and always asks me for help with her computer. You wouldn't expect her to know about Sam Altman, but she's actively sending me articles about this fiasco.
I would've said the same thing about ChatGPT itself. You could've knocked me over with a feather when they announced that they'd grown to 100 million weekly active users.
I know, personally, a dozen or so non-tech people who know of Sam, mostly because they listen to podcasts or consume other news sources that tell them.
Generative AI's ubiquity has nothing to do with Sam Altman's noteriety. People can know what the former is without needing to know the latter. It's not as though he relishes in celebrity like other famous CEO's (Musk).
The news yesterday broke the tech/AI bubble, and there would have been much more press on it if it wasn't done as a Friday news dump.