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Reflections on OpenAI

• yahoozoo 1y ago
  It would be interesting to read the memoirs of former OpenAI employees that dive into whether they thought the company was on the right track towards AGI. Of course, that’s an NDA violation at best.
• dagorenouf 1y ago
  Maybe I’m paranoid but this sounds too good to be true. Almost like something planted to help with recruiting after meta poached their best guys.
  • Reubend 1y ago
    The fact that they gave little shout outs at the end makes me think they wanted to avoid burning bridges by criticizing the company.
    • istjohn 1y ago
      They didn't mind burning MS
    • bink 1y ago
      They almost certainly still own shares/options in the company.
  • lucianbr 1y ago
    > It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade. I really can't see a person with at least minimal self-awareness talking their own work up this much. Give me a break dude. Plus, you haven't built AGI yet. Can't believe there's so little critique of this post here. It's incredibly self-serving.
    • sensanaty 1y ago
      Reading through the thread, it seems like half of the commenters work for OpenAI, so it'd make sense people aren't critiquing it much :p
  • torginus 1y ago
    It sounds to me in contrast to the grandiose claims OpenAI tries to make about its own products - it views AI as 'regular technology', and is pragmatically tries to build viable products using it.
• bhl 1y ago
  > The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.
  • tptacek 1y ago
    It's not sustainable, at all, but if it's happening just a couple times throughout your career, it's doable; I know people who went through that process, at that company, and came out of it energized.
  • babelfish 1y ago
    This is what being a wartime company looks like
  • lvl155 1y ago
    I am not saying that’s easy work but most motivated people do this. And if you’re conscious of this that probably means you viewed it more as a job than your calling.
  • Rebelgecko 1y ago
    How did they have any time left to be a parent?
    • ambicapter 1y ago
      > I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. Obvious priorities there.
      • harmonic18374 1y ago
        That part made me do a double take. I hope his child never learns they were being put second.
• vouaobrasil 1y ago
  > The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in. I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI. What keeping AI free for everyone is akin to is keeping an addictive drug free for everyone so that it can be sold in larger quantities later. One can argue that some technology is beneficial. A mosquito net made of plastic immediately improves one's comfort if out in the woods. But AI doesn't really offer any immediate TRUE improvement of life, only a bit more convenience in a world already saturated in it. It's past the point of diminishing returns for true life improvement and I think everyone deep down inside knows that, but is seduced by the nearly-magical quality of it because we are instinctually driven to seek out advantags and new information.
  • ookblah 1y ago
    i don't really understand this thought process. all technology has it's advantages and drawbacks and we are currently going through the hype and growing pains process. you could just as well argue the internet, phones, tv, cars, all adhere to the exact same prisoner's dilemma situation you talk about. you could just as well use AI to rubber duck or ease your mental load than treat it like some rat-race to efficiency.
    • vouaobrasil 1y ago
      True, but it is meaningful to understand whether the "quantity" advantages - drawbacks decreases over time, which I believe it does. And we should indeed apply the logic to other inventions: some are more worth using than others, whereas in today's society, we just use all of them due to the mechanisms of the prisoner's dilemma. The Amish, on the other hand, apply deliberation on whether to use certain technologies, which is a far better approach.
  • 1y ago
• randometc 1y ago
  What’s the GTM role referenced a couple of times in the post?
  • tptacek 1y ago
    Go-to-market. Outbound marketing and sales, pipeline definition, analytics.
    • randometc 1y ago
      That’s how I imagined it, kind of a hybrid of what I’ve seen called Product Marketing Manager and Product Analyst, but other replies and OpenAI job postings indicate maybe it’s a different role, more hands on building, getting from research to consumer product maybe?
  • skywhopper 1y ago
    “Go To Market”, ie the group that turns the tech into products people can use and pay for.
  • koolba 1y ago
    GTM = go to market An actual offering made to the public that can be paid for.
• tptacek 1y ago
  This was good, but the one thing I most wanted to know about what it's like building new products inside of OpenAI is how and how much LLMs are involved in their building process.
  • wilkomm 1y ago
    That's a good question!
  • vFunct 1y ago
    He describes 78,000 public pull requests per engineer over 53 days. LMAO. So it's likely 99.99% LLM written. Lots of good info in the post, surprised he was able to share so much publicly. I would have kept most of the business process info secret. Edit: NVM. That 78k pull requests is for all users of Codex, not all engineers of Codex.
  • girvo 1y ago
    Same! I was really hoping it was discussed. I’m assuming “lots, but it depends on what you’re working on”?
  • edanm 1y ago
    Yes, same, that's a fascinating question that people are pretty tight-lipped about. Note he was specifically on the team that was launching OpenAI's version of a coding agent, so I imagine the numbers before that product existed could be very different to the numbers after.
• deleted 1y ago
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• deleted 1y ago
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• nembal 1y ago
  wham. thanks for sharing anecdotal episodes from OAI's inner mecahnism from an eng perspective. I wonder if OAI wouldn't be married to Azure would the infra be more resilient, require less eng effort to invent things to just run (at scale). What i haven't seen much is the split between eng and research and how people within the company are thinking about AGI and the future, workforce, etc. Is it the usual SF wonderland or is there an OAI specific value alignment once someone is working there.
• simonw 1y ago
  Whoa, there is a ton of interesting stuff in this one, and plenty of information I've never seen shared before. Worth spending some time with it.
  • tomrod 1y ago
    Agreed!
    • ujkiolp 1y ago
      post substantially
      • tomrod 1y ago
        Substantiality is not limited by length. Depth and emphasis can weigh as substance, as is the case here. Though , ironically, ephemeral judgements regarding a post's substantially are themselves lacking in substance. Perhaps by discussing why a post lacks substance, a misplaced reprimand itself can gain substance. As for the originally critiqued post, adding additional emphasis through the unmitigatate plurality of exclamation points would paradoxically negate the potential for substantiality. Yet such meta-analysis avoids discussion of the issue at hand, in this case where the culture and engineering of an up and coming company are put on display in a positive light.
        • ujkiolp 1y ago
          a lot better
          • tomrod 1y ago
            The first comment had significantly more substance than my lengthy navel gazing diatribe.
• codemac 1y ago
  [flagged]
• upghost 1y ago
  Granted the "OpenAI is not a monolith" comment, interesting that use of AI assisted coding was a curious omission from the article -- no mention if encouraged or discouraged.
• tines 1y ago
  Interesting how ChatGPT’s style of writing has made people start bolding so much text.
  • isoprophlex 1y ago
    Possibly the dumbest, blandest, most annoying kind of cultural transference imaginable. We dreamed of creating machines in our image, and now we're shaping ourselves in the image of our machines. Ugh.
    • enjoylife 1y ago
      I think we’ve always shaped ourselves based what we’re capable of building. Think of how infrastructure such as buildings and roadways shape our lives within them. What I do agree with you, is how LLMs are shaping our mental thought how we are offloading a lot of our mental capacities with blind trust in the LLM output.
  • layer8 1y ago
    I remember this being common business practice for written communication (email, design documents) circa 20 years ago, so that people at least read the important points, or can quickly pick them out again later.
  • pchristensen 1y ago
    People have bolded important points to make text easier to scan long before AI.
• reducesuffering 1y ago
  "Safety is actually more of a thing than you might guess if you read a lot from Zvi or Lesswrong. There's a large number of people working to develop safety systems. Given the nature of OpenAI, I saw more focus on practical risks (hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bio-weapons, self-harm, prompt injection) than theoretical ones (intelligence explosion, power-seeking). That's not to say that nobody is working on the latter, there's definitely people focusing on the theoretical risks. But from my viewpoint, it's not the focus." This paragraph doesn't make any sense. If you read a lot of Zvi or LessWrong, the misaligned intelligence explosion is the safety risk you're thinking of! So readers "guesses" are actually right that OpenAI isn't really following Sam Altman's: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."[0] [0] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1 https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
• bawana 1y ago
  This is a politically correct farewell letter. Obviously something we little people who need jobs have to resort to so the next HR manager doesn't think we are a risk to stock valuation. For a deeper understanding, read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. She defrocks Sam Altman to reveal he is just another human. Like Steve Jobs, he is an adept salesman appealing to the naïve altruistic sentiments of humans while maintaining his singular focus on scale. Not so different from the archetype of Rockefeller in his pursuit of monopoly through scale using any means, sam is no different than google which even forgot its own rallying cry ‘dont be evil’. Other actors in the story seem to have been infected by the same meme virus, leaving openAI for their own empires- Musk left after he and altman conflicted over who would be CEO.(birth of xAI). Amodei, his sister and others left to start anthropic. Sutskever left to start ‘safe something or other’(smacks of the same misdirection sam used when openAI formed as a nonprofit ) giving the idea of a nonprofit a mantle of evil since OPENAI has pivoted to profit. The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth. Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side. Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built. Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements. Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now? Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war? These are the questions that come to mind after Hao’s historic summary.
• humbleferret 1y ago
  What a great post. Some points that stood out to me: - Progress is iterative and driven by a seemingly bottom up, meritocratic approach. Not a top down master plan. Essentially, good ideas can come from anywhere and leaders are promoted based on execution and quality of ideas, not political skill. - People seem empowered to build things without asking permission there, which seems like it leads to multiple parallel projects with the promising ones gaining resources. - People there have good intentions. Despite public criticism, they are genuinely trying to do the right thing and navigate the immense responsibility they hold. - Product is deeply influenced by public sentiment, or more bluntly, the company "runs on twitter vibes." - The sheer cost of GPUs changes everything. It is the single factor shaping financial and engineering priorities. The expense for computing power is so immense that it makes almost every other infrastructure cost a "rounding error." - I liked the take of the path to AGI being framed as a three horse race between OpenAI (consumer product DNA), Anthropic (business/enterprise DNA), and Google (infrastructure/data DNA), with each organisation's unique culture shaping its approach to AGI.
  • mikae1 1y ago
    > I liked the take of the path to AGI being framed as a three horse race between OpenAI (consumer product DNA), Anthropic (business/enterprise DNA), and Google (infrastructure/data DNA) Wouldn't want to forget Meta which also has consumer product DNA. They literally championed the act of making the consumer the product.
    • smath 1y ago
      lol, I almost missed the sarcasm there :)
    • pyman 1y ago
      "Hey, Twitter vibes are a metric, so make sure to mention the company on Twitter if you want to be heard." Twitter is a one-way communication tool. I doubt they're using it to create a feedback loop with users, maybe just to analyse their sentiment after a release? The entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Those of us who live outside the US are more sceptical, especially after everything revealed about OpenAI in the book Empire of AI.
• krashidov 1y ago
  > giant python monolith this does not sound fun lol
• jjani 1y ago
  > The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in. There's an API you can sign up and use–and most of the models (even if SOTA or proprietary) tend to quickly make it into the API for startups to use. The comparison here should clearly be with the other frontier model providers: Anthropic, Google, and potentially Deepseek and xAI. Comparing them gives the exact opposite conclusion - OpenAI is the only model provider that gates API access to their frontier models behind draconic identity verification (also, Worldcoin anyone?). Anthropic and Google do not do this. OpenAI hides their model's CoT (inference-time compute, thinking). Anthropic to this day shows their CoT on all of their models. Making it pretty obvious this is just someone patting themselves on the back and doing some marketing.
  • harmonic18374 1y ago
    Yes, also OpenAI being this great nimble startup that can turn on a dime, while in reality Google reacted to them and has now surpassed them technically in every area, except image prompt adherence.
  • levzzz 1y ago
    [dead]
  • pyman 1y ago
    There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things: CloseAI.
  • ivape 1y ago
    OpenAI hides their model's CoT (inference-time compute, thinking) Probably because Deepseek trained a student model off their frontier model.
    • jjani 1y ago
      And the same thing could very easily happen to Anthropic, yet they choose not to hide it.
• hinterlands 1y ago
  It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that there are people who feel rudderless because there is no roadmap or a thing carved out for them to own. Similarly, the flip side of "strong bias to action" and "changes direction on a dime" is that everything is chaotic and there's no consistent vision from the executives. This cracked me up a bit, though: "As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!
  • harmonic18374 1y ago
    I would never post any criticism of an employer in public. It can only harm my own career (just as being positive can only help it). Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media! Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the best possible light. I think it all makes him look like a mark, which is desirable for employers, so I guess it is working.
    • m00x 1y ago
      Calvin cofounded Segment that had a $3.2B acquisition. He's not your typical employee.
      • harmonic18374 1y ago
• smeeger 1y ago
  > everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing making human beings obsolete is not the right thing. nobody in openAI is doing the right thing. in another part of the post he says safety teams work primarily on making sure the models dont say anything racist as well as limiting helpful tips on building weapons of terror… and that AGI safety is basically not a focus. i dont think this company should be allowed to exist. they dont have ANY right to threaten the existence and wellbeing of me and my kids!
• seydor 1y ago
  seems like the whole thing was meant to be a jab at Meta
  • ishita159 1y ago
    was it? it was however interesting to know that it isn't just Meta poaching OpenAI, but the reverse also happened.
    • latency-guy2 1y ago
      Very apt, OpenAI's start was always poach-central, we know this from executive email leaks via Elon/Sam respectively. Any gibberish on any company's behalf of "poaching" is nonsense regardless IMO.
  • pchristensen 1y ago
    I definitely didn't get that feeling. There was a whole section about how their infra resembles Meta and they've had excellent engineers hired from Meta.
• bagxrvxpepzn 1y ago
  He joins a proven unicorn at its inflection point and then leaves mere days after hitting his vesting cliff. All of this "learning" and "experience" talk is sopping wet with cynicism.
  • dang 1y ago
    Can you please make your substantive points without crossing into personal attack and/or name-calling? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • bagxrvxpepzn 1y ago
      Sorry, I removed the personal attack.
      • dang 1y ago
        I appreciate the edit, but "sopping wet with cynicism" still breaks the site guidelines, especially this one: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        • bagxrvxpepzn 1y ago
          Understood, in the future I will refrain from questioning motives in featured articles. I can no longer edit my post but you may delete or flag it so that others will not be exposed to it.
          • dang 1y ago
            It's ok—we mostly just care about recalibrating for future posts. Thanks for the kind replies! As you can imagine, we don't always get those :)
  • 1y ago
• suncemoje 1y ago
  „the right people can make magic happen“ :-)
  • NoOn3 1y ago
    It is very strange to hear this in connection with OpenAI. After all, their goal is to save people from things like this...
• fidotron 1y ago
  > There's a corollary here–most research gets done by nerd-sniping a researcher into a particular problem. If something is considered boring or 'solved', it probably won't get worked on. This is a very interesting nugget, and if accurate this could become their Achilles heel.
  • ACCount36 1y ago
    It's not "their" Achilles heel. It's the Achilles heel of the way humans work. Most top-of-their-field researchers are on top of their field because they really love it, and are willing to sink insane amount of hours into doing things they love.
• ishita159 1y ago
  this post was such a brilliant read. to read about how they still have a YC-style startup culture, are meritocratic, and people get to work on things they find interesting. as an early stage founder, i worry about the following a lot. - changing directions fast when i lose conviction - things breaking in production - and about speed, or the lack of it I learned to actually not worry about the first two. But if OpenAI shipped Codex in 7 weeks, small startups have lost the speed advantage they had. Big reminder to figure out better ways to solve for speed.
• vonneumannstan 1y ago
  >Safety is actually more of a thing than you might guess Considering all the people who led the different safety teams have left or been fired, Superalignment has been a total bust and the various accounts from other employees about the lack of support for safety work I find this statement incredibly out of touch and borderline intentionally misleading.
  • whamlastxmas 1y ago
    This is not true and it’s weird hyperbole misinformation
    • vonneumannstan 1y ago
      Yeah I agree safety is not more of a thing at OpenAI, it is less of a thing then you might think.
      • vonneumannstan 1y ago
        https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/24/openai-miles-brundage-agi-readiness.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/24/openai-miles-brundage-agi-re... https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlProblem/comments/1iyb7ov/key_openai_departures_over_ai_safety_or/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlProblem/comments/1iyb7ov/key... https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai-resignations-ai-safety-ilya-sutskever-jan-leike-artificial-intelligence https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai... https://fortune.com/2025/01/28/openai-researcher-steven-adler-quit-ai-labs-taking-risky-gamble-humanity-agi/ https://fortune.com/2025/01/28/openai-researcher-steven-adle... https://www.centeraipolicy.org/work/openai-safety-teams-departure-is-a-fire-alarm https://www.centeraipolicy.org/work/openai-safety-teams-depa...
• imiric 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing. One thing I was interested to read but didn't find in your post is: does everyone believe in the vision that the leadership has shared publicly, e.g. [1]? Is there some skepticism that the current path leads to AGI, or has everyone drunk the Kool-Aid? If there is some dissent, how is it handled internally? [1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
  • fragmede 1y ago
    Externally there's no rigorous definition as to what constitutes AGI, so I'd guess internally it's not one monolithic thing they're targeting either. You'd need everyone to take a class about the nature of intelligence first, and all the different kinds of it just to begin with. There's undoubtedly dissent internally as to the best way to achieve chosen milestones on the way there, as well as disagreement that those are the right milestones to begin with. Think tactical disagreement, not strategic. If you didn't think that AGI were ever possible with LLMs, would you even be there to begin with?
    • imiric 1y ago
      Well, Sam Altman has a clear definition of ASI, and AGI is something they've been thinking about for a long time, so presumably they must have some accepted definition of it. My question was whether everyone believes this vision that ASI is "close", and more broadly whether this path leads to AGI. > If you didn't think that AGI were ever possible with LLMs, would you even be there to begin with? People can have all sorts of reasons for working with a company. They might want to work on cutting-edge tech with smart people and infinite resources, for investment or prestige, but not necessarily buy into the overarching vision. I'm just wondering whether such a profile exists within OpenAI, and if so, how it is handled.
  • tedsanders 1y ago
    Not the author, but I work at OpenAI. There are wide variety of viewpoints and it's fine for employees to disagree on timelines and impact. I myself published a 100-page paper on why I think transformative AGI by 2043 is quite unlikely (https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02519 https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.02519). From informal discussion, I think the vast majority of employees don't think that we're mere years from a post-scarcity utopia where we can drink mai tais on the beach all day. But there is a lot of optimism about the rapid progress in AI, and I do think that it's harder to forecast the path of a technology that has the potential to improve itself. So much depends on your definition of AGI. In a sense, GPT-4 is already AGI in the literal sense that it's an artificial intelligence with some generality. But in the sense of automating the economy, it's of course not close.
• throwawayohio 1y ago
  > As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing. I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I would have just left this part out. If there is anything I've learned during my time in tech (ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area) it's that the people you didn't meet are absolutely angling to do the wrong thing(TM).
  • jjulius 1y ago
    When your work provides lunch in a variety of different cafeterias all neatly designed to look like standalone restaurants, directly across from which is an on-campus bank that will assist you with all of your financial needs before you take your company-operated Uber-equivalent to the next building over and have your meeting either in that building's ballpit, or on the tree-covered rooftop that - for some reason - has foxes on top, it's easy to focus only on the tiny "good" thing you're working on and not the steaming hot pile of garbage that the executives at your company are focused on but would rather you not see. Edit: And that's to say nothing of the very generous pay...
  • myaccountonhn 1y ago
    I've been in circles with very rich and somewhat influential tech people and it's a lot of talk about helping others, but somehow beneath the veneer of the talk of helping others you notice that many of them are just ripping people off, doing coke and engaging in self-centered spiritual practices (especially crypto people). I also don't trust that people within the system can assess if what they're doing is good or not. I've talked with higher ups in fashion companies who genuinely believe their company is actually doing so much great work for the environment when they basically invented fast-fashion. I've felt it first hand personally how my mind slowly warped itself into believing that ad-tech isn't so bad for the world when I worked for an ad-tech company, and only after leaving did I realize how wrong I was.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • beezlebroxxxxxx 1y ago
• LZ_Khan 1y ago
  This is just the exact same culture as Deepmind minus the "everything on Slack" bulletpoint.
  • xmasotto 1y ago
    Surely one wouldn't complain about infra at deepmind?
• paxys 1y ago
  > An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. Not that unusual nowadays. I'd wager every tech company founded in the last ~10 years works this way. And many of the older ones have moved off email as well.
  • david_shi 1y ago
    I wonder how much of this data Salesforce can use, a literal goldmine of information
    • denimnerd42 1y ago
      isnt there a clause in the slack contract you cant use the slack api to pull data to train an AI
      • david_shi 1y ago
        rules for thee, not for me
• zzzeek 1y ago
  > On the other hand, you're trying to build a product that hundreds of millions of users leverage for everything from medical advice to therapy. ... then the next paragraph > As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing. not if you're trying to replace therapists with chatbots, sorry
• ThouYS 1y ago
  These one or two year tenures.. I don't know man
• AIorNot 1y ago
  I'm 50, worked at few cool places and lots of boring ones. to paraphrase, Tolstoy tends to be right -all happy families are similar and unhappy families are unhappy in unique ways OpenAI is currently selected for the brightest and young excited minds, (and a lot of money).. bright, young (as in full of energy) and excited people will work well anywhere- esp if given a fair amount of autonomy. Young people talking about how hard they worked is not a sign of a great corp culture, just a sign that they are in the super excited stage of their careers In the long run who knows, I tend to view these companies as groups of like minded people and groups of people change and the dynamic changees overnight -so if they can sustain that culture sure, but who knows..
  • rogerkirkness 1y ago
    Calvin is the founder/CTO of Segment, not old but also not some doe eyed new grad.
    • jonas21 1y ago
      On one hand, yes. But on the other hand, he's still in his 30s. In most fields, this would be considered young / early career. It kind of reinforces the point that bright, young people can get a lot done in the tech world.
      • paulcole 1y ago
        > In most fields, this would be considered young / early career Is it considered young / early career in this field?
      • m00x 1y ago
        Calvin is loaded from the Segment exit, he would not work if he wasn't excited about the work. The other founders just went on to do their own thing or non-profits. I worked there for a few years and Calvin is definitely more of the grounded engineering guy. He would introduced him as an engineer and just get talking code. He would spend most of his time with the SRE/core team trying to tackle the hardest technical problem at the company.
• theletterf 1y ago
  For a company that has grown so much in such a short time, I continue to be surprised by its lack of technical writers. Saying docs could be better is an euphemism, but I still can't find fellow tech writers working there. Compare this with Anthropic and its documentation. I don't know what's the rationale for not hiring tech writers other than nobody suggesting it yet, which is sad. Great dev tools require great docs, and great docs require teams that own them and grow them as a product.
  • mlinhares 1y ago
    The higher ups don't think there's value in that. Back at DigitalOcean they had an amazing tech writing team, with people with years of experience, doing some of the best tech docs in the industry, when the layoffs started the writing team was the first to be cut. People look at it as a cost a and nothing else.
    • nikcub 1y ago
      I didn't realise that team at DO was let go, what a horrible decision - the SERP footprint of DO was immense and the quality of the content was fantastic.
    • rs186 1y ago
      Really makes me worry about the future of MDN docs.
  • csomar 1y ago
    I think he explained it in his post? You get rewarded for "actions" which is making cool things and stuff. You don't get rewarded for writing docs.
• frankfrank13 1y ago
  > As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing I doubt many people would say something contrary to this about their (former) colleagues, which means we should always take this with a (large) grain of salt. Do I think (most) AT&T employees wanted to let the NSA spy on us? Probably not. Google engineers and ICE? Palantir and.. well idk i think everyone there knows what Palantir does.
• JonathanRaines 1y ago
  Fascinating that you chose to compare OpenAI's culture to Los Alamos. I can't tell if you're hinting AI is as world ending as nuclear weapons or not.
• troupo 1y ago
  > As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing. To quote Jonathan Nightingale from his famous thread on how Google sabotaged Mozilla [1]: --- start quote --- The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional. --- end quote --- Replace that with OpenAI [1] https://archive.is/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871238922776576 https://archive.is/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh...
• cess11 1y ago
  20 years from now, the only people who will remember how much you worked is your family, especially your kids. Seems like an awful place to be.
• viccis 1y ago
  >It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI >... >OpenAI is also a more serious place than you might expect, in part because the stakes feel really high. On the one hand, there's the goal of building AGI–which means there is a lot to get right. I'm kind of surprised people are still drinking this AGI Koolaid
  • windowshopping 1y ago
    for real. same. the level of delusion. i think what'll happen is they'll get some really advanced agents that can effectively handle most general tasks and they'll call it AGI and say they've done it. it won't really be AGI, but a lot of people will have bought into the lie thanks to the incredibly convincing facsimile they'll have created.
    • cootsnuck 1y ago
      > i think what'll happen is they'll get some really advanced agents that can effectively handle most general tasks and they'll call it AGI They likely won't wait even for that. Because that itself is still really far off.
      • viccis 1y ago
        Yeah wait and see how much executives and investors want AI when it gets smart enough to put executives and investors out of a job.
• brcmthrowaway 1y ago
  Lucky to be able to write this .. likely just vested with FU money!
• jordanmorgan10 1y ago
  I’m at a point my life and career where I’d never entertain working those hours. Missed basketball games, seeing kids come home from school, etc. I do think when I first started out, and had no kiddos, maybe some crazy sprints like that would’ve been exhilarating. No chance now though
  • chribcirio 1y ago
    > I’m at a point my life and career where I’d never entertain working those hours. That’s ok. Just don’t complain about the cost of daycare, private school tuition, or your parents senior home/medical bills.
    • metaltyphoon 1y ago
      > Just don’t complain about the cost of daycare, private school tuition, or your parents senior home/medical bills. How does any of this relates to the amount of hours one works?
    • jordanmorgan10 1y ago
      ...I....I didn't?
• dcreater 1y ago
  This is silicon valley culture on steroids: I really have to question if it is positive for any involved party. Codex almost has no mindshare and rightly so. It's a textbook also ran, except it came from the most dominant player and was outpaced by Claude code on the order of weeks. Why go through all that? Instead what would have been a much better scenario is openai carefully assessing different approaches to agentic coding and releasing a more fully baked product with solid differentiation. Even Amazon just did that with Kiro
  • danenania 1y ago
    Codex is quite different from Claude Code. It’s more similar to Devin. Maybe you’re thinking of the confusingly named Codex CLI?
  • energy123 1y ago
    What I read in this blogpost is a description of how every good research organization works, from academia to private labs. The command and control, centrally planned approach doesn't work.
• soygem 1y ago
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• david_shi 1y ago
  Python monorepo is the biggest surprise in this whole article
  • menaerus 1y ago
    Chunking the codebase that you entirely own into packages is as if you're intentionally wanting to make your life miserable by imposing the same kind of volatility that you would otherwise find in the development process of building the Linux distribution. It's a misnomer.
  • nharada 1y ago
    Yeah legit interested in their toolchain. I tried Pants and had a bad experience. Bazel is too heavyweight imo and doesn't deal with a variety of dependencies well.
• solarized 1y ago
  > As I see it, the path to AGI is a three-horse race right now: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Each of these organizations are going to take a different path to get there based upon their DNA (consumer vs business vs rock-solid-infra + data). Grok be like. okey. :))
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• gsf_emergency_2 1y ago
  If you'd like some "objective" insights into how bottoms-up innovation at OpenAI works.. a research manager there coauthored this under-hyped book: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/review-of-why-greatness-cannot-be https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/review-of-why-greatn...
• lz400 1y ago
  Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff snowballs over any probabilities. 0.00001% multiplied by infinite is an infinite EV so you have to treat it like that. Best marketing, it writes itself.
  • ivape 1y ago
    "but what if it's true?" There was nothing hypothesized about next-token prediction and emergent properties (they didn't know scale would allow it to generalize for sure). What if it's true is part of LLMs story, there is a mystical element here.
    • echoangle 1y ago
      > There was nothing hypothesized that next-token prediction and scale could show emergent properties. Nobody ever hypothesized it before it happened? Hard to believe.
      • ivape 1y ago
        Someone else can confirm, but from my understanding, no they did not know sentiment analysis, reasoning, few shot learning, chain of thought, etc would emerge at scale. Sentiment analysis was one of the first things they noticed a scaled up model could generalize. Remember, all they were trying to do was get better at next-token prediction, there was no concrete idea to achieve "instruction following", for example. We can never truly say going up another order of magnitude on the number of params won't achieve something (it could, for reasons unknown, just like before). It is somewhat parallel to the story of Columbus looking for India but ending up in America.
        • ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
• Havoc 1y ago
  Interesting read! Discounting Chinese labs entirely for agi seems like a misstep though. I find it hard to believe there won’t be at least a couple contenders
  • ed_mercer 1y ago
    Well they don’t have (good) GPUs, so how are they going to seriously compete?
• nsoonhui 1y ago
  He joined last year May and left recently. About one year of stay. I wonder one year is enough time for programmers to understand codebase, let alone meaningfully contributing patches? But then we see that job hopping is increasing common, which results in the drop in product qualities. I wonder what values are the job hoppers adding to the company.
  • tibbar 1y ago
    Well, since he worked on a brand-new product, it probably didn't matter too much.
• maxnevermind 1y ago
  What I really wanted to know if OpenAI(and other labs for that matter) actually use their own products and not just casually but make LLM a core of how they operate. For example: using LLM for coding in prod, training/fine-tuning internal models for aligning on the latest updates, finding answer etc. Do they put their money where their mouth is, do LLMs help with productivity? There is no mention of it in the article, so I guess they don't?
  • danenania 1y ago
    I don’t know, but I’d guess they are using them heavily, though in a piecemeal fashion. As impressive as LLMs can be at one-shotting certain kinds of tasks, working in a sprawling production codebase like the one described with tight performance constraints, subtle interdependencies, cross-cutting architectural concerns, etc. still requires a human driving most of the time. LLMs help a lot for this kind of work, but the human is either carefully assimilating their output or carefully choosing spots where (with detailed prompts) they can generate usable code directly. Again, just a guess, but this my impression of how experienced engineers (including myself) are using LLMs in big/nontrivial codebases, and I’ve seen no indication that engineering processes at the labs are much different from the wider industry.
  • neonbjb 1y ago
    Yes we do. If you worked at Google you know moma. Our moma is an internal version of chat. It is very good.
• csomar 1y ago
  > Good ideas can come from anywhere, and it's often not really clear which ideas will prove most fruitful ahead of time. Is that why they have a dozens of different models? > Many leaders who were incredibly competent weren't very good at things like presenting at all-hands or political maneuvering. I don't think the Sam/Board drama confirms this. > The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in. Did you thank your OpenAI overlords for letting you access their sacred latest models? +-+- This reads like an Ad for Open AI or an attempt by the author to court them again? I am not sure how anyone can take his words seriously.
• breadwinner 1y ago
  > As I see it, the path to AGI is a three-horse race right now: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Umm... I don't think Zuckerberg would agree with this statement.
  • mirekrusin 1y ago
    ...or Musk, or chinese labs.
• breadwinner 1y ago
  > What's funny about this is there are exactly three services that I would consider trustworthy: Azure Kubernetes Service, CosmosDB (Azure's document storage), and BlobStore. CosmosDB is trustworthy? Everyone I know that used CosmosDB ended up rewriting their code because of throttling.
  • daxfohl 1y ago
    It's pretty heavily used within Azure itself, and my old team didn't have any issues, even though we had a high volume service with stored procs, triggers, list indexes, etc. And it was cheaper and faster than the SQL Server instance it replaced (granted, the original Sql-based app had tons of big joins and wasn't designed to scale). I know a few other teams when I was working elsewhere that had to migrate off Spanner due to throttling and random hiccups, though if Google uses it for zanzibar, they must not have that problem internally. Maybe all these companies increase throttling limits for first party use cases. My current team uses dynamo, which has also given throttling issues, but generally only when they try to do things that it's not designed for (bulk updating a bunch of records in the same partition). Other than that, it seems reliable (incredibly consistent low latencies) and a bit cheaper than my experience with cosmos, though with fewer features. They all seem to have their own pros and cons in my experience.
• kraig911 1y ago
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• retornam 1y ago
  Doesn't it bother anybody that their product heavily relies on FastAPI according to this post yet they haven't donated to the project or aren't listed as sponsors? https://github.com/sponsors/tiangolo#sponsors https://github.com/sponsors/tiangolo#sponsors https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi?tab=readme-ov-file#sponsors https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi?tab=readme-ov-file#sponso...
  • senko 1y ago
    Presumably it also relies on Python, Linux, nginx, coreutils and a bunch of other stuff they haven't donated to.
  • PunchTornado 1y ago
    no, because I wouldn't expect anything good from openai.
• carimura 1y ago
  No way the newborn slept until 5:30 every morning.
• sarthaksoni 1y ago
  Great read! As a software engineer sitting here in India, it feels like a privilege to peek inside how OpenAI works. Thanks for sharing!
• paradite 1y ago
  This is an incredibly fascinating read into how OpenAI works. Some of the details seem rather sensitive to me. I'm not sure if the essay is going to stay up for long, given how "secretive" OpenAI is claimed to be.
• nilirl 1y ago
  Are any of these causal to OpenAI's success? Or are they incidental? You can throw all of this "culture" into an org but I doubt it'd do anything without the literal world-changing technology the company owns.
• d--b 1y ago
  > As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing Of course they are. People in orgs like that are passionate, they want to work on the tech cause LLMs are once-in-a-lifetime tech breakthrough. But they don’t realize enough that they’re working for bad people. Ultimately all of that tech is in the hands of Altman, and that guy hasn’t proven to be the saint he hopes to become.
• a_bonobo 1y ago
  >Thanks to this bottoms-up culture, OpenAI is also very meritocratic. Historically, leaders in the company are promoted primarily based upon their ability to have good ideas and then execute upon them. Many leaders who were incredibly competent weren't very good at things like presenting at all-hands or political maneuvering. That matters less at OpenAI then it might at other companies. The best ideas do tend to win. 2 This sets off my red flags: companies that say they are meritocratic, flat etc., often have invisible structures that favor the majority. Valve Corp is a famous example for that where this leads to many problems, see https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-unusual-corporate-structure-causes-its-problems-report-suggests/ https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-unusual-corporate-structure-c... >It sounds like a wonderful place to work, free from hierarchy and bureaucracy. However, according to a new video by People Make Games (a channel dedicated to investigative game journalism created by Chris Bratt and Anni Sayers), Valve employees, both former and current, say it's resulted in a workplace two of them compared to The Lord of The Flies.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • mcosta 1y ago
    Are you implying that a top-down corporate structure is better?
    • NicuCalcea 1y ago
      If not better, certainly more honest.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  • darkoob12 1y ago
    I think in this structure people only think locally and they are not concerned with the overall mission of the company and do not actively think about morality of the mission or if they are following it.
• chvid 1y ago
  This stuff: - The company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000. - Changes direction on a dime. - Very secretive place. With the added "everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost" and "this creates a lot of strange-looking code because there are so many ways you can write Python". Is not something that is going to last.
• mehulashah 1y ago
  While their growth is faster and technology different, the atmosphere feels very much like AWS back in 2014. I stayed for 8 years because I enjoyed it so much.
• VirusNewbie 1y ago
  Interesting that so many folks from Meta joined OpenAI - but Meta wasn't really able to roll its own competitive foundational model, so is that a bad sign? Kind of interesting that folks aren't impressed by Azure's offering. I wonder if OpenAI is handicapped by that as well, compared to being on AWS or GCP.
• Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  My biggest problem with these new companies is their core philosophy. First, these companies generate their own demand — natural demand for their products rarely exists. Therefore, they act more like sellers than developers. Second, they always follow the same maxim: "What's the next logical step?" This naturally follows from the first premise, because this allows you to ignore everything "real". You are simply bound to logic. They have no "problems" to solve, yet they offer you solutions - simply as a logical consequence of their own logic. Has anyone ever actually asked if coders would use agents if it meant losing their jobs? Thirdly, this naturally brings to light the B2B philosophy. The customer is merely a catalyst that will eventually become superfluous. Fourth, the same excuse and ignorance of the form "(we don't know what we are doing, but) time will tell". What if time tells you "this is bad and you should and could have known better?"
• segalord 1y ago
  > The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. That is literally how openAI gets data for fine-tuning it's models, by testing it on real users and letting them supply data and use cases. (tool calling, computer use, thinking, all of these were championed by people outside and they had the data)
• teiferer 1y ago
  >It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, Where is this AGI that you've built then? The reason for the very existence of that term is an acknowledgement that what's hyped today as AI isn't actually what AI used to mean, but the hype cycle VC money depends on using the term AI, so a new term was invented to denote the thing the old term used to denote. Do we need yet another term because AGI is about to get burned the same way? > and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade. Sorry, what? I'm sure it feels that way from some corners of that particular tech bubble, but my 73 year old mom's life is not impacted by LLMs at all - well, except for when she opens her facebook feed once a month and gets blasted with tons of fake BS. Really something to be proud of for us as an industry? A tech breakthrough of the last decade that might have literally saved her life were mRNA vaccines though, and I could likely come up with more examples if I thought about it for more than 3 seconds.
• tehnub 1y ago
  >As I see it, the path to AGI is a three-horse race right now: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Sleeping on Keen Technology I see
• sebslomski 1y ago
  Good writing, enjoyed that article. Also I guess it looks like there was more time spent writing this article than actually working at OpenAI? 1 year tenure and a paternity leave?
• motbus3 1y ago
  I didn't find any surprises reading this post. If anything about OpenAI which should bothers people is how they fake to be blind to the consequences because of "the race". Leveraging the decision IF and WHAT should be done to the top heads only never worked well.
• rasmul 1y ago
  some thoughts - no such thing as open ai as a decision unit, there are people at the top who decide + shareholder pressure - a narcissist optimizes for himself and has no affective empathy: cruel, extremely selfish, image oriented, power hungry, liar etc. - having no structure means having a hidden structure and hence real power of the few above, no accountability (narcissists love this too) - framing this meritocracy is a positive framing, it is very easy to hide incompetence - people want to do good, great, perfect naive and you can utilize this motivation to let them burn out and work for YOUR goals as a leader... another narcissist is great doing this to people and the richest man in the world per share price all in all, having this kind of mindset is good for start ups or get the lucky punch, but AGI will be brought by Anthropic, Google and Ilya :) you will not have series of lucky punches, you have to have a direction I think Sam Altman, a terrible narcissist, uses open AI to feel great and he has no strategy but using others for their own benefit, because narcissists dont care, they just care about their image and power... and that is why open AI goes down... bundling with Microsoft was a big red flag in the first place... when i think of openAI, it is a bit like Netscape Navigator + Internet Explorer in one :) Anthropic is like Safari + Brave Google is like ... yeah :) Ilya is like Opera/Vivaldi or so
• armstrong10 1y ago
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• hoseja 1y ago
  >As a result, OpenAI is a very secretive place. The choice of name continues providing incredible amusement.
• ujkiolp 1y ago
  this sounds awfully doctored
• dowager_dan99 1y ago
  Wild that OpenAI is changing so much that you can post about how things have radically changed in a year, and consider yourself a long-timer after < 16 months. I'm highly skeptical that an org this big is based on merit and there wasn't a lot of political maneuvering. You can have public politics or private politics, but no politics doesn't exist - at least after you hit <some> number of people where "some" is definitely < the size of OpenAI. All I hear about OpenAI is politics these days,
• fogbeak 1y ago
  Absolutely hilarious to assert that "everyone at OpenAI is trying to do the right thing" and then compare it to Los Alamos, the creators of the nuclear bomb.
  • thinkingtoilet 1y ago
    Well, no one accused wealthy tech bros of being in touch.
• noname120 1y ago
  Does Sa… uh OpenAI still do stock clawbacks from employees who say negative things about the company after leaving?
• kylereeve 1y ago
  I'm gonna be pedantic, shouldn't it be "bottom-up" instead of "bottoms-up"?
  • BrenBarn 1y ago
    Yes, I was chuckling at this as well. "Bottoms-up" makes it sound like they're drinking a lot on the job.
    • kylereeve 1y ago
      they might be
• b0a04gl 1y ago
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• daxfohl 1y ago
  What do people not like about Azure IAM? That's the one I'm most familiar with, and I've always thought it was decent, pretty vanilla. When I go to AWS it looks similar except role assignments can't be scoped, so needs more duplication and maintenance. In that way Azure seems nicer. In everything else, it seems pretty equivalent. But I see it catching flak occasionally on HN, so curious what others dislike.
• paul7986 1y ago
  I now have developed a hate with a small sprinkle of love relationship with AI. This past week I canceled my $20 subscription to GPT, advocated my friends do the same (i got them hooked) and just will be using Gemini from now on. It can create AI maps instantly for road trip travel routes to planning creek tubing trips and more. GPT does not do maps and I was paying $20 for it while Gemini is free? Bye! Further and more important this guy says in his blog he is happy to help with the destruction of our (white collar) society that will cause many MANY financial to emotional pain while he lives high off the hog? Impending 2030 depression .. 100 years later Im unfortunately betting! Now AI could indeed help us cure disease but if the major are destitute while a few hundreds or so live high of the hog the benefits of AI are canceled out. AI can definitely do the job ten people use to yet NOW its just one person typing into a text prompt to complete the tasks ten use. Why are we here..sprinting towards this goal of destruction let China destory themselves!!!
• ec109685 1y ago
  No releases since June 13th: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11428266-codex-changelog https://help.openai.com/en/articles/11428266-codex-changelog It seems like Claude code via screen / multiple terminal windows is strictly better than the Codex approach given it keeps the developer in the loop. Only advantage of async Codex is ability to carry on when using a different device like your phone to code.
• southernplaces7 1y ago
  >Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I clicked that other story just to see what that author said about his time at that company. The fundamental urge is to slap some bloody sense into him, because the only thing amazing about the article is just how obtuse it is. Under all the glowy, wide-eyed applause for many aspects of how Palantir operates, he's not really internalizing just what kind of parasitic, corporate/government surveillance monster he was working for. To put it simply, he speaks as if he were a useful idiot, praising selectively, glossing around a very serious moral swamp with mealy-mouthed categorizations about what's cool and not cool, ideological whitewash and generally failing to see the fucking forest for the trees. Palantir and its kind represent a disgusting possibility for the future of how society is managed by increasingly autocratic government tendencies and their hustling corporate allies. And I can think of no more chilling a notion than just what that management could entail for hundreds of millions of people under the guise of supposedly fighting all kinds of ambiguous or outright invented "bad actors" With OpenAI, you get a lot of corporate mendacity and the usual stew of trying to game the rules for the company's own favor. However, underneath this is a product that's largely used by ordinary people for doing fairly ordinary things, even if many of them contribute to the burial of culture in the cheapest auto-generated sludge imaginable. With Palantir, the fruits of the labor are... squarely something else entirely.
• greatgib 1y ago
  What is funny is that this guy looks like to be really thinking that they are working on AGI or that OpenAI is on the way to way despite that we all know that it is serious bullshit disconnected from reality. So it let me wonder if employees are really believing that and drinking the kool-aid of their own marketing, or if this is just a communication move again.
• theGnuMe 1y ago
  >An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there. If you aren't organized, you will find this incredibly distracting. If you curate your channels and notifications, you can make it pretty workable. This is super interesting. I work in a group where everything is on slack and some pieces are/were super hard. So much so that I want an AI assistant that can manage my slack feed etc... I feel like an AI bot/slack integration is a thing that needs to be done well.