Former senior engineer pens what it was like to work at OpenAI
Calvin French-Owen was an engineer working on OpenAI's coding agent Codex. There was no drama in his exit, he stated, clarifying that he wanted to return to startup founding. He has impressive credentials as a founder, having cofounded Segment, a customer data platform that was acquired by Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion.
'Everything breaks'
"The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000, and I was in the top 30% by tenure," his post read.French-Owen said anything that has scaled that quickly is bound to break, including "how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organise people and the hiring processes."Everything runs on Slack; there are no emails at the AI powerhouse. OpenAI is very "bottoms-up", especially in research, he said, which makes it very meritocratic. Good ideas can come from anywhere, and promotions are handed to those who have demonstrated the ability "to have good ideas and then execute upon them."
Secrets, secrets
Since the ChatGPT maker has been in the news a lot, it is very secretive, French-Owen said. "I'd regularly see news stories broken in the press that hadn't yet been announced internally. I'd tell people I work at OpenAI and be met with a pre-formed opinion on the company. A number of Twitter users run automated bots which check to see if there are new feature launches coming up," he said.
Safety is a priority
OpenAI has been under fire for its shifting priorities related to the safety of the technology, but he says safety is actually "more of a thing than you might guess".He said many people are working to develop safety systems, even as there is more focus on practical risks (hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bioweapons, self-harm, prompt injection) than theoretical ones (intelligence explosion, power-seeking).
Exit queue
French-Owen's departure comes after a series of talent outflows at OpenAI. Cofounders like John Schulman left to join rival Anthropic, and others like Jan Leike cited disagreements about "the company's core priorities."
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