OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman says engineers need this one trait to succeed
The most critical quality for engineers to succeed at OpenAI is "technical humility, Brockman said at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco on June 4.
"You're coming in because you have skills that are important," he said in a video recording of the session that was published on AI Engineer's YouTube channel on Monday. "But it's a totally different environment from something like a traditional web startup."
That insight, he said, came from watching culture clashes between colleagues from engineering and research backgrounds.
He said engineers often think, "We've agreed on an interface, I can implement it however I want." Researchers, by contrast, see the system as a whole, where even a tiny bug can quietly degrade performance.
In one early project, Brockman said OpenAI's engineering team ground to a halt debating every line of code.
His solution was simple. He'd propose five ideas, a researcher would reject four, and they'd move forward with the one that remained.
The key for engineers, Brockman said, is knowing when to trust your instincts and when to leave them behind.
"The most important thing is to come in, really listen, and kind of assume that there's something that you're missing until you deeply understand the why," he said.
"Then, at that point, great, make the change," he added.
Brockman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
What it takes to succeed at OpenAI
Leaders at OpenAI have spoken about what it takes for employees to thrive at the company.
"Approaching each scenario from scratch is so important in this space," Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, told Lenny Rachitsky on his weekly tech podcast on Saturday. "There is no analogy for what we're building. You can't copy an existing thing."
He said OpenAI cannot iterate on products or features developed by tech giants like Instagram or Google.
"You can learn from everywhere, but you have to do it from scratch. That's why that trait tends to make someone effective at OpenAI, and it's something we test for," he said, referring to an employee's ability to start a project from the ground up.
According to OpenAI's interview guide, which is published on its website, the company looks for candidates who can "ramp up quickly in a new domain and produce results."
It also values "collaboration, effective communication, openness to feedback, and alignment with our mission and values."
Brockman, a software engineer by training, dropped out of MIT to join the payments startup Stripe in 2010, becoming its CTO before leaving in 2015 to cofound OpenAI.
He took a three-month leave of absence from the company in August 2024, at which point the company was going through a period of major staffing and leadership upheaval. He returned that November in a new technical leadership role.
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