Ex-OpenAI employee reveals ‘unusual part of the company', says ‘There's a strong bias to…'
, ex-engineer at
ChatGPT
maker
OpenAI
has shared a blog post, reflecting on his journey at the company. In the blog post, Calvin shared things he liked and didn't like working at OpenAI. He began his post by praising OpenAI, stating 'how quickly it's grown'. Calvin wrote '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. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago.'
Calvin continues talking about an unusual part of OpenAI which he says is 'that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email.' He further added '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.'
In the post, Calvin revealed that OpenAI is 'very meritocratic'. Writing that '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.' He says that this 'matters less at OpenAI then it might at other companies. The best ideas do tend to win'.
He also points to a 'strong bias' in the company. Calvin writes 'There's a strong bias to action (you can just do things). It wasn't unusual for similar teams but unrelated teams to converge on various ideas.'
Narrating his own experience, Calvin writes 'I started out working on a parallel (but internal) effort similar to ChatGPT Connectors. There must've been ~3-4 different Codex prototypes floating around before we decided to push for a launch. These efforts are usually taken by a small handful of individuals without asking permission.''Teams tend to quickly form around them as they show promise,' he adds.
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