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Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI 前工程師爆料！快速而靈活有如舊日 Facebook？極速擴張而來的代價
(FILES) This file photo taken on January 23, 2023 in Toulouse, southwestern France, shows screens displaying the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT. - Search giant Baidu's lacklustre unveiling of its chatbot exposed gaps in China's race to rival ChatGPT, as censorship and a US squeeze on chip imports have hamstrung the country's artificial intelligence ambitions. (Photo by Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP) / NO USE AFTER APRIL 19, 2023 16:00:00 GMT - TO GO WITH "CHINA-TECHNOLOGY-AI-SOFTWARE", FOCUS BY POORNIMA WEERASEKARA & SEBASTIEN RICCI - To go with "China-technology-AI-software", FOCUS by Poornima Weerasekara & Sebastien Ricci OpenAI 在極短時期內走紅並持續擴張，成為科技界灸手可熱的公司，但在惹人艷羨背後，公司內部文化到底是如何演化呢？曾在 OpenAI 工作一年的 Calvin French-Owen 日前發表了一篇詳細的部落格文章，揭露了這家 AI 巨頭公司內部的真實工作環境。French-Owen 曾參與開發 AI 編程助手 Codex，用以與 Cursor 和 Anthropic 的 Claude Code 競爭的新產品。 French-Owen 在文章中透露，OpenAI 在他工作的一年內從 1,000 人快速擴張至 3,000 人。這種驚人的增長速度反映了 ChatGPT 作為史上增長最快消費產品的地位，該平台在今年三月時已擁有超過 5 億活躍用戶並持續快速增長。 有趣的是，OpenAI 員工極度依賴網路協作工具 Slack 來互相溝通，與 Meta 當年仍然名為 Facebook 時期相似，有著 Move Fast and Break Things（高速衝刺，敢於破格）的特性，實際上 OpenAI 也有不少員工是由 Meta 轉投過去。 然而，如此快速的擴張也帶來了巨大挑戰。French-Owen 坦言：「當你擴張得如此之快時，一切都會出問題：公司內部溝通方式、匯報結構、產品發布流程、人員管理和組織方式、招聘流程等等」。這種混亂狀態在公司的技術架構中也有所體現，多個團隊經常重複開發相同功能，他舉例說：「我見過至少六個不同的隊列管理或代理循環庫。 OpenAI Codex 儘管規模已經相當龐大，OpenAI 仍然保持著小型創業公司的靈活性。員工能夠在幾乎沒有繁文縟節的情況下實現自己的想法。French-Owen 描述了他所在的高級團隊如何在僅僅七週內完成 Codex 的開發和發布，團隊包括大約八名工程師、四名研究員、兩名設計師、兩名市場推廣人員和一名產品經理，整個過程幾乎沒有休息。 然而，這種快速發展模式也產生了技術債務。公司的核心代碼庫被形容為「有點像垃圾場」，因為團隊成員的編程技能差異很大，從能夠處理十億用戶的資深 Google 工程師，到缺乏實際編程經驗的新晉博士都有。 作為備受關注的公司，OpenAI 發展出了高度保密的企業文化，試圖防止信息洩露到公眾。同時，公司密切關注 X（前 Twitter）平台上的動態，如果某個帖子病毒式傳播，OpenAI 會看到並可能做出回應。French-Owen 引用朋友的話說：「這家公司跟著 Twitter 的風向運行」。 針對外界對 OpenAI AI 安全承諾的質疑，French-Owen 認為這是對公司最大的誤解[1]。他指出，雖然有些人擔心理論上對人類的風險，但公司內部更關注實際的安全問題，如「仇恨言論、濫用、操縱政治偏見、製造生物武器、自我傷害、提詞攻擊」等。 OpenAI 並非忽視長期潛在影響，公司有研究人員專門研究這些問題，並且清楚意識到數億人正在使用其大語言模型獲取從醫療建議到心理治療等各種服務。 儘管工作環境充滿挑戰，French-Owen 對產品發布時的效果感到驚嘆。他描述 Codex 上線時的情況：「我從未見過一個產品僅僅是出現在左側邊欄就能獲得如此多的即時用戶增長，但這就是 ChatGPT 的力量」。 French-Owen 強調他的離職並非因為任何「內部糾紛」，而是希望重新回到創業者的角色。他是客戶數據初創公司 Segment 的聯合創始人，該公司於 2020 年被 Twilio 以 32 億美元收購。 更多內容： A former OpenAI engineer describes what it's really like to work there 介紹 Codex 緊貼最新科技資訊、網購優惠，追隨 Yahoo Tech 各大社交平台！ 🎉📱 Tech Facebook： 🎉📱 Tech Instagram： 🎉📱 Tech WhatsApp 社群： 🎉📱 Tech WhatsApp 頻道： 🎉📱 Tech Telegram 頻道：
Yahoo
18-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
An OpenAI employee's farewell letter offers a rare window into what it's like working at the company
OpenAI has lost some key talent, but few of them have talked about their time at the company. One employee, Calvin French-Owen, however, recently shared some details. OpenAI has a bottom-up culture where promotions are meritocratic, he said. A lot can happen in a year at OpenAI. Calvin French-Owen, a former member of OpenAI's technical staff who helped launch a series of AI coding tools called Codex, published a lengthy blog post on Tuesday that detailed what happened to him in his year at the company. His blog offers a rare, first-person account of everyday life at OpenAI — insight that its string of recently departed employees haven't provided until now. He said he left about three weeks ago after starting in May 2024. Prior to OpenAI, he was the cofounder of a customer data platform called Segment, according to his LinkedIn profile. He said he's still figuring out what's next. French-Owen said that OpenAI has a "bottoms-up" culture, especially in its research departments. This makes the company "very meritocratic," he said, and people are promoted on their ability to generate ideas and execute them. The most competent, he said, weren't great at all-hands presentations or "political maneuvering." Despite the revelations about CEO Sam Altman's leadership style that surfaced during his brief ousting as CEO in 2023 — and subsequent chatter of culture clashes between the company's academic and corporate factions — French-Owen said the company stays true to its nonprofit origins. "The longer you've been there, the more you probably view things through the 'research lab' or 'nonprofit for good' lens," he wrote. That's not to say the company isn't worried about turning a profit. He said success is mostly measured by the number of subscriptions a new tool or update generates, a key path to profitability. He also said the company doesn't operate like an institution or a tech giant. It makes decisions quickly, teams are fluid, and it can be "very secretive," he said, so he never knew what others were working on in much detail. Another hallmark of the fast-paced, startup-like culture is that most communication takes place on Slack. French-Owen said he received about 10 emails during his whole tenure at OpenAI. But the pace can sometimes backfire. "Everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc," he said. Hours are long, he said, especially as it comes close to a product launch. Some of OpenAI's engineers told media outlets that they were burned out from working 80 hours a week, and the company gave them a week off earlier this month. When the launch of Codex neared, French-Owen said he worked from 7 a.m. to midnight most days, and weekends, too. "The stakes feel really high," he said. "On the one hand, there's the goal of building AGI — which means there is a lot to get right. On the other hand, you're trying to build a product that hundreds of millions of users leverage." Artificial general intelligence is broadly defined as AI that reasons as well as or better than humans. It's what most leading AI companies are competing to develop first. Talent is the key to reaching that goal. The biggest tech companies in the world are throwing millions at a handful of top researchers to win the race to AGI. Meta has been at the forefront of these talent wars. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently hired Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to lead its AI efforts, and has recruited some of the top AI researchers in the world from other companies. One of the top places Zuckerberg is poaching from is OpenAI. Jason Wei, who worked on OpenAI's o1 and deep research models, and colleague Hyung Won Chung, both left for Meta this week. Ultimately, French-Owen said there's a chance he'd return to OpenAI. "It's entirely possible that the quality of the work will draw me back," he said. "It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider
Gizmodo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
An Engineer's Diary Reveals the Human Cost of Building OpenAI's Next Big Thing
Behind the seemingly magical abilities of OpenAI's technology lies a story of intense human effort and immense personal sacrifice. In a candid reflection posted on July 15, former top engineer Calvin French-Owen peeled back the curtain on the company's high stakes culture. He detailed a product launch that was 'unquestionably one of the highlights of my career' but also the 'hardest I've worked in nearly a decade.' French-Owen is a seasoned tech leader who cofounded the successful data company Segment, according to his profile on LinkedIn. He was not a wide eyed junior developer; he was a veteran who understood the demands of the industry. Yet even he was struck by the intensity of the sprint to build and launch Codex, an ambitious AI agent designed to write and edit software, after joining OpenAI in May 2024. The project went from the first line of code to a full public launch in a breathtaking seven weeks. 'The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade,' French-Owen wrote. He described a relentless schedule that blurred the lines between work and life, all while navigating the challenges of a growing family. '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. We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted.' The immense pressure culminated on the night before the scheduled launch. French-Owen and four of his colleagues found themselves in the office in the dead of night, battling a complex and stressful technical challenge. They were trying to deploy the main 'monolith,' a term for a large, single piece of software that encompasses an entire application. Deploying a monolith is like trying to renovate an entire skyscraper at once. Instead of fixing one apartment at a time, you change the plumbing, electrical, and structure of the whole building simultaneously. If a single part fails, the entire system can break, making the operation incredibly high stakes and nerve wracking. 'Five of us stayed up until 4a trying to deploy the main monolith (a multi-hour affair),' he recalled. Just a few hours later, they were back in the office for the 8 AM public announcement and livestream, ready to turn on the features and watch the traffic pour in. This grueling work ethic exists within the hypercompetitive landscape of artificial intelligence, where OpenAI is in a constant race with giants like Google and Anthropic. The pressure to innovate and launch products quickly is immense. In this case, the result of the team's sprint was nothing short of staggering. Since its launch just 53 days ago (May 16), Codex has generated over 630,000 public pull requests. A pull request is the standard way a software engineer submits a finished unit of coding work. This number represents an almost unimaginable level of automated productivity, validating the team's belief in the product and, in a way, justifying their incredible sacrifice. French-Owen, who has since left OpenAI for a fresh start, harbors no resentment. He calls the experience the 'ride of a lifetime' and 'one of the best moves I've ever made.' His story, however, offers a sobering and essential look at the human engine powering the AI revolution. It reveals that behind every seamless AI response is a team of brilliant people who have likely pushed themselves to the absolute limit.
Gizmodo
17-07-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
A Top Engineer Reveals OpenAI's Culture of Secrets and Chaos
Calvin French-Owen only worked at OpenAI for a year, but he saw more in twelve months than most engineers do in a lifetime. As a successful founder turned employee, he joined the world's leading artificial intelligence company in May 2024 and left in June 2025. What he walked into was not a typical corporate tech job. It was a startup strapped to a rocket ship, powered by GPUs, Slack notifications, and a culture of secrecy that makes Apple look like an open book. 'The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown,' French-Owen writes in a long, revealing blog post published on July 15. '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.' That kind of explosive growth, known in Silicon Valley as hypergrowth, breaks everything: communication, team structures, hiring, and product planning. And yet, OpenAI keeps shipping groundbreaking tools like ChatGPT and its AI coding assistant, Codex. How? According to French-Owen, the company functions as a chaotic, bottom up meritocracy, valuing speed over structure and individual initiative over rigid planning. The entire operation, he reveals, runs on a single communication tool. 'Everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email,' he wrote. 'I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there.' This means that critical decisions, technical documentation, debates, and even leadership directives all happen in fast moving, ephemeral chat threads. If you miss a key message, you might miss a product launch. While outsiders might assume OpenAI operates with meticulous, long term planning, French-Owen says the truth is far messier and more improvisational. 'When I first showed up, I started asking questions about the roadmap for the next quarter. The answer I got was: 'this doesn't exist',' he wrote. Instead of a top down master plan, ideas bubble up from individual researchers and engineers who are encouraged to act on their own initiative. 'There's a strong bias to action (you can just do things),' he explained. '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 notes that this environment empowers individual researchers, who he says are treated like their own 'mini-executive.' But it also creates redundancy. 'There must've been ~3-4 different Codex prototypes floating around before we decided to push for a launch,' French-Owen writes. This move fast spirit comes at a cost. He describes the company's main software system, a backend monolith called sa-server, as 'a bit of a dumping ground.' In software terms, a monolith is a single, massive codebase where all services are bundled together. It can be powerful, but also difficult to manage and slow to update. Yet despite these challenges, the team managed to launch the groundbreaking Codex product in just seven weeks, a period during which French-Owen was also caring for his newborn child. '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,' he remembered. 'We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted.' This intense work culture is shrouded in profound secrecy. Engineers are not permitted to discuss their projects in detail outside the company. Information is strictly compartmentalized inside different Slack workspaces with layered permissions. French-Owen even notes that internal employees sometimes learn about new products from the media first. 'I'd regularly see news stories broken in the press that hadn't yet been announced internally,' he says. This secrecy is not just about protecting intellectual property. It is also about controlling the narrative in a high stakes global race to dominate AI, with government regulators, corporate competitors like Google and Anthropic, and critics on social media watching every move. That intense scrutiny has led to a cautious public posture, but it has not slowed the company's metabolism. 'OpenAI changes direction on a dime,' French-Owen wrote. 'It's remarkable that a company as large as OpenAI still maintains this ethos. The company makes decisions quickly, and when deciding to pursue a direction, goes all in.' Despite the internal chaos, he insists that employees genuinely care about doing the right thing. This includes a robust focus on AI safety, though he clarifies it is aimed at immediate, practical risks rather than science fiction doomsday scenarios. '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),' he wrote. In other words, OpenAI is not full of mad scientists racing toward Skynet. It is full of overworked engineers trying to stop people from tricking their chatbot into writing malicious code or harmful content. Perhaps the most surprising revelation is the degree to which OpenAI is influenced by social media, especially X (formerly Twitter). 'If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it,' French-Owen wrote. 'A friend of mine joked, 'this company runs on twitter vibes'.' In a company that often lacks traditional roadmaps, viral trends and public sentiment can act as a powerful signal for what to build next. That culture, for better or worse, has made OpenAI one of the most unpredictable and powerful forces in technology. French-Owen's post reveals an organization that thrives on ambiguity, speed, and secrecy. It is a place where brilliant ideas can emerge from anywhere, but can also get buried in a sea of Slack threads. It is where you might build the future of AI in seven weeks, but you will do it with no plan, no email, and perhaps, no sleep.
Entrepreneur
16-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
Former OpenAI Engineer Details What It's Like to Work There
The former OpenAI engineer said that there was no drama behind his decision to quit, but that he simply wanted a new beginning. When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in May 2024, the startup had around 1,000 employees. A year later, OpenAI's workforce had tripled to 3,000 employees, and French-Owen was in the top 30% by tenure. In a blog post published Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was like to work for the ChatGPT-maker for a little over a year, from May 2024 to June 2025. He quit OpenAI three weeks ago, stating that there was no "personal drama" behind his decision, but that he was simply "craving a fresh start." Related: OpenAI Is Creating AI to Do 'All the Things That Software Engineers Hate to Do' While at OpenAI, French-Owen worked on Codex, a coding assistant released in May that competes with AI coding tools like Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code. He described in his blog post that his team of eight engineers, four researchers, two designers, two go-to-market managers, and one project manager created Codex in just seven weeks. They worked most nights until 11 p.m. or midnight and came into the office on weekends to complete the project. "It's hard to overstate how incredible this level of pace was," French-Owen wrote. "I haven't seen organizations large or small go from an idea to a fully launched + freely available product in such a short window." He added later that Codex had reached 630,000 engineers in less than two months since launch. "I'm not sure I've ever worked on something so impactful in my life," French-Owen wrote. Calvin French-Owen. Photo By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images One "unusual" aspect of OpenAI, which French-Owen emphasized in his blog post, was that "there is no email," and nearly all communication happens on the workplace messaging platform Slack. He estimated that he received about 10 emails in his entire time at the company. Related: OpenAI Executives Look For These 3 Key Traits in New Hires: 'It's Actually My Advice to Students' French-Owen also stated that there's a strong bias for action at OpenAI, meaning that staff are encouraged to have good ideas and act on them. He characterized the startup as extremely meritocratic, promoting employees based on their ability to have the best ideas instead of their ability to present at meetings or play political games. French-Owen found OpenAI to be "a very secretive place" as well as "a more serious place than you might expect." The startup prohibited him from telling anyone what he was working on in detail, and it felt as though the stakes were high for the company to build a product used by 500 million global weekly users. French-Owen also wrote that when it comes to engineering personnel, there is a "very significant" Meta to OpenAI pipeline. He pointed out that OpenAI is similar to Meta in its early days, with a top-performing consumer app and "a desire to move really quickly." Before joining OpenAI, French-Owen was previously a co-founder of data startup Segment, which Twilio bought for $3.2 billion in 2020. Related: 'I'll Fight to Keep Every One of You': OpenAI Responds to Meta Poaching Talent, Says It Is 'Recalibrating' Pay Meta has been hiring talent from OpenAI, too. Meta recently poached top OpenAI researchers, including ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao and ChatGPT voice mode co-creator Shuchao Bi, with pay packages reportedly in the nine figures. OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen indicated last month in a leaked Slack message that the company is rethinking compensation in response to the poaching. OpenAI raised $40 billion in March at a valuation of $300 billion, the biggest private tech deal ever recorded. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success.
