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Economic Times
30-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
Former senior engineer pens what it was like to work at OpenAI
Agencies A senior engineer at OpenAI who recently resigned after his year-long stint at OpenAI wrote a long-winding blog post, reflecting on his experience at the ChatGPT maker, acknowledging its fast growth and internal chaos in the past year. 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 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." Former CEO Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has recently raised $2 billion in a seed funding round, valuing the six-month-old venture at $10 billion. Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. Leadership shakeups cloud Ola Electric's revival attempts Trent trips on the ramp. Is it still worth the splurge or time to change brands? Just before the Air India crash, did India avert another deadly mishap? Can Indian IT protect its high valuation as AI takes centre stage? Stock Radar: Why is Hindustan Zinc looking good for a short-term bounce after falling over 35% from highs? These large-caps have 'strong buy' & 'buy' recos and an upside potential of more than 25% Buy, Sell or Hold: Motilal Oswal maintains buy rating on HCL Tech; ICICI Securities maintains sell call on Tata Technologies Consolidation: An opportunity or threat? Depends on…. 5 mid-cap stocks from different sectors with upside potential of over 26%
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
NDTV
18-07-2025
- Business
- NDTV
"Pretty Workable": Ex-OpenAI Employee On Company's Email-Free Workplace
A former OpenAI employee has shed light on the inner workings of ChatGPT's parent business, revealing a practically email-free workplace. Calvin French-Owen, who worked at OpenAI from May 2024 to June 2025, claimed that during his tenure at the company, he received only about 10 emails. In a detailed blog post, Mr French-Owen claimed that Slack, not email, was OpenAI's primary means of employee communication. "An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack," he wrote in the blog post published on Tuesday. "There is no email. I maybe received 10 emails in my entire time there. If you aren't organised, you will find this incredibly distracting," Mr French-Owen added. Compared to other digital titans, this policy of prioritising Slack over email is unconventional. Despite Slack's shortcomings, which Mr French-Owen described as "incredibly distracting," he said that it can be "pretty workable" if users carefully control channel overload and notification settings. He said his 14-month employment with the company was demanding, covert, and unrelentingly high-pressure, with "vibes" on social media carrying unexpected weight. He characterised a fast-paced, bottom-up culture in which projects come up on their own, move quickly, and occasionally run into each other. "OpenAI is incredibly bottoms-up, especially in research... Rather than a grand 'master plan', progress is iterative and uncovered as new research bears fruit," Mr French-Owen said. Speaking of OpenAI's culture, Mr French-Owen said the company expanded exponentially. There were just over 1,000 employees at the company when he started, and after a year, it had surpassed 3,000, and Mr French-Owen was among the top 30 per cent by tenure. "Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were 2-3 years ago," he added. He also refuted the claim that OpenAI was careless with security. In addition to more abstract, long-term risks, Mr French-Owen observed a strong emphasis on practical risks, such as political bias, hate speech, and quick injection. Mr French-Owen, a former startup founder whose company, Segment, was purchased by Twilio, claimed that he left OpenAI because he was exhausted and had a strong desire to lead rather than follow, and not because of any drama. Although he expressed "deep conflict" about quitting, he said that he felt "lucky" to have been a member of the elite team developing Codex, OpenAI's grandiose software engineering agent.
Business Insider
17-07-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
An OpenAI employee's farewell letter offers a rare window into what it's like working at the company
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."
Time of India
16-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Former senior engineer pens what it was like to work at OpenAI
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills A senior engineer at OpenAI who recently resigned after his year-long stint at OpenAI wrote a long-winding blog post, reflecting on his experience at the ChatGPT maker, acknowledging its fast growth and internal chaos in the past year. 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."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 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."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 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).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."Former CEO Mira Murati 's Thinking Machines Lab has recently raised $2 billion in a seed funding round, valuing the six-month-old venture at $10 billion.
