I wonder one year is enough time for programmers to understand codebase, let alone meaningfully contributing patches? But then we see that job hopping is increasing common, which results in the drop in product qualities. I wonder what values are the job hoppers adding to the company.
Reflections on OpenAI
201–210 of 446 posts
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because someone claims they are speaking in good faith doesn’t mean we have to take their word for it. Most people in tech dealing with big money are doing it for cynical reasons. The talk of changing the world or “doing something hard” is just marketing typically.
Calvin works incredibly hard and has very little ego. I was surprised he joined OpenAI since he's loaded from the Segment acquisition, but if anyone it makes sense he would do this. He's always looking to find the hardest problem and work on it. That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#203> An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. Not that unusual nowadays. I'd wager every tech company founded in the last ~10 years works this way. And many of the older ones have moved off email as well.
I wonder how much of this data Salesforce can use, a literal goldmine of information
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
"but what if it's true?" There was nothing hypothesized about next-token prediction and emergent properties (they didn't know scale would allow it to generalize for sure). What if it's true is part of LLMs story, there is a mystical element here.
> There was nothing hypothesized that next-token prediction and scale could show emergent properties. Nobody ever hypothesized it before it happened? Hard to believe.
It is somewhat parallel to the story of Columbus looking for India but ending up in America.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#205He joined last year May and left recently. About one year of stay. I wonder one year is enough time for programmers to understand codebase, let alone meaningfully contributing patches? But then we see that job hopping is increasing common, which results in the drop in product qualities. I wonder what values are the job hoppers adding to the company.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#206It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that…
The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time.
I was at a company that turned into the most toxic place I had ever worked due to a CEO who decided to randomly get involved with projects, yell at people, and even fire some people on the spot.
Yet a lot of people wrote glowing stories about their time at the company on blogs or LinkedIn because it was beneficial for their future job search.
> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.
For the posts that make HN I rarely see it that way. The recent trend is for passionate employees who really wanted to make a company work to lament how sad it was that the company or department was failing.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#207> The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in. There's an API you can sign up and use–and most of the models (even if SOTA or proprietary) tend to quickl…
Probably because Deepseek trained a student model off their frontier model.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. Obvious priorities there.
That part made me do a double take. I hope his child never learns they were being put second.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would never post any criticism of an employer in public. It can only harm my own career (just as being positive can only help it). Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media! Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the…
Calvin cofounded Segment that had a $3.2B acquisition. He's not your typical employee.
You think every billionaire is gonna be unhinged like Musk calling the president a pedo on twitter?
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
What incentives? It's not a very intellectual opinion to give wild hypotheticals with nothing to go on other than "it's possible".
I am not trying to advance wild hypotheticals, but something about his behavior does not quite feel right to me. Someone who has enough money for multiple lifetimes, working like he's possessed, to launch a product minimally different than those at dozens of other companies, and leaving his wife with all the childcare, then leaving after 14 months and insisting he was not burnt out but without a clear next step, not…