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Reflections on OpenAI

calv.info

201–210 of 446 posts

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#201
He 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

#202
post #134

Earlier 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.

Someone putting their work project over their newborn in this circumstance (returning early from pay leave no less) is 100% ego driven.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#203
post #87

> 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

isnt there a clause in the slack contract you cant use the slack api to pull data to train an AI

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#204
post #186

Earlier 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.

Someone else can confirm, but from my understanding, no they did not know sentiment analysis, reasoning, few shot learning, chain of thought, etc would emerge at scale. Sentiment analysis was one of the first things they noticed a scaled up model could generalize. Remember, all they were trying to do was get better at next-token prediction, there was no concrete idea to achieve "instruction following", for example. We can never truly say going up another order of magnitude on the number of params won't achieve something (it could, for reasons unknown, just like before).

It is somewhat parallel to the story of Columbus looking for India but ending up in America.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#205

He 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.

Well, since he worked on a brand-new product, it probably didn't matter too much.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#206

It 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…

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience.

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
post #50

> 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…

OpenAI hides their model's CoT (inference-time compute, thinking)

Probably because Deepseek trained a student model off their frontier model.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#208

Earlier 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.

Many people are bad parents. Many are bad at their jobs. Many at bad at both. At least this guy is good at his job, and can provide very well for his family.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#209
post #136

Earlier 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.

That's even more of a reason not to bad mouth other billionaires/billion dollar companies. Billionaires and billion dollar companies work together all the time. It's not a massive pool. There is a reason beef between companies and top level execs and billionaires is all rumors and tea-talk until a lawsuit drops out of no where.

You think every billionaire is gonna be unhinged like Musk calling the president a pedo on twitter?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#210
post #161

Earlier 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…

i know calvin, and he's one of the most authentic people i've worked with in tech. this could not be more off the mark
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