While their growth is faster and technology different, the atmosphere feels very much like AWS back in 2014. I stayed for 8 years because I enjoyed it so much.
Reflections on OpenAI
271–280 of 446 posts
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#272It 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…
Well, as a reminder OpenAI has a non disparagement clause in their contracts, so the only thing you'll ever see from former employees is positive feedback.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calvin cofounded Segment that had a $3.2B acquisition. He's not your typical employee.
Which is a YC startup. If you know anything about YC it's the network of founders supporting each other no matter what.
> no matter what
except if you publicly speak in less than glowing terms their leaders
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#274It 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…
We already have bad guys doing X right now (literally, not the placeholders variable)
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we were to believe the embodiment theory of intelligence (it’s by far not the only one out there, but very influential and convincing), this means that building an AGI is an equivalent problem to building an artificial human. Not a puppet, not a mock, not “sorta human”, but real, fully embodied human, down to gut bacterial biome, because according to the embodiment theory, this affects intelligence too. In this fo…
Sure, if we redefine "AGI" to mean "literally cloning a human biologically", then AGI suddenly is a very different problem (mainly one of ethics, since creating human clones, educating, brainwashing, and forcing them to respond to chat messages ala chatGPT has a couple ethical issues along the way). I don't see how claiming that intelligence is multi-faceted makes AGI (the A is 'artificial' remember) impossible. Even…
“AGI” isn’t a thing and never will be. It fails even really basic scrutiny. The objective function of a human being is to keep its biological body alive and reproduce. There is no such similar objective on which a ML algorithm can be trained. It’s frankly a stupid idea propagated by people with no meaningful connection to the field and no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#276>Thanks to this bottoms-up culture, OpenAI is also very meritocratic. Historically, 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. That matters less at OpenAI then it might at other companies. The best ideas do tend to win.…
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Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#277This is just the exact same culture as Deepmind minus the "everything on Slack" bulletpoint.
Surely one wouldn't complain about infra at deepmind?
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#278This was good, but the one thing I most wanted to know about what it's like building new products inside of OpenAI is how and how much LLMs are involved in their building process.
Same! I was really hoping it was discussed. I’m assuming “lots, but it depends on what you’re working on”?
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#279> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. 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. There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months. Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, gi…
My hot take is I don’t think burn out has much to do with raw hours spent working. I feel it has a lot more to do with sense of momentum and autonomy. You can work extremely hard 100 hour weeks six months in a row, in the right team and still feel highly energized at the end of it. But if it feels like wading through a swamp, you will burn out very quickly, even if it’s just 50 hours a week. I also find ownership has…
At some level of raw hours, your health and personal relationships outside work both begin to wither, because there are only 24 hours in a day. That doesn’t always cause burnout, but it provides high contrast - what you are sacrificing.
Re: Reflections on OpenAI
#280Interesting that so many folks from Meta joined OpenAI - but Meta wasn't really able to roll its own competitive foundational model, so is that a bad sign?
Kind of interesting that folks aren't impressed by Azure's offering. I wonder if OpenAI is handicapped by that as well, compared to being on AWS or GCP.