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I’m joining OpenAI

steipete.me

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Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has a heartbeat operation and you can message it via messaging apps. Instead of going to your computer and launching claude code to have it do something, or setting up cron jobs to do things, you can message it from your phone whenever you have an idea and it can set some stuff up in the background or setup a scheduled report on its own, etc. So it's not that it has to be running and generating tokens 24/7, it's j…

AI companies must hate this right? Because they're selling tokens at a loss?

From all indications the big players have healthy margins on inference.

Research and training are the cost sinks.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#723

I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human. We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. The…

It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions a…

I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way.

"Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scaling journey where you have to evolve the stack structure for the purpose of getting those features out fast sustainably. That's where the quality of the engineering makes a difference.

(Anecdotally, the YouTube codebase may be locally messy, but its overall architecture is beautiful. You cannot have a system that uploads, processes, encodes, stores, and indexes massive amounts of videos every hour of every day that in the overwhelming majority of cases will be watched less than 10 times, and still make a profit, without some brilliant engineering coming in somewhere.)

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#724

I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human. We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. The…

It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions a…

You also believe that AI will replace mathematicians?

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#725
I feel like a lot of people miss out what this hire and his decision to join are really about. I (think) I can relate, because I once had a viral hit (with interviews, press, etc) that made me "silicon valley famous" for a while, and ended up with me joining a mega-company despite lots of speculation I'd build it into a startup.

The two sides:

* From his POV: He said he's not interested in doing "another company" after spending 13 years trying to build a startup. I imagine there's another aspect too, which is that OpenClaw is not in itself an inherently revenue-generating product, nor is it IP-defensible. This was my situation. My viral hit could (and soon was) replicated by many others. I had the advantage of being "the guy who invented that cool thing", but otherwise I would be starting from scratch. It was a mind-fuck having a huge hit on my hands from one day to the next, but with no obvious direction on how to capitalize on it.

* Then from the company's POV: despite hiring thousands and thousands of employees, only a tiny handful of them ever capture any "magic." You've got an army of product managers who have never actually built or conceived of a product people love, and engineers who usually propose ideas that are ok but probably not true gold. So now here we have a guy who did actually conjure up something magical that really resonated with people. Can he do it again? Unknown, but he's already proved himself in the ideas space more than most people, so it's worth a shot for the company.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#726

I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human. We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. The…

> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success"

Kids and young people have known this forever at this point. Sadly.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny to me how still so many don't realize you don't get hired for the best positions for being a 10x programmer who excels at hackerrank, you get hired for your proven ability to deliver useful products. Creativity, drive, vision, whatever. Code is a means to an end. If you're the type of programmer who thinks of yourself as just a programmer, and take pride in your secure code, ability to optimize functions a…

I literally got my current cushy gig to fix a codebase that was crumbling under its own unmaintainable weight at a company that, like you, thought that quality doesn't matter. This is not the first time in my career I get a great job that way. "Quality doesn't matter" people are why I'm not worried about employment. While there is value in getting features out fast, definitely, there always comes a point on your scal…

Both can be true: people who deliver products based on vision and all are very much needed and cracked devs who excel in technical details as well. Peter and you are of these respective groups then.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#729

I'm happy for the guy, but am I jealous as well? Well yes, and that's perfectly human. We have someone who vibe coded software with major security vulnerabilities. This is reported by many folks We also have someone who vibecoded without reading any of the code. This is self admitted by this person. We don't know how much of the github stars are bought. We don't know how many twitter followings/tweets are bought. The…

You are most likely confusing OpenClaw with Moltbook, which is the project that had the most glaring vulnerabilities. But even if OpenClaw was full of holes it would not matter. Peter is not just a random "vibe coder" and he does not need to be hired by OpenAI to achieve "success". Before this he founded and sold a company that raised €100M. It is not his first project in the space either (see VibeTunnel for instance…

What vision? Everyone and their mother has been trying to build useful AI assistants and personal CRMs since computers were invented - way before LLMs. He glued it together, and he succeeded because he executed before anyone else.

I applaud what he's done, and wish him luck trying to get this working safely at scale, but the idea that he's some visionary that has seen something the rest of the world hasn't is ludicrous.

Re: I’m joining OpenAI

#730
post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you get hired for your proven ability to (…) No, you get hired for your perceived ability to (…) The world is full of Juliuses, which is a big reason everything sucks. https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

In a couple of decades of work, I have never actually met anyone like Julius. Typically, I have found that those who excel at listening and presenting are also capable of understanding the technology at an appropriate level for their role -- it's not like this stuff is truly complicated, after all. I have met quite a few people who are more focussed on the business than the technology, but those people tend to end up…

oh man, I have met several Juliuses. one of them was my boss till he made an error as similar to the one the original Julius made, but unfortunately too late I had to leave the company earlier he made my life hell. now he is at another company, as long as he is at this company I won't apply there, if they hire him they have no place for me
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