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Reflections on OpenAI

calv.info

11–20 of 446 posts

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#13
wham. thanks for sharing anecdotal episodes from OAI's inner mecahnism from an eng perspective. I wonder if OAI wouldn't be married to Azure would the infra be more resilient, require less eng effort to invent things to just run (at scale).

What i haven't seen much is the split between eng and research and how people within the company are thinking about AGI and the future, workforce, etc. Is it the usual SF wonderland or is there an OAI specific value alignment once someone is working there.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#14
post #3

> 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…

It's not sustainable, at all, but if it's happening just a couple times throughout your career, it's doable; I know people who went through that process, at that company, and came out of it energized.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#15
post #3

> 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…

This is what being a wartime company looks like

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#16

> 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. I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a pri…

i don't really understand this thought process. all technology has it's advantages and drawbacks and we are currently going through the hype and growing pains process.

you could just as well argue the internet, phones, tv, cars, all adhere to the exact same prisoner's dilemma situation you talk about. you could just as well use AI to rubber duck or ease your mental load than treat it like some rat-race to efficiency.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#17

> 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. I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a pri…

[flagged]

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#19
post #3

> 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…

I am not saying that’s easy work but most motivated people do this. And if you’re conscious of this that probably means you viewed it more as a job than your calling.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#20

> 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. I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a pri…

> I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.

Personally, my life has significantly improved in meaningful ways with AI. Apart from the obvious work benefits (I'm shipping code ~10x faster than pre-AI), LLMs act as my personal nutritionist, trainer, therapist, research assistant, executive assistant (triaging email, doing SEO-related work, researching purchases, etc.), and a much better/faster way to search for and synthesize information than my old method of using Google.

The benefits I've gotten are much more than conveniences and the only argument I can find that anyone else is worse off because of these benefits is that I don't hire junior developers anymore (at max I was working with 3 for a contracting job). At the same time, though, all of them are also using LLMs in similar ways for similar benefits (and working on their own projects) so I'd argue they're net much better off.

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