351–360 of 446 posts
>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.…
Are you implying that a top-down corporate structure is better?
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I also find it interesting that the definition always includes the "outperforms humans" qualifier. Maybe our first AGIs will underperform humans. Imagine I built a robot dog that behaved just like a biological dog. It bonds with people, can be trained, shows emotion, communicates, likes to play, likes to work, solves problems, understands social cues, and is loyal. IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it is…
> IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it isn't writing essays or producing business plans. I'm not sure it would, though. The "G" in AGI stands for "General", which a dog obviously can't showcase. The comparison must be done against humans, since the goal is to ultimately have the system perform human tasks. The definition mentioned by tedsanders seems adequate to me. Most of the terms are fuzzy ("most", "…
That isn't obvious to me at all. If you don't like the dog analogy, lets try another: Does a human toddler qualify as having general intelligence?
>Safety is actually more of a thing than you might guess Considering all the people who led the different safety teams have left or been fired, Superalignment has been a total bust and the various accounts from other employees about the lack of support for safety work I find this statement incredibly out of touch and borderline intentionally misleading.
This is not true and it’s weird hyperbole misinformation
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This is not true and it’s weird hyperbole misinformation
Yeah I agree safety is not more of a thing at OpenAI, it is less of a thing then you might think.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlProblem/comments/1iyb7ov/key...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai...
https://fortune.com/2025/01/28/openai-researcher-steven-adle...
https://www.centeraipolicy.org/work/openai-safety-teams-depa...
What a great post. Some points that stood out to me: - Progress is iterative and driven by a seemingly bottom up, meritocratic approach. Not a top down master plan. Essentially, good ideas can come from anywhere and leaders are promoted based on execution and quality of ideas, not political skill. - People seem empowered to build things without asking permission there, which seems like it leads to multiple parallel p…
> I liked the take of the path to AGI being framed as a three horse race between OpenAI (consumer product DNA), Anthropic (business/enterprise DNA), and Google (infrastructure/data DNA) Wouldn't want to forget Meta which also has consumer product DNA. They literally championed the act of making the consumer the product.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-...
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> no matter what except if you publicly speak in less than glowing terms their leaders
Some books do a good job of documenting the power struggles that happen behind closed doors, big egos backed by millions clashing over ideas and control. Not gonna lie, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Feels like something went down on Slack, some doors got slammed, and this article is just trying to keep them unlocked. Because no matter how rich you are in the Valley, if you…
Engineers thinking they're building god is such a good marketing strategy. I can't overstate it. It's even difficult to be rational about it. I don't actually believe it's true, I think it's pure hype and LLMs won't even approximate AGI. But this idea is sort of half-immune to criticism or skepticism: you can always respond with "but what if it's true?". The stakes are so high that the potentially infinite payoff sno…
Similar to Pascal's wager, which pretty much amounts to "yeah, God is probably not real, _but what if it is_? The utility of getting into heaven is infinite (and hell is infinitely negative), so any non-zero probability that God is real should make you be religious, just in case." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager#Analysis_with...
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…
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…
Every, and I mean every, technology company scours social media. Amazon has a team that monitors social media posts to make sure employees, their spouses, their friends don’t leak info, for example.
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This guy who is already independently wealthy chose working 16-17h 7 days a week instead of raising his newborn child and thanks his partner for “childcare duties”. Pretty much tells you everything you need to know.
Yeah as someone who has a young child this entire post made me feel like I was taking crazy pills. Working this much with a newborn is toxic behavior and if a company demands it then it is toxic culture. And writing about it as anything but that feels like some combination of Stockholm syndrome, being a workaholic, and marketing spin. Being passionate about something and giving yourself to a project can be amazing, b…
i.e. Silicon Valley "grind culture".
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I think any reasonable manager would appreciate that sort of interest in a project and would support it, not demand it.
And, at least if I'm your manager, zealously defend the sanctity of your recovery time afterward.