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Reflections on OpenAI

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Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#51

Post by parpfish »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #38
bhl wrote: 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…

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…

i hope thats not a hot take because it's 100% correct.

people conflate the terms "burnout" and "overwork" because they seem semantically similar, but they are very different.

you can fix overwork with a vacation. burnout is a deeper existential wound.

my worst bout of burnout actually came in a cushy job where i was consistently underworked but felt no autonomy or sense of purpose for why we were doing the things we were doing.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#52

Post by hinterlands »

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 there are people who feel rudderless because there is no roadmap or a thing carved out for them to own. Similarly, the flip side of "strong bias to action" and "changes direction on a dime" is that everything is chaotic and there's no consistent vision from the executives.

This cracked me up a bit, though: "As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#53

Post by apwell23 »

sashank_1509 wrote: post #38
bhl wrote: 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…

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…

> 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.

Something about youth being wasted on young.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#54

Post by layer8 »

tines wrote: post #31

Interesting how ChatGPT’s style of writing has made people start bolding so much text.

I remember this being common business practice for written communication (email, design documents) circa 20 years ago, so that people at least read the important points, or can quickly pick them out again later.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#55

Post by smeeger »

> everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing

making human beings obsolete is not the right thing. nobody in openAI is doing the right thing.

in another part of the post he says safety teams work primarily on making sure the models dont say anything racist as well as limiting helpful tips on building weapons of terror… and that AGI safety is basically not a focus. i dont think this company should be allowed to exist. they dont have ANY right to threaten the existence and wellbeing of me and my kids!

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#56

Post by bradyriddle »

alwa wrote: post #46
bhl wrote: 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…

If anyone tried to demand that I work that way, I’d say absolutely not. But when I sink my teeth into something interesting and important (to me) for a few weeks’ or months’ nonstop sprint, I’d say no to anyone trying to rein me in, too! Speaking only for myself, I can recognize those kinds of projects as they first start to make my mind twitch. I know ahead of time that I’ll have no gas left the tank by the end, and…

I'd be curious to know about this community. Is this a formal group or just the people that you've collected throughout your life?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#57

Post by threetonesun »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #43
beebmam wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those that love the work they do don't burn out, because every moment working on their projects tends to be joyful. I personally hate working with people who hate the work they do, and I look forward to them being burned out

"You don't really love what you do unless you're willing to do it 17 hours a day every day" is an interesting take. You can love what you do but if you do more of it than is sustainable because of external pressures then you will burn out. Enjoying your work is not a vaccine against burnout. I'd actually argue that people who love what they do are more likely to have trouble finding that balance. The person who hates…

Weird how we went from like the 4 hour workweek and all those charts about how people historically famous in their field spent only a few hours a day on what they were most famous for, to "work 12+ hours a day or you're useless".

Also this is one of a few examples I've read lately of "oh look at all this hard work I did", ignoring that they had a newborn and someone else actually did all of the hard work.

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#59

Post by Rebelgecko »

bhl wrote: 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…

How did they have any time left to be a parent?

Re: Reflections on OpenAI

#60

Post by bawana »

This is a politically correct farewell letter. Obviously something we little people who need jobs have to resort to so the next HR manager doesn't think we are a risk to stock valuation. For a deeper understanding, read Empire of AI by Karen Hao. She defrocks Sam Altman to reveal he is just another human. Like Steve Jobs, he is an adept salesman appealing to the naïve altruistic sentiments of humans while maintaining his singular focus on scale. Not so different from the archetype of Rockefeller in his pursuit of monopoly through scale using any means, sam is no different than google which even forgot its own rallying cry ‘dont be evil’. Other actors in the story seem to have been infected by the same meme virus, leaving openAI for their own empires- Musk left after he and altman conflicted over who would be CEO.(birth of xAI). Amodei, his sister and others left to start anthropic. Sutskever left to start ‘safe something or other’(smacks of the same misdirection sam used when openAI formed as a nonprofit ) giving the idea of a nonprofit a mantle of evil since OPENAI has pivoted to profit.

The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.

Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.

Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.

Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.

Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?

Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?

These are the questions that come to mind after Hao’s historic summary.

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