Nice read on the inner workings of OpenAI. Other than the technical insights, and similarities with early Meta
When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there’s a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I’ve seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong. Put these things together, and you see a lot of core parts of infra that feel reminiscent of Meta. There was an in-house reimplementation of TAO. An effort to consolidate auth identity at the edge. And I’m sure a number of others I don’t know about.
I found it surprising that everything runs on Slack and Twitter:
An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there. If you aren’t organized, you will find this incredibly distracting. If you curate your channels and notifications, you can make it pretty workable.
The company pays a lot of attention to twitter. If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it. A friend of mine joked, “this company runs on twitter vibes”.
Also, it’s amazing how they are able to move fast and change direction quickly, reminds me of Bezo’s “disagree and commit” philosophy:
OpenAI changes direction on a dime. This was a thing we valued a lot at Segment–it’s much better to do the right thing as you get new information, vs decide to stay the course just because you had a plan. It’s remarkable that a company as large as OpenAI still maintains this ethos–Google clearly doesn’t. The company makes decisions quickly, and when deciding to pursue a direction, goes all in.