A Top Engineer Reveals OpenAI’s Culture of Secrets and Chaos
Calvin French-Owen only worked at OpenAI for a year, but he saw more in twelve months than most engineers do in a lifetime. As a successful founder turned employee, he joined the world’s leading artificial intelligence company in May 2024 and left in June 2025. What he walked into was not a typical corporate tech job. It was a startup strapped to a rocket ship, powered by GPUs, Slack notifications, and a culture of secrecy that makes Apple look like an open book. “The first thing to know about