I left OpenAI three weeks ago. I had joined the company back in May 2024.
I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like.
Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI while it's fresh in my mind. You won't find any trade secrets here, more just reflections on this current iteration of one of the most fascinating organizations in history at an extremely interesting time.
To put it up-front: there wasn't any personal drama in my decision to leave–in fact I was deeply conflicted about it. It's hard to go from being a founder of your own thing to an employee at a 3,000-person organization. Right now I'm craving a fresh start.
It's entirely possible that the quality of the work will draw me back. It's hard to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade. I feel lucky to have seen some of the developments first-hand and also been a part of the Codex launch.
Obviously these aren't the views of the company–as observations they are my own. OpenAI is a big place, and this is my little window into it.
Culture
The first thing to know about OpenAI is how quickly it's grown. When I joined, the company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000 and I was in the top 30% by tenure. Nearly everyone in leadership is doing a drastically different job than they were ~2-3 years ago.
Of course, everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc. Teams vary significantly in culture: some are sprinting flat-out all the time, others are babysitting big runs, some are moving along at a much more consistent pace. There's no single OpenAI experience, and research, applied, and GTM operate on very different time horizons.
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.
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