To be fair, they accidently made a game-changing breakthrough that gained millions of users overnight, and I don't think they were ready for it.

Before chatgpt, most normal people had never heard of OpenAI. Their flagship product was basically an API that only programmers could make useful.

Team leaders at OpenAI have stated that they were not expecting the success, let alone the highest adoption rate for any product in history. In their minds, it was just a cleaned-up version of a 2-year old product. It was billed as a research preview.

So, all of a sudden you go from hiring mostly researchers because you only have to maintain an API and some mid-traffic web infra, to suddenly having the fastest growing web product in history and having to scale up as fast as you can. Keep in mind that they didn't get backing from Microsoft until January 23, 2023-- that was only 2 months ago.

I'd say we should cut them some slack.