My first job out of college was at Google Ads on a team of 7 creating a new Ad format that ended up being pretty successful. That ad type has now made billions of dollars, and I did get a promo and bonuses, but I never expected anything like profit share because it felt so obvious to me that I was standing on the shoulders of thousands of giants.

There was the ads policy team that made sure our ads weren't offensive. There was the Cider team that gave us an efficient IDE for doing our work. There were the SREs that made sure we wouldn't break everything when we ran releases. There were internal tooling teams that made our tests reliable, our builds fast, and our development easy. There were the creators of the frameworks we used on the frontends/backends/infra. There was the creator of Memegen that kept me sane. There were dozens of folks telling me what to do as a new grad that made my job easy. There was the experiments/AB testing folks who helped us tune our models.

At the end of the day, I was converting protobufs from one format to another, making a UI here or there, parsing some logs, making minor model adjustments, etc. It was work, pretty similar to what I've done at other companies, it was just that the scale was different.

I always wonder when I see stories like this if these folks really were as critical as they claim to be or if they were just in the right place at the right time to get a bunch of visibility. Especially when in that Twitter thread there is this conversation:

> What do you mean by created? Did you code it from scratch yourself?

> Alex: Yes, me and 1-6 others.

> Scientist at OpenAI: hey

> Alex: correction: + much of OpenAI eng, plus years of their bleeding edge research

I wonder if Alex maybe had more help than he's claiming in other places as well.