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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

I've never seen a company publishing consistently groundbreaking features at such a speed like this one. I really wonder how their teams work. It's unprecedented at what i've seen in 15 years software

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I wonder how much they use their own products internally to speed up development and decisions.

They definitely use their own products internally, perhaps to a fault: While chatting with OpenAI recruiters, I received calendar events with nonsensical DALLE-generated calendar images, and "interview prep" guides that were clearly written by an older GPT model.

And I wonder how much they use them externally to influence the online conversations about their own products/company.

They have roles on their “Leverage Engineering” team which appears to be exactly this

https://openai.com/careers/full-stack-software-engineer-leve...

AFAIK a lot of these ideas are not new (the JSON thing was done with OS models before) and OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?), so I think this is actually all within expectations.

They're exceptional at executing and delivering, you don't get that just through having more funding.

How are they exceptional?

Their web UI was a glitchy mess for over a year. Rollouts of just data is staggered and often delayed. They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately, even though others have figured this out ages ago. There are global outages regularly. Etc…

I’m impressed by some aspects of their rapid growth, but these are financial achievements (credit due Sam) more than technical ones.

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

Not sure why you are being downvoted. You are generally right. Most of their new product rollouts were acoompanied with huge production instabilities for paying customers. Only in the most recent ones did they manage that better.

> They still can’t adhere to a JSON schema accurately

Strict mode for structured output fixes at least this though.

It’s literally just a bunch of ex-stripe employees and data scientists..

> OpenAI is possibly the hottest startup with the most funding this decade (maybe even past two decades?)

It depends on how you define startup but I don't think they will surpass Uber, ByteDance, or SpaceX until this next rumored funding round.

I'm excluding companies that have raised funding post IPO since that's an obvious cutoff for startups. The other cuttof being break even, in which case Uber has raised well over $20 billion.

Is it that most models are based on the transformer architecture ? And so performance improvements can then we used throughout their different products ?

GPT 5 is writing their code

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