Reflections on OpenAI
calv.info
calv.info
I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.
Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that there are people who feel rudderless because there is no roadmap or a thing carved out for them to own. Similarly, the flip side of "strong bias to action" and "changes direction on a dime" is that everything is chaotic and there's no consistent vision from the executives.
This cracked me up a bit, though: "As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!
Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media!
Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the best possible light. I think it all makes him look like a mark, which is desirable for employers, so I guess it is working.
His experience at OpenAI feels overly positive and saccharine, with a few shockingly naive comments that others have noted. I think there is obvious incentive. One reason for this is, he may be in burnout, but does not want to admit it. Another is, he is looking to the future: to keep options open for funding and connections if (when) he chooses to found again. He might be lonely and just want others in his life. Or to feel like he's working on something that "matters" in some way that his other company didn't.
I don't know at all what he's actually thinking. But the idea that he is resistant to incentives just because he has had a successful exit seems untrue. I know people who are as rich as he is, and they are not much different than me.
Also, keep in mind that people aren't the same. What seems hard to you might be easy to others, vice versa.
I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but the more I read about OpenAI, the more I like Meta. And I deleted Facebook years ago.
The fact that several commenters know the author personally goes some way to explain why the entire comment section seems to have missed the utterly unbalanced nature of the article.
I've always heard horror stories about Amazon, but when I speak to most people at, or from Amazon, they have great things to say. Some people are just optimists, too.
You think every billionaire is gonna be unhinged like Musk calling the president a pedo on twitter?
except if you publicly speak in less than glowing terms their leaders
Not gonna lie, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Feels like something went down on Slack, some doors got slammed, and this article is just trying to keep them unlocked. Because no matter how rich you are in the Valley, if you're not on good terms with Sam, a lot of doors will close. He's the prodigy son of the Valley, adopted by Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, and secretly admired by Elon Musk. With Paul Graham's help, he spent 10 years building an army of followers by mentoring them and giving them money. Most of them are now millionaires with influence. And now, even the most powerful people in tech and politics need him. Jensen Huang needs his models to sell servers. Trump needs his expertise to upgrade defence systems. I saw him shaking hands with an Arab sheikh the other day. The kind of handshake that says: with your money and my ambition, we can rule the world.
I guess that's why he's filthy rich.
> The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade. Most nights were up until 11 or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30 every morning. Heading to the office again at 7a. Working most weekends.
Their baby, I presume…not just hers.
Literally any excuse for the man to not be involved.
Couldn't be me. I do my work, then clock the fuck off, and I don't even have kids. I wasn't put upon this earth to write code or solve bugs, I just do that for the cash.
Then later they even have the balls to complain how kids these days are unruly, never acknowledging massive gaps in their own care.
Plus it certainly helps the kid with bonding, emotional stability and keeps the parent more in touch emotionally with their own kid(s).
My favorite is ‘I can’t understand why my kid didn’t turn into a responsible adult!’
Cue look back on what opportunities the parent put them in to learn and practice those skills, over the last 20 years.
Brown, G. L., Mangelsdorf, S. C., & Neff, C. (2012). Father involvement, paternal sensitivity, and father-child attachment security in the first 3 years. Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43), 26(3), 421–430. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027836
Deneault, A. A., Bakermans-Kranenburg, M. J., Groh, A. M., Fearon, P. R. M., & Madigan, S. (2021). Child-father attachment in early childhood and behavior problems: A meta-analysis. New directions for child and adolescent development, 2021(180), 43–66. https://doi.org/10.1002/cad.20434
Scism, A. R., & Cobb, R. L. (2017). Integrative Review of Factors and Interventions That Influence Early Father-Infant Bonding. Journal of obstetric, gynecologic, and neonatal nursing : JOGNN, 46(2), 163–170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jogn.2016.09.004
Jeong, J., Franchett, E. E., Ramos de Oliveira, C. V., Rehmani, K., & Yousafzai, A. K. (2021). Parenting interventions to promote early child development in the first three years of life: A global systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS medicine, 18(5), e1003602. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1003602
Joas, J., & Möhler, E. (2021). Bonding in Early Infancy Predicts Childrens' Social Competences in Preschool Age. Frontiers in psychiatry, 12, 687535. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.687535
Thümmler R, Engel E-M, Bartz J. Strengthening Emotional Development and Emotion Regulation in Childhood—As a Key Task in Early Childhood Education. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2022; 19(7):3978. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19073978
Source: World Health Organization, Child maltreatment, Fact sheet, 2020 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/child-maltr...
“The term ‘child abuse and neglect’ means, at a minimum, any recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker, which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation, or an act or failure to act which presents an imminent risk of serious harm. This includes emotional neglect such as “extreme or bizarre forms of punishment, deliberate cruelty or rejection, or the failure to provide the necessary psychological nurturing.”
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) https://acf.gov/cb/law-regulation/child-abuse-prevention-and...
Emotional neglect includes “acts of omission, such as the failure to provide developmentally appropriate affection, attention, or emotional support.”
Source: APSAC, Practice Guidelines: The Investigation and Determination of Suspected Psychological Maltreatment of Children and Adolescents, 2017 https://apsac.org/guidelines
This thread reads like all the excuses for emotional and actual abandonment of a mother and a newborn for man’s little work project.
Either option is priceless :-)
I would not describe it as easy.
Sums up western workforce attitude and why immigrants continue to crush them
But I had a son 14 months ago.
There was absolutely no way I was going to miss any of a critical part in my baby’s life in order to be in an office at 2am managing a bad deployment.
Maybe I gave up my chance at PPU or RSU riches. But I know I chose a different kind of wealth that can never be replaced.
Every, and I mean every, technology company scours social media. Amazon has a team that monitors social media posts to make sure employees, their spouses, their friends don’t leak info, for example.
Much more common for OpenAI, because you lose all your vested equity if you talk negatively about OpenAI after leaving.
There is a reason why there was a cult-like behaviour on X amongst the employees in supporting to bringing back Sam as CEO when he was kicked out by the OpenAI board of directors at the time.
"OpenAI is nothing without it's people"
All of "AGI" (which actually was the lamborghinis, penthouses, villas and mansions for the employees) was all on the line and on hold if that equity went to 0 or would be denied selling their equity if they openly criticized OpenAI after they left.
I'd have sounded cult-like too under those conditions (but I also don't believe AGI is a thing, so would not have a countervailing cult belief system to weigh against that behavior).
Why not? I don't think we're anywhere close, but there are no physical limitations I can see that prevent AGI.
It's not impossible in the same way our current understanding indicates FTL travel or time travel is.
In this formulation, it’s pretty much as impossible as time travel, really.
I don't see how claiming that intelligence is multi-faceted makes AGI (the A is 'artificial' remember) impossible.
Even if _human_ intelligence requires eating yogurt for your gut biome, that doesn't preclude an artificial copy that's good enough.
Like, a dog is very intelligent, a dog can fetch and shake hands because of years of breeding, training, and maybe from having a certain gut biome. Boston Dynamics did not have to understand a single cell of the dog's stomach lining in order to make dog-robots perfectly capable of fetching and shaking hands.
I get that you're saying "yes, we've fully mapped the neurons of a fruit fly and can accurately simulate and predict how a fruit fly's brain's neurons will activate, and can create statistical analysis of fruit-fly behavior that lets us accurately predict their action for much cheaper even without the brain scan, but human brains are unique in a way where it is impossible to make any sort of simulation or prediction or facsimile that is 'good enough' because you also need to first take some bacteria from one of peter thiel's blood boys and shove it in the computer, and if we don't then we can't even begin to make a facsimile of intelligence". I just don't buy it.
My main reason for thinking general intelligence is not a thing is similar to how Turing completeness is not a thing. You can conceptualize a Turing machine, but you can't actually build one for real. I think actual general intelligence would require an infinite brain.
That's actually a great point which I'd never heard before. I agree that it's very likely that us humans do not really have GI, but rather only the intelligence that evolved stochastically to better favour our existence and reproduction, with all its positive and negative spandrels[0]. We can call that human intelligence (HI).
However, even if our "general" intelligence is a mirage, surely what most people imagine when they talk about 'AGI' is actually AHI, as in an artificial intelligence that has the same characteristics as human intelligence that in their own hubris they believe is general. Or are you making a harder argument, that human intelligence may not actually have the ability to create AHI?
> Or are you making a harder argument, that human intelligence may not actually have the ability to create AHI?
I wasn't, but I've pondered it since you brought it up. No, I don't think it's impossible to create a greater intelligence than oneself — in fact, evolution has already done it by creating animals, including but not limited to humans. I used to think it was impossible when I pondered science fictional characters like Data from TNG, but modern LLMs show that we can create it without having to understand how it works. Data is depicted as having been engineered, but machine learning is closer to evolution than it is to engineering.
OpenAI will certainly punish you for this and most likely make an example out of you, regardless of the outcome.
The goal is corporate punishment, not the rule of the law.
The tender offer limitations still are, last I heard.
Sure, maybe OA can no longer cancel your vested equity for $0... but how valuable is (non-dividend-paying) equity you can't sell? (How do you even borrow against it, say?)
(It would be a pretty fake solution if equity cancellation was halted, but equity could still be frozen. Cancelled and frozen are de facto identical until the first dividend payment, which could take decades.)
Again, who said anything about a 'specific loophole'? Needing permission to participate in a tender (which is the only way to sell) is not a 'loophole', and the threat is always there on the table. So again: how was that 'fixed'? Should I interpret your comment as implying that the tender threat of being frozen out is not fixed?
Certainly your fellow OA employee in the other comment doesn't seem to think that it's not on the table, because he is arguing that the threat is fine and harmless because it's never been exercised, which would seem to imply that it's still there...
FWIW, I have positive experiences about many of my former employers. Not all of them, but many of them.
I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.
More seriously, everyone is the hero of their own story, no matter how obvious their failings are from the outside.
I’ve been burned by empathetically adopting someone’s worldview and only realizing later how messed up and self-serving it was.
"Yes, I agree there are some downsides to our product and there are some people suffering because of that - but no one is forcing them to buy from us, they're people with agency and free will, they can act as adults and choose not to buy. Now what is this talk about feedback loops and systemic effects? It's confusing, go away."
This category is where you'll also find most of the advertising business.
The self-righteous may be the source of the greatest evil by magnitude, but day-to-day, the indifferents make it up in volume.
At 8am every morning, the executives walk across the casino floor on their way to the board room, past the depressed people who have been there gambling by themselves the entire night, seeing their faces, then they go into a boardroom to strategize ways to get them those people to gamble even harder. They brag about it. It's absolute pure villainy.
It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.
The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.
So, casino industry perhaps is a convenient pinata when in reality it's not the specific industry, it's the system.
We can have all sorts of interesting discussions about how to balance human independence with shared social costs, but it's not inherently "evil" to give consenting adults products and experiences they desire.
IMO, much more evil is caused by busybodies trying to tell other people what's good for them. See: The Drug War.
Even when the self-righteous are at their most dangerous, they have to be self-righteous and in power, e.g.:
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.or:
រក្សាន្នកគ្មានប្រយោជន៍ខាត។ បំផ្លាញអ្នកគ្មានការខាតបង់I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
Do these people have even minimal self-awareness?
Considering the high stakes, money, and undoubtedly the ego involved, the writer might have acquired a few bruises along the way, or might have lost out on some political in fights (remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own).
Another possible explanation is that the writer's just had enough - enough money to last a lifetime, just started a family, made his mark on the world, and was no longer compelled (or have been able to) keep up with methed-up fresh college grads.
Well it depends on people’s mindset. It’s like doing a hackathon and not winning. Most people still leave inspired by what they have seen other people building, and can’t wait to do it again.
…but of course not everybody likes to go to hackathons
That kind of ambition feels like the result of Bill Gates pushing Altman to the limit and Altman rising to the challenge. The famous "Gates demo" during the GPT‑2 days comes to mind.
Having said that, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection.
I liked my jobs and bosses!
Usually the level 1 people are just motivated by power and money to an unhealthy degree. The worst are true believers in something. Even something seemingly mild.
Sure, but this bit really makes me wonder if I'd like to see what the writer is prepared to do to other people to get to his payday:
"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"
The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time.
I was at a company that turned into the most toxic place I had ever worked due to a CEO who decided to randomly get involved with projects, yell at people, and even fire some people on the spot.
Yet a lot of people wrote glowing stories about their time at the company on blogs or LinkedIn because it was beneficial for their future job search.
> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.
For the posts that make HN I rarely see it that way. The recent trend is for passionate employees who really wanted to make a company work to lament how sad it was that the company or department was failing.
Yeah I had to re-read the sentence.
The positive "Farewell" post is indeed the norm. Especially so from well known, top level people in a company.
I mean, that's a leap. There could be a bond villain that sets up incentives such that people who rationalize the way they want is who gets promoted / their voice amplified. Just because individual workers generally seem like they're trying to do the best thing doesn't mean the organization is set up specifically and intentionally to make certain kinds of "shady" decisions.
> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization.
I don't think people who work on products that spy on people, create addiction or worse are as naïve as you portrayed them.
The operative word is “trying”. You can “try” to do the right thing but find yourself restricted by various constraints. If an employee actually did the right thing (e.g. publish the weights of all their models, or shed light on how they were trained and on what), they get fired. If the CEO or similarly high-ranking exec actually did the right thing, the company would lose out on profits. So, rationalization is all they can do. “I'm trying to do the right thing, but.” “People don't see the big picture because they're not CEOs and don't understand the constraints.”
> Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!
Those are the easy cases, and correspondingly, you don't see much of those - or at least few are paying attention to companies talking like that. This is distinct from saying "X is going to directly benefit the society, and we're merely charging for it as fair compensation of our efforts, much like a baker charges you for the bread" or variants of it.
This is much closer to what most tech companies try to argue, and the distinction seems to escape a lot of otherwise seemingly sharp people. In threads like this, I surprisingly often end up defending tech companies against such strawmen - because come on, if we want positive change, then making up a simpler but baseless problem, calling it out, and declaring victory, isn't helping to improve anything (but it sure does drive engagement on-line, making advertisers happy; a big part of why press does this too on a routine basis).
And yes, this applies to this specific case of OpenAI as well. They're not claiming "LLMs are going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to get rich off them, and then use that money to fund lots of nice things". They're just saying, "here, look at ChatGPT, we believe you'll find it useful, and we want to keep doing R&D in this direction, because we think it'll directly benefit society". They may be wrong about it, or they may even knowingly lie about those benefits - but this is not trickle-down economics v2.0, SaaS edition.
> I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch.
10 years from now, the significance of having participated in that launch will be ridiculously small (unless you tell yourself that it was a pivotal moment of your life, even if it objectively wasn't) versus those first weeks with your newborn will never come back. Kudos to your partner though.
We're talking about Sam Altman here, right, the dude behind Worldcoin? A literal bond-villainesque biological data harvesting scheme?
I'd be more worried about the guy who tweeted “If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.” and more recently wore a custom T-shirt that implies he's like Vito Corleone.
Or you could realize what those guys all have in common and be worried about the systems that enable them because the problem isn't a guy but a system enabling those guys to become everyone's problem.
I don't mind "Vito Corleone" joking about a volcano lair. I mind him interfering in my country's elections and politics. I shouldn't have to worry about the antics of a guy building rockets that explode and cars that can chop off your fingers because I live in a country that can protect me from those things becoming my problem, but because we have the same underlying systems I do have to worry about him because his political power is easily transferrable to any other country including mine.
This would still be true if it were a different guy. Heck, Thiel is landing contracts with his surveillance tech in my country despite the foreign politics of the US making it an obvious national and economic security risk and don't get me started on Bezos - there's plenty of "guys" already.
Not that you're wrong about the systems, just that if it was as easy as changing these systems because we can tell they're bad and allow corruption, the Enlightenment wouldn't have managed to mess up with both Smith and Marx.
That said, "I have a bigger stick" wasn't all we had before the present systems. I'm not a primitivist but I think it's a thought-terminating cliché to just look at what we have now and what came immediately before and decide that the local plateau is the best we can have.
Humanity invests a ton of resources in enforcing the status quo of power dynamics - both through overt force (be it military violence or the mere threat of violence necessary to assert contracts and claims to private property) and through more subtle means (e.g. narrative framing in education, news media and entertainment). Maintaining these systems takes immense resources and effort. But in moments of crisis our cooperative human nature can shine through until order is restored and we are ushered back into learned helplessness and mutual distrust as "the authorities" take over.
The problem isn't that the systems "allow corruption". The systems are inherently bad and corrupting. We build hierarchies of absolute power and then try to come up with solutions for the problems those hierarchies cause in the first place.
The problem isn't who rules. The problem is having rulers. Quoth Bakunin: "the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labelled the 'peoples stick'. [..] not even the reddest republic - can ever give the people what they really want."
This is a great insight. But if we think a bit deeper about why that happens, I land on because there is nobody forcing anyone to do the right thing. Our governments and laws are geared more towards preventing people from doing the wrong thing, which of course can only be identified once someone has done the wrong thing and we can see the consequences and prove that it was indeed the wrong thing. Sometimes we fail to even do that.
Some points that stood out to me:
- Progress is iterative and driven by a seemingly bottom up, meritocratic approach. Not a top down master plan. Essentially, good ideas can come from anywhere and leaders are promoted based on execution and quality of ideas, not political skill.
- People seem empowered to build things without asking permission there, which seems like it leads to multiple parallel projects with the promising ones gaining resources.
- People there have good intentions. Despite public criticism, they are genuinely trying to do the right thing and navigate the immense responsibility they hold.
- Product is deeply influenced by public sentiment, or more bluntly, the company "runs on twitter vibes."
- The sheer cost of GPUs changes everything. It is the single factor shaping financial and engineering priorities. The expense for computing power is so immense that it makes almost every other infrastructure cost a "rounding error."
- I liked the take of the path to AGI being framed as a three horse race between OpenAI (consumer product DNA), Anthropic (business/enterprise DNA), and Google (infrastructure/data DNA), with each organisation's unique culture shaping its approach to AGI.
Wouldn't want to forget Meta which also has consumer product DNA. They literally championed the act of making the consumer the product.
Twitter is a one-way communication tool. I doubt they're using it to create a feedback loop with users, maybe just to analyse their sentiment after a release?
The entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection. Those of us who live outside the US are more sceptical, especially after everything revealed about OpenAI in the book Empire of AI.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/mark-zuckerberg-says-meta-...
There was nothing hypothesized about next-token prediction and emergent properties (they didn't know scale would allow it to generalize for sure). What if it's true is part of LLMs story, there is a mystical element here.
Nobody ever hypothesized it before it happened? Hard to believe.
It is somewhat parallel to the story of Columbus looking for India but ending up in America.
Some would say it still hasn't (to an agreeable level).
But I'd go further: even abilities that do appear "emergent" often aren't that mysterious when you consider the training data. Take instruction following - it seems magical that models can suddenly follow instructions they weren't explicitly trained for, but modern LLMs are trained on massive instruction-following datasets (RLHF, constitutional AI, etc.). The model is literally predicting what it was trained on. Same with chain-of-thought reasoning - these models have seen millions of examples of step-by-step reasoning in their training data.
The real question isn't whether these abilities are "emergent" but whether we're measuring the right things and being honest about what our training data contains. A lot of seemingly surprising capabilities become much less surprising when you audit what was actually in the training corpus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_wager#Analysis_with...
Which god should I believe in, though? There are so many.
And what if I pick the wrong god?
Not sure how you can say this so confidently. Many would argue they're already pretty close, at least on a short time horizon.
There is a decade + worth of implementation details and new techniques to invent before we have something functionally equivalent to Jarvis.
There's so much compression / time-dilation in the industry: large projects are pushed out and released in weeks; careers are made in months.
Worried about how sustainable this is for its people, given the risk of burnout.
You can love what you do but if you do more of it than is sustainable because of external pressures then you will burn out. Enjoying your work is not a vaccine against burnout. I'd actually argue that people who love what they do are more likely to have trouble finding that balance. The person who hates what they do usually can't be motivated to do more than the minimum required of them.
Also this is one of a few examples I've read lately of "oh look at all this hard work I did", ignoring that they had a newborn and someone else actually did all of the hard work.
I don’t delight in anybody’s suffering or burnout. But I do feel relief when somebody is suffering from the pace or intensity, and alleviates their suffering by striking a more sustainable balance for them.
I feel like even people energized by efforts like that pay the piper: after such a period I for one “lay fallow”—tending to extended family and community, doing phone-it-in “day job” stuff, being in nature—for almost as long as the creative binge itself lasted.
I think there are a lot of people that love their craft but are in specific working conditions that lead to burnout, and all I was saying is that I don't think it means they love their craft any less.
people conflate the terms "burnout" and "overwork" because they seem semantically similar, but they are very different.
you can fix overwork with a vacation. burnout is a deeper existential wound.
my worst bout of burnout actually came in a cushy job where i was consistently underworked but felt no autonomy or sense of purpose for why we were doing the things we were doing.
Something about youth being wasted on young.
Well given the amount of money OpenAI pays their engineers, this is what it comes with. It tells you that this is not a daycare or for coasters or for the faint of heart, especially at a startup at the epicenter of AI competition.
There is now a massive queue of lots of desperate 'software engineers' ready to kill for a job at OpenAI and will not tolerate the word "burnout" and might even work 24 hours to keep the job away from others.
For those who love what they do, the word "burnout" doesn't exist for them.
But when I sink my teeth into something interesting and important (to me) for a few weeks’ or months’ nonstop sprint, I’d say no to anyone trying to rein me in, too!
Speaking only for myself, I can recognize those kinds of projects as they first start to make my mind twitch. I know ahead of time that I’ll have no gas left the tank by the end, and I plan accordingly.
Luckily I’ve found a community who relate to the world and each other that way too. Often those projects aren’t materially rewarding, but the few that are (combined with very modest material needs) sustain the others.
That just turns out to be the kind of person who likes to be around me, and I around them. It’s something I wish I had been more deliberate about cultivating earlier in my life, but not the sort of thing I regret.
In my case that’s a lot of artists/writers/hackers, a fair number of clergy, and people working in service to others. People quietly doing cool stuff in boring or difficult places… people whose all-out sprints result in ambiguity or failure at least as often as they do success. Very few rich people, very few who seek recognition.
The flip side is that neither I nor my social circles are all that good at consistency—but we all kind of expect and tolerate that about each other. And there’s lots of “normal” stuff I’m not part of, which I probably could have been if I had tried. I don’t know what that means to the business-minded people around here, but I imagine it includes things like corporate and nonprofit boards, attending sports events in stadia, whatever golf people do, retail politics, Society Clubs For Respectable People, “Summering,” owning rich people stuff like a house or a car—which is fine with me!
More than enough is too much :)
Obvious priorities there.
There are plenty worse than that. The storied dramatic fiction parent missing out on a kid's life is much better than what a lot of children have.
Yet, all kids grow up, and the greatest factor determining their overall well-being through life is socioeconomic status, not how many hours a father was present.
About the guy: I think if it’s just a one time thing it’s ok but the way he presents himself gives reason for doubt
It's debatable whether a parent always needs to "lead by example": for example, I've never played hockey, but I introduced my son to it, and he played for a while (until injuries made us reconsider and he stopped). For mental well-being, make sure to not display your worst emotions in front of your kids - they will definitely notice, and will probably carry it for the rest of their lives.
This guy is young. He can experience all that again, if it is that much of a failure, and he really wants to.
Sure, there are ethical issues here, but really, they can be offset by restitution, lets be honest.
This is what ex-employees said in Empire of AI, and it's the reason Amodei and Kaplan left OpenAI to start Anthropic.
Being passionate about something and giving yourself to a project can be amazing, but you need to have the bandwidth to do it without the people you care about suffering because of that choice.
i.e. Silicon Valley "grind culture".
As for caring for a newborn, that is the least impactful moment you have with your kids.
Seems like he made a reasonable trade-off and will be there for all their formative years.
This sets off my red flags: companies that say they are meritocratic, flat etc., often have invisible structures that favor the majority. Valve Corp is a famous example for that where this leads to many problems, see https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-unusual-corporate-structure-c...
>It sounds like a wonderful place to work, free from hierarchy and bureaucracy. However, according to a new video by People Make Games (a channel dedicated to investigative game journalism created by Chris Bratt and Anni Sayers), Valve employees, both former and current, say it's resulted in a workplace two of them compared to The Lord of The Flies.
Could work with a bunch of similarly skilled people in a narrow niche
Lots of good info in the post, surprised he was able to share so much publicly. I would have kept most of the business process info secret.
Edit: NVM. That 78k pull requests is for all users of Codex, not all engineers of Codex.
Note he was specifically on the team that was launching OpenAI's version of a coding agent, so I imagine the numbers before that product existed could be very different to the numbers after.
This paragraph doesn't make any sense. If you read a lot of Zvi or LessWrong, the misaligned intelligence explosion is the safety risk you're thinking of! So readers "guesses" are actually right that OpenAI isn't really following Sam Altman's:
"Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."[0]
To quote Jonathan Nightingale from his famous thread on how Google sabotaged Mozilla [1]:
--- start quote ---
The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them, just like I know plenty on the Chrome team. They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional.
--- end quote ---
Replace that with OpenAI
[1] https://archive.is/2019.04.15-165942/https://twitter.com/joh...
Considering all the people who led the different safety teams have left or been fired, Superalignment has been a total bust and the various accounts from other employees about the lack of support for safety work I find this statement incredibly out of touch and borderline intentionally misleading.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ControlProblem/comments/1iyb7ov/key...
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158403/openai...
https://fortune.com/2025/01/28/openai-researcher-steven-adle...
https://www.centeraipolicy.org/work/openai-safety-teams-depa...
- The company was a little over 1,000 people. One year later, it is over 3,000.
- Changes direction on a dime.
- Very secretive place.
With the added "everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost" and "this creates a lot of strange-looking code because there are so many ways you can write Python".
Is not something that is going to last.
I don't know what's the rationale for not hiring tech writers other than nobody suggesting it yet, which is sad. Great dev tools require great docs, and great docs require teams that own them and grow them as a product.
People look at it as a cost a and nothing else.
https://github.com/sponsors/tiangolo#sponsors
https://github.com/fastapi/fastapi?tab=readme-ov-file#sponso...
Is that why they have a dozens of different models?
> Many leaders who were incredibly competent weren't very good at things like presenting at all-hands or political maneuvering.
I don't think the Sam/Board drama confirms this.
> The thing that I appreciate most is that the company is that it "walks the walk" in terms of distributing the benefits of AI. Cutting edge models aren't reserved for some enterprise-grade tier with an annual agreement. Anybody in the world can jump onto ChatGPT and get an answer, even if they aren't logged in.
Did you thank your OpenAI overlords for letting you access their sacred latest models?
+-+-
This reads like an Ad for Open AI or an attempt by the author to court them again? I am not sure how anyone can take his words seriously.
The comparison here should clearly be with the other frontier model providers: Anthropic, Google, and potentially Deepseek and xAI.
Comparing them gives the exact opposite conclusion - OpenAI is the only model provider that gates API access to their frontier models behind draconic identity verification (also, Worldcoin anyone?). Anthropic and Google do not do this.
OpenAI hides their model's CoT (inference-time compute, thinking). Anthropic to this day shows their CoT on all of their models.
Making it pretty obvious this is just someone patting themselves on the back and doing some marketing.
CloseAI.
Probably because Deepseek trained a student model off their frontier model.
Yet such meta-analysis avoids discussion of the issue at hand, in this case where the culture and engineering of an up and coming company are put on display in a positive light.
That’s ok.
Just don’t complain about the cost of daycare, private school tuition, or your parents senior home/medical bills.
How does any of this relates to the amount of hours one works?
This is a very interesting nugget, and if accurate this could become their Achilles heel.
Most top-of-their-field researchers are on top of their field because they really love it, and are willing to sink insane amount of hours into doing things they love.
I doubt many people would say something contrary to this about their (former) colleagues, which means we should always take this with a (large) grain of salt.
Do I think (most) AT&T employees wanted to let the NSA spy on us? Probably not. Google engineers and ICE? Palantir and.. well idk i think everyone there knows what Palantir does.
Not that unusual nowadays. I'd wager every tech company founded in the last ~10 years works this way. And many of the older ones have moved off email as well.
This past week I canceled my $20 subscription to GPT, advocated my friends do the same (i got them hooked) and just will be using Gemini from now on. It can create AI maps instantly for road trip travel routes to planning creek tubing trips and more. GPT does not do maps and I was paying $20 for it while Gemini is free? Bye!
Further and more important this guy says in his blog he is happy to help with the destruction of our (white collar) society that will cause many MANY financial to emotional pain while he lives high off the hog? Impending 2030 depression .. 100 years later Im unfortunately betting!
Now AI could indeed help us cure disease but if the major are destitute while a few hundreds or so live high of the hog the benefits of AI are canceled out.
AI can definitely do the job ten people use to yet NOW its just one person typing into a text prompt to complete the tasks ten use.
Why are we here..sprinting towards this goal of destruction let China destory themselves!!!
Why go through all that? Instead what would have been a much better scenario is openai carefully assessing different approaches to agentic coding and releasing a more fully baked product with solid differentiation. Even Amazon just did that with Kiro
Maybe you’re thinking of the confusingly named Codex CLI?
If anything about OpenAI which should bothers people is how they fake to be blind to the consequences because of "the race". Leveraging the decision IF and WHAT should be done to the top heads only never worked well.
That is literally how openAI gets data for fine-tuning it's models, by testing it on real users and letting them supply data and use cases. (tool calling, computer use, thinking, all of these were championed by people outside and they had the data)
What i haven't seen much is the split between eng and research and how people within the company are thinking about AGI and the future, workforce, etc. Is it the usual SF wonderland or is there an OAI specific value alignment once someone is working there.
a research manager there coauthored this under-hyped book: https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/review-of-why-greatn...
This is super interesting. I work in a group where everything is on slack and some pieces are/were super hard. So much so that I want an AI assistant that can manage my slack feed etc... I feel like an AI bot/slack integration is a thing that needs to be done well.
It seems like Claude code via screen / multiple terminal windows is strictly better than the Codex approach given it keeps the developer in the loop.
Only advantage of async Codex is ability to carry on when using a different device like your phone to code.
>...
>OpenAI is also a more serious place than you might expect, in part because the stakes feel really high. On the one hand, there's the goal of building AGI–which means there is a lot to get right.
I'm kind of surprised people are still drinking this AGI Koolaid
They likely won't wait even for that. Because that itself is still really far off.
Of course they are. People in orgs like that are passionate, they want to work on the tech cause LLMs are once-in-a-lifetime tech breakthrough. But they don’t realize enough that they’re working for bad people. Ultimately all of that tech is in the hands of Altman, and that guy hasn’t proven to be the saint he hopes to become.
When I go to AWS it looks similar except role assignments can't be scoped, so needs more duplication and maintenance. In that way Azure seems nicer. In everything else, it seems pretty equivalent.
But I see it catching flak occasionally on HN, so curious what others dislike.
Seems like an awful place to be.
Kind of interesting that folks aren't impressed by Azure's offering. I wonder if OpenAI is handicapped by that as well, compared to being on AWS or GCP.
CosmosDB is trustworthy? Everyone I know that used CosmosDB ended up rewriting their code because of throttling.
I know a few other teams when I was working elsewhere that had to migrate off Spanner due to throttling and random hiccups, though if Google uses it for zanzibar, they must not have that problem internally. Maybe all these companies increase throttling limits for first party use cases.
My current team uses dynamo, which has also given throttling issues, but generally only when they try to do things that it's not designed for (bulk updating a bunch of records in the same partition). Other than that, it seems reliable (incredibly consistent low latencies) and a bit cheaper than my experience with cosmos, though with fewer features.
They all seem to have their own pros and cons in my experience.
I clicked that other story just to see what that author said about his time at that company. The fundamental urge is to slap some bloody sense into him, because the only thing amazing about the article is just how obtuse it is.
Under all the glowy, wide-eyed applause for many aspects of how Palantir operates, he's not really internalizing just what kind of parasitic, corporate/government surveillance monster he was working for.
To put it simply, he speaks as if he were a useful idiot, praising selectively, glossing around a very serious moral swamp with mealy-mouthed categorizations about what's cool and not cool, ideological whitewash and generally failing to see the fucking forest for the trees. Palantir and its kind represent a disgusting possibility for the future of how society is managed by increasingly autocratic government tendencies and their hustling corporate allies. And I can think of no more chilling a notion than just what that management could entail for hundreds of millions of people under the guise of supposedly fighting all kinds of ambiguous or outright invented "bad actors"
With OpenAI, you get a lot of corporate mendacity and the usual stew of trying to game the rules for the company's own favor. However, underneath this is a product that's largely used by ordinary people for doing fairly ordinary things, even if many of them contribute to the burial of culture in the cheapest auto-generated sludge imaginable.
With Palantir, the fruits of the labor are... squarely something else entirely.
One thing I was interested to read but didn't find in your post is: does everyone believe in the vision that the leadership has shared publicly, e.g. [1]? Is there some skepticism that the current path leads to AGI, or has everyone drunk the Kool-Aid? If there is some dissent, how is it handled internally?
My question was whether everyone believes this vision that ASI is "close", and more broadly whether this path leads to AGI.
> If you didn't think that AGI were ever possible with LLMs, would you even be there to begin with?
People can have all sorts of reasons for working with a company. They might want to work on cutting-edge tech with smart people and infinite resources, for investment or prestige, but not necessarily buy into the overarching vision. I'm just wondering whether such a profile exists within OpenAI, and if so, how it is handled.
What definition of AGI is used at OpenAI?
My definition: AGI will be here when you can put it in a robot body in the real word and interact with it like you would a person. Ask it to drive your car or fold your laundry or make a mai tai and if it doesn’t know how to do that, you show it, and then it can.
That makes me wonder what kinds of work aren’t economically valuable? Would that be services generally provided by government?
Imagine I built a robot dog that behaved just like a biological dog. It bonds with people, can be trained, shows emotion, communicates, likes to play, likes to work, solves problems, understands social cues, and is loyal. IMHO, that would qualify as an AGI even though it isn't writing essays or producing business plans.
I'm not sure it would, though. The "G" in AGI stands for "General", which a dog obviously can't showcase. The comparison must be done against humans, since the goal is to ultimately have the system perform human tasks.
The definition mentioned by tedsanders seems adequate to me. Most of the terms are fuzzy ("most", "outperform"), but limiting the criteria to economic value narrows it down to a measurable metric. Of course, this could be exploited by building a system that optimizes for financial gain over everything else, but this wouldn't be acceptable.
The actual definition is not that important, IMO. AGI, if it happens, won't appear suddenly from a singular event, but as a gradual process until it becomes widely accepted that we have reached it. The impact on society and our lives would be impossible to ignore at that point. The problem with this is that along the way there will be charlatans and grifters shouting from the rooftops that they've already cracked it, but this is nothing new.
That isn't obvious to me at all. If you don't like the dog analogy, lets try another: Does a human toddler qualify as having general intelligence?
I would say... yes. But with the strong caveat that when used within the context of AGI, the individual/system should be able to showcase that intelligence, and the results should be comparable to those of a neurotypical adult human. Both a dog and a toddler can show signs of intelligence when compared to individuals of their similar nature, but not to an adult human, which is the criteria for AGI.
This is why I don't think that a system that underperforms the average neurotypical adult human in "most" cognitive tasks would constitute AGI. It could certainly be considered a step in that direction, but not strictly AGI.
But again, I don't think that a strict definition of AGI is helpful or necessary. The impact of a system with such capabilities would be impossible to deny, so a clear definition doesn't really matter.
What makes you say that it underperforms? I ask because evidence strongly suggests that it is actually vice-versa - AI models currently outperform humans in most of the tasks.
Most services provided by governments are economically valuable, as they provide infrastructure that allow individual actors to perform better, increasing collective economic output. (For e.g. high-expenditure infrastructure it could be quite easily argued though that they are not economically profitable.)
The hype around this tech strongly promotes the narrative that we're close to exponential growth, and that AGI is right around the corner. That pretty soon AI will be curing diseases, eradicating poverty, and powering humanoid robots. These scenarios are featured in the AI 2027 predictions.
I'm very skeptical of this based on my own experience with these tools, and rudimentary understanding of how they work. I'm frankly even opposed to labeling them as intelligent in the same sense that we think about human intelligence. There are certainly many potentially useful applications of this technology that are worth exploring, but the current ones are awfully underwhelming, and the hype to make them seem more than they are is exhausting. Not to mention that their biggest potential to further degrade public discourse and overwhelm all our communication channels with even more spam and disinformation is largely being ignored. AI companies love to talk about alignment and safety, yet these more immediate threats are never addressed.
Anyway, it's good to know that there are disagreements about the impact and timelines even inside OpenAI. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if nothing else.
Some of the details seem rather sensitive to me.
I'm not sure if the essay is going to stay up for long, given how "secretive" OpenAI is claimed to be.
as an early stage founder, i worry about the following a lot.
- changing directions fast when i lose conviction - things breaking in production - and about speed, or the lack of it
I learned to actually not worry about the first two.
But if OpenAI shipped Codex in 7 weeks, small startups have lost the speed advantage they had. Big reminder to figure out better ways to solve for speed.
An actual offering made to the public that can be paid for.
Discounting Chinese labs entirely for agi seems like a misstep though. I find it hard to believe there won’t be at least a couple contenders
I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I would have just left this part out. If there is anything I've learned during my time in tech (ESPECIALLY in the Bay Area) it's that the people you didn't meet are absolutely angling to do the wrong thing(TM).
Edit: And that's to say nothing of the very generous pay...
I also don't trust that people within the system can assess if what they're doing is good or not. I've talked with higher ups in fashion companies who genuinely believe their company is actually doing so much great work for the environment when they basically invented fast-fashion. I've felt it first hand personally how my mind slowly warped itself into believing that ad-tech isn't so bad for the world when I worked for an ad-tech company, and only after leaving did I realize how wrong I was.
It's weird to say, but some people simply are not tuned in to the long term ramifications of their work. The "fuck you I got mine" mentality is even at play in many outwardly appearing progressive communities where short term gain is a moral imperative above doing good.
You should write a book about that. Did you start seeing adblockers as immoral? I've heard ad-dependent people literally claiming that.
As impressive as LLMs can be at one-shotting certain kinds of tasks, working in a sprawling production codebase like the one described with tight performance constraints, subtle interdependencies, cross-cutting architectural concerns, etc. still requires a human driving most of the time. LLMs help a lot for this kind of work, but the human is either carefully assimilating their output or carefully choosing spots where (with detailed prompts) they can generate usable code directly.
Again, just a guess, but this my impression of how experienced engineers (including myself) are using LLMs in big/nontrivial codebases, and I’ve seen no indication that engineering processes at the labs are much different from the wider industry.
Sleeping on Keen Technology I see
The choice of name continues providing incredible amusement.
I wonder one year is enough time for programmers to understand codebase, let alone meaningfully contributing patches? But then we see that job hopping is increasing common, which results in the drop in product qualities. I wonder what values are the job hoppers adding to the company.
So it let me wonder if employees are really believing that and drinking the kool-aid of their own marketing, or if this is just a communication move again.
Where is this AGI that you've built then? The reason for the very existence of that term is an acknowledgement that what's hyped today as AI isn't actually what AI used to mean, but the hype cycle VC money depends on using the term AI, so a new term was invented to denote the thing the old term used to denote. Do we need yet another term because AGI is about to get burned the same way?
> and LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the decade.
Sorry, what? I'm sure it feels that way from some corners of that particular tech bubble, but my 73 year old mom's life is not impacted by LLMs at all - well, except for when she opens her facebook feed once a month and gets blasted with tons of fake BS. Really something to be proud of for us as an industry? A tech breakthrough of the last decade that might have literally saved her life were mRNA vaccines though, and I could likely come up with more examples if I thought about it for more than 3 seconds.
Umm... I don't think Zuckerberg would agree with this statement.
:-)
it was however interesting to know that it isn't just Meta poaching OpenAI, but the reverse also happened.
Any gibberish on any company's behalf of "poaching" is nonsense regardless IMO.
- no such thing as open ai as a decision unit, there are people at the top who decide + shareholder pressure
- a narcissist optimizes for himself and has no affective empathy: cruel, extremely selfish, image oriented, power hungry, liar etc.
- having no structure means having a hidden structure and hence real power of the few above, no accountability (narcissists love this too)
- framing this meritocracy is a positive framing, it is very easy to hide incompetence
- people want to do good, great, perfect naive and you can utilize this motivation to let them burn out and work for YOUR goals as a leader... another narcissist is great doing this to people and the richest man in the world per share price
all in all, having this kind of mindset is good for start ups or get the lucky punch, but AGI will be brought by Anthropic, Google and Ilya :) you will not have series of lucky punches, you have to have a direction
I think Sam Altman, a terrible narcissist, uses open AI to feel great and he has no strategy but using others for their own benefit, because narcissists dont care, they just care about their image and power... and that is why open AI goes down... bundling with Microsoft was a big red flag in the first place...
when i think of openAI, it is a bit like Netscape Navigator + Internet Explorer in one :)
Anthropic is like Safari + Brave
Google is like ... yeah :)
Ilya is like Opera/Vivaldi or so
this does not sound fun lol
I really can't see a person with at least minimal self-awareness talking their own work up this much. Give me a break dude. Plus, you haven't built AGI yet.
Can't believe there's so little critique of this post here. It's incredibly self-serving.
... then the next paragraph
> As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing.
not if you're trying to replace therapists with chatbots, sorry
That's what he did at Segment even in the later stages.
> 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.
This is just wholly irrational for someone whose credentials indicate someone who is capable of applying critical thinking towards accomplishing their goals. People who operate at that level don't often act on impulse or suddenly realize they want to do something different. It seems much more likely he intentionally planned to give himself a year of vacation at OpenAI, which allows him to hedge a bit while taking a breather before jumping back into being a founder.
Is this essentially speculation? Yes. Is it cynical to assume he's acting cynically? Yes. Speculation on his true motives is necessary because otherwise we'll never get confirmation, short of him openly admitting to it (which is still fraught). We have to look at behaviors and actions and assess likelihoods from there.
It's more likely that he was there to see how OpenAI was run so he could learn and something similar on his own after.
My criticism is that that's a detail that is being obscured and instead other explanations for leaving are being presented (cynically IMO).
There might be some marginal drama to scrape up here if the post was negative about OpenAI (I'd still be complaining about trying to whip up drama where there isn't any), but it's kind of glowing about them.
OpenAI is currently selected for the brightest and young excited minds, (and a lot of money).. bright, young (as in full of energy) and excited people will work well anywhere- esp if given a fair amount of autonomy.
Young people talking about how hard they worked is not a sign of a great corp culture, just a sign that they are in the super excited stage of their careers
In the long run who knows, I tend to view these companies as groups of like minded people and groups of people change and the dynamic changees overnight -so if they can sustain that culture sure, but who knows..
Is it considered young / early career in this field?
I worked there for a few years and Calvin is definitely more of the grounded engineering guy. He would introduced him as an engineer and just get talking code. He would spend most of his time with the SRE/core team trying to tackle the hardest technical problem at the company.
The cadence we're talking about isn't sustainable --- has never been sustained anywhere --- but if insane sprints like this (1) produce intrinsically rewarding outcomes and (2) punctuate otherwise-sane work conditions, they can work out fine for the people involved.
It's completely legit to say you'd never take a job where this could be an expectation.
The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.
Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salomon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ‘too big to fail’ kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedy’s inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.
Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.
Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ‘competition’ of multiple players in the US multiplies the energy requirements.
Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?
Will AI’s contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?
These are the questions that come to mind after Hao’s historic summary.
I would argue that there are very few benefits of AI, if any at all. What it actually does is create a prisoner's dilemma situation where some use it to become more efficient only because it makes them faster and then others do the same to keep up. But I think everyone would be FAR better off without AI.
What keeping AI free for everyone is akin to is keeping an addictive drug free for everyone so that it can be sold in larger quantities later.
One can argue that some technology is beneficial. A mosquito net made of plastic immediately improves one's comfort if out in the woods. But AI doesn't really offer any immediate TRUE improvement of life, only a bit more convenience in a world already saturated in it. It's past the point of diminishing returns for true life improvement and I think everyone deep down inside knows that, but is seduced by the nearly-magical quality of it because we are instinctually driven to seek out advantags and new information.
you could just as well argue the internet, phones, tv, cars, all adhere to the exact same prisoner's dilemma situation you talk about. you could just as well use AI to rubber duck or ease your mental load than treat it like some rat-race to efficiency.
And we should indeed apply the logic to other inventions: some are more worth using than others, whereas in today's society, we just use all of them due to the mechanisms of the prisoner's dilemma. The Amish, on the other hand, apply deliberation on whether to use certain technologies, which is a far better approach.
Personally, my life has significantly improved in meaningful ways with AI. Apart from the obvious work benefits (I'm shipping code ~10x faster than pre-AI), LLMs act as my personal nutritionist, trainer, therapist, research assistant, executive assistant (triaging email, doing SEO-related work, researching purchases, etc.), and a much better/faster way to search for and synthesize information than my old method of using Google.
The benefits I've gotten are much more than conveniences and the only argument I can find that anyone else is worse off because of these benefits is that I don't hire junior developers anymore (at max I was working with 3 for a contracting job). At the same time, though, all of them are also using LLMs in similar ways for similar benefits (and working on their own projects) so I'd argue they're net much better off.
That doesn't necessitate feeling bad because the reaction to feel good or bad about something is a side effect of the sort of religious "good and evil" mentality that probably came about due to Christianity or something. But *regardless*, one should at least understand that because our world has reached a sufficient critical mass of complexity, even the things we do that we think are benign or helpful can have negative side effects.
I never claim that we should feel bad about that, but we should understand it and attempt to mitigate it nonetheless. And, where no mitigation is possible, we should also advocate for a better societal structure that will eventually, in years or decades, result in fewer deleterious side effects.
I don't think the takeaway was meant to really be about capitalism but more generally the complexity of the system. That's just me though.
OK, if you're going to say things like this I'm going to insist you clarify which subset of "AI" you mean.
Presumably you're OK with the last few decades of machine learning algorithms for things like spam detection, search relevance etc.
I'll assume your problem is with the last few years of "generative AI" - a loose term for models that output text and images instead of purely being used for classification.
Are predictive text keyboards on a phone OK (tiny LLMs)? How about translation engines like Google Translate?
Vision LLMs to help with wildlife camera trap analysis? How about to help with visual impairments navigate the world?
I suspect your problem isn't with "AI", it's with the way specific AI systems are being built and applied. I think we can have much more constructive conversations if we move beyond blanket labeling "AI" as the problem.
2. I would argue that translation engines have their positives and negatives, but a lot of them are negative, because they lead to translators losing their jobs, and a loss in general for the magical qualities of language learning.
3. Predictive text: I think people should not be presented with possible next words, and think of them on their own, because that means they will be more thoughtful in their writing and less automatic. Also, with a higher barrier to writing something, they will probably write less and what they do write will be of greater significance.
4. I am against all LLMs, including wildlife camera trap analysis. There is an overabundance of hiding behind research when we really already know the problem fairly well. It's a fringe piece of conservation research anyway.
5. Visual impairments: one can always appeal to helping the disabled and impaired, but I think the tradeoff is not worth the technological enslavement.
6. My problem is categorically with AI, not with how it is applied, PRECISELY BECAUSE AI cannot be applied in an ethical way, since human beings en masse will inevitably have a sufficient number of bad actors to make the net effect always negative. It's human nature.
I think AI classification and stuff like classification is probably okay but of course with that, as with all technologies, we should be cautious of how we use it as it can be used also in facial recognition, which in turn can be used to create a stronger police state.
"PRECISELY BECAUSE AI cannot be applied in an ethical way, since human beings en masse will inevitably have a sufficient number of bad actors"
I think this is vibes based on bad headlines and no actual numbers (and tbf, founders/CEO's talking outta their a**). In my real-life experience the advantages of specifically generative AI far outweighs the disadvantages, by like a really large margin. I say this as someone academically trained on well modeled Dynamical systems (the opposite of Machine Learning). My team just lost. Badly.
Case-in-point: I work with language localization teams that have fully adopted LLM based translation services (our DeepL.com bills are huge), but we've only hired more translators and are processing more translations faster. It's just..not working out like we were told in the headlines. Doomsday Radiologist predictions [1], same thing.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/technology/ai-jobs-radiol...
We define bad actors in different ways. I also include people like tech workers, CEOs who program systems that take away large numbers of jobs. I already know people whose jobs were eroded based on AI.
In the real world, lots of people hate AI generated content. The advantages you speak of are only to those who are technically minded enough to gain greater material advantages from it, and we don't need the rich getting richer. The world doesn't need a bunch of techies getting richer from AI at the expense of people like translators, graphic designers, etc, losing their jobs.
And while you may have hired more translators, that is only temporary. Other places have fired them, and you will too once the machine becomes good enough. There will be a small bump of positive effects in the short term but the long term will be primarily bad, and it already is for many.
It may also be the narrative fed to actual employees, saying "You're losing your job because AI" is an easy way to direct anger away from your bad business decisions. If a business is shrinking, it's shrinking, AI was inconsequential. If a business is growing AI can only help. Whether it's growing or shrinking doesn't depend on AI, it depends on the market and leadership decision-making.
You and I both know none of this generative AI is good enough unsupervised (and realistically, with deep human edits). But they're still massive productivity boosts which have always been huge economic boosts to the middle-class.
Do I wish this tech could also be applied to real middle-class shortages (housing, supply-chain etc.), sure. And I think it will come.
its impossible to get benefit from the woods if youve brought a bug net, and you should stay out rather than ruining the woods for everyone
If someone says driving at 200mph is unsafe, then your argument is like saying "driving at any speed is unsafe". Fact is, you need to consider the magnitude and speed of the technology's power and movement, which you seem incapable of doing.
making human beings obsolete is not the right thing. nobody in openAI is doing the right thing.
in another part of the post he says safety teams work primarily on making sure the models dont say anything racist as well as limiting helpful tips on building weapons of terror… and that AGI safety is basically not a focus. i dont think this company should be allowed to exist. they dont have ANY right to threaten the existence and wellbeing of me and my kids!
Grok be like. okey. :))