🚀 So, a former OpenAI developer spilled the tea on what life’s like at one of the world's most innovative companies after leaving just 3 months ago! Here’s the scoop:
🌱 Growth & Culture
- OpenAI went from 1,000 to 3,000 employees in just a year! The author was in the top 30% for tenure.
- They communicate almost entirely via Slack—like, only got about 10 emails during their time there! 📧✌️
- It’s a “bottom-up” culture, meaning anyone can pitch ideas. No boring quarterly roadmaps here!
⚙️ Tech Specs
- They run on a massive monorepo mostly in Python, with more Rust creeping in. 🐍🔥
- Everything’s on Azure with only three reliable services: Azure Kubernetes Service, CosmosDB, and BlobStore.
- GPU costs are so high that everything else feels like pocket change—one feature (Codex) cost as much as all of Segment's infrastructure combined! 💸
🛠 Launching Codex
- Codex was built from scratch in just 7 weeks—talk about a coding sprint! 🏃♂️💨
- In 53 days post-launch, Codex generated 630k public pull requests!
- The team hustled hard—working late nights (11 PM to midnight) and waking up at 5:30 AM every day, weekends included! 😳⏰
🏢 Corporate Vibe
- Secrecy is key; the author often saw news before it was announced internally! 🔒👀
- Twitter is a big deal; if your tweet about OpenAI goes viral, it’ll definitely get noticed!
- Top execs are super engaged and regularly respond on Slack.
- The race to AGI is between three companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—each taking their own path. 🏁🤖
#OpenAI #TechCulture #Innovation