Former OpenAI engineer told about chaos inside the company
Want to know what’s really happening inside OpenAI? Former engineer Calvin French-Owen revealed all the details after he left there 3 weeks ago.
During Calvin’s last year of work, the company grew from 1,000 to 3,000 employees. Can you imagine such pace? With such growth, there’s real chaos inside. According to the engineer, “everything breaks when you scale so fast: corporate communications, reporting structures, product development processes, people management, hiring procedures – everything breaks”.
Despite the size, OpenAI maintains startup culture. Employees can implement ideas practically without bureaucracy, but this leads to work duplication. French-Owen saw “at least 6 libraries” for the same tasks.
Code quality is also different. From professionals from Google to recent graduates with academic degrees without industrial development experience. He called the central code repository a “dump” where processes often break.
Calvin’s team of 8 engineers, 4 researchers, 2 designers, 2 marketers and a manager created the Codex product in just 7 weeks with almost no sleep. But the result was worth it – the new tool received instant response, I quote, “simply by appearing in ChatGPT’s sidebar”.
