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A former OpenAI engineer describes what it’s really like to work there


A senior engineer describes the thrill, chaos, and exhaustion of working at OpenAI this past year while launching its coding agent Codex.

Chaos: “Everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc.,” French-Owen wrote. French-Owen described how his senior team of around eight engineers, four researchers, two designers, two go-to-market staff and a product manager built and launched Codex in only seven weeks, start to finish, with almost no sleep. While there are doomsayers worrying about theoretic risks to humanity, internally there’s more focus on practical safety like “hate speech, abuse, manipulating political biases, crafting bio-weapons, self-harm, prompt injection,” he wrote.

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