When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in Might 2024, the startup had round 1,000 workers. A 12 months later, OpenAI’s workforce had tripled to three,000 workers, and French-Owen was within the prime 30% by tenure.
In a weblog put up printed Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was wish to work for the ChatGPT-maker for just a little over a 12 months, from Might 2024 to June 2025. He stop OpenAI three weeks in the past, stating that there was no “private drama” behind his resolution, however that he was merely “craving a contemporary begin.”
Associated: OpenAI Is Creating AI to Do ‘All of the Issues That Software program Engineers Hate to Do’
Whereas at OpenAI, French-Owen labored on Codex, a coding assistant launched in Might that competes with AI coding instruments like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code. He described in his weblog put up that his staff of eight engineers, 4 researchers, two designers, two go-to-market managers, and one venture supervisor created Codex in simply seven weeks. They labored most nights till 11 p.m. or midnight and got here into the workplace on weekends to finish the venture.
“It is arduous to overstate how unbelievable this stage of tempo was,” French-Owen wrote. “I have never seen organizations giant or small go from an thought to a totally launched + freely out there product in such a brief window.”
He added later that Codex had reached 630,000 engineers in lower than two months since launch.
“I am unsure I’ve ever labored on one thing so impactful in my life,” French-Owen wrote.
Calvin French-Owen. Picture By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Internet Summit by way of Getty Pictures
One “uncommon” side of OpenAI, which French-Owen emphasised in his weblog put up, was that “there is no such thing as a electronic mail,” and practically all communication occurs on the office messaging platform Slack. He estimated that he acquired about 10 emails in his complete time on the firm.
Associated: OpenAI Executives Look For These 3 Key Traits in New Hires: ‘It is Really My Recommendation to College students’
French-Owen additionally said that there is a robust bias for motion at OpenAI, which means that employees are inspired to have good concepts and act on them. He characterised the startup as extraordinarily meritocratic, selling workers based mostly on their capability to have the perfect concepts as a substitute of their capability to current at conferences or play political video games.
French-Owen discovered OpenAI to be “a really secretive place” in addition to “a extra severe place than you may count on.” The startup prohibited him from telling anybody what he was engaged on intimately, and it felt as if the stakes had been excessive for the corporate to construct a product utilized by 500 million world weekly customers.
French-Owen additionally wrote that on the subject of engineering personnel, there’s a “very important” Meta to OpenAI pipeline. He identified that OpenAI is just like Meta in its early days, with a top-performing client app and “a need to maneuver actually rapidly.”
Earlier than becoming a member of OpenAI, French-Owen was beforehand a co-founder of information startup Phase, which Twilio purchased for $3.2 billion in 2020.
Associated: ‘I will Combat to Maintain Each One in every of You’: OpenAI Responds to Meta Poaching Expertise, Says It Is ‘Recalibrating’ Pay
Meta has been hiring expertise from OpenAI, too. Meta not too long ago poached prime OpenAI researchers, together with ChatGPT co-creator Shengjia Zhao and ChatGPT voice mode co-creator Shuchao Bi, with pay packages reportedly within the 9 figures. OpenAI Chief Analysis Officer Mark Chen indicated final month in a leaked Slack message that the corporate is rethinking compensation in response to the poaching.
OpenAI raised $40 billion in March at a valuation of $300 billion, the most important non-public tech deal ever recorded.
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When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in Might 2024, the startup had round 1,000 workers. A 12 months later, OpenAI’s workforce had tripled to three,000 workers, and French-Owen was within the prime 30% by tenure.
In a weblog put up printed Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was wish to work for the ChatGPT-maker for just a little over a 12 months, from Might 2024 to June 2025. He stop OpenAI three weeks in the past, stating that there was no “private drama” behind his resolution, however that he was merely “craving a contemporary begin.”
Associated: OpenAI Is Creating AI to Do ‘All of the Issues That Software program Engineers Hate to Do’
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