Why I Joined OpenAI

To answer a few people at once: I did mention compensation as a factor in the post, but I didn't elaborate details, so easy to miss. Comp is important of course, but so are the other factors. It feels like I can't go for a day without reading about the cost of AI datacenters in the news, and I can do something about it.

> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet

There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)

Strong LinkedIn vibes in this entry.

This article is so full of itself I can hardly stand to read it. I had to just sort of skim it instead. Sorry! This style just doesn't do it for me.

> Mia the hairstylist got to work, and casually asked what I do for a living. "I'm an Intel fellow, I work on datacenter performance." Silence.

How could she not know?

> She was worried about a friend who was travelling in a far-away city, with little timezone overlap when they could chat, but she could talk to ChatGPT anytime about what the city was like and what tourist activities her friend might be doing, which helped her feel connected. She liked the memory feature too, saying it was like talking to a person who was living there.

This seems rather sad. Is this really what AI is for?

And we do not need gigawatts and gigawatts for this use case anyway. A small local model or batched inference of a small model should do just fine.

Performance and efficiency are important, but we need you to invent the monitoring tools and visualisations that will underpin alignment!

> save the planet

> I'd been missing that human connection

At OpenAI.

Brendan can do whatever he wants. Hes that good. If anybody seriously needed to interview him 20+ times to figure it out, then the burden is now on them to not fuck it up.

Apparently, there's this guy who's really good at optimizing computer performance and makes a lot of money doing it. At the same time, he writes mediocre school essays that are actually a bit embarrassing. Guys, if you have the opportunity to land a very well-paid job, then do it. Take the money. Live your life. But please spare us the public self-castration.

Mia was right. Listen to Mia

If it's in your power, make sure user prompts and llm responses are never read, never analyzed and never used for training - not anonymized, not derived, not at all.

[flagged]

TLDR: Money, Fame and A Glorious IPO (AGI)

Just say you joined for the money and that Intel's stock didn't do a 10,000x run like Nvidia did and he completely missed it.

So the best chance at something like that again is OpenAI when they achieve a 1TN valuation with AGI.