When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in Could 2024, the startup had round 1,000 workers. A yr 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 revealed Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was prefer to work for the ChatGPT-maker for a bit of over a yr, from Could 2024 to June 2025. He give up 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 Could that competes with AI coding instruments like Cursor and Anthropic’s Claude Code. He described in his weblog put up that his crew of eight engineers, 4 researchers, two designers, two go-to-market managers, and one mission 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 mission.
“It is laborious to overstate how unbelievable this stage of tempo was,” French-Owen wrote. “I have never seen organizations massive or small go from an thought to a completely 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. Photograph By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Net Summit through Getty Photographs
One “uncommon” facet of OpenAI, which French-Owen emphasised in his weblog put up, was that “there is no such thing as a e-mail,” and practically all communication occurs on the office messaging platform Slack. He estimated that he acquired about 10 emails in his total time on the firm.
French-Owen additionally said that there is a sturdy bias for motion at OpenAI, which means that workers are inspired to have good concepts and act on them. He characterised the startup as extraordinarily meritocratic, selling workers primarily based on their capacity to have the very best concepts as a substitute of their capacity to current at conferences or play political video games.
French-Owen discovered OpenAI to be “a really secretive place” in addition to “a extra critical place than you would possibly anticipate.” The startup prohibited him from telling anybody what he was engaged on intimately, and it felt as if the stakes have been excessive for the corporate to construct a product utilized by 500 million world weekly customers.
French-Owen additionally wrote that in the case 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 want 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.
Meta has been hiring expertise from OpenAI, too. Meta lately 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 largest non-public tech deal ever recorded.
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When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in Could 2024, the startup had round 1,000 workers. A yr 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 revealed Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was prefer to work for the ChatGPT-maker for a bit of over a yr, from Could 2024 to June 2025. He give up 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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