by Podcaster and MIT scientist Lex Fridman, who has become the father confessor of the technological world, voiced the rapid array of emotions I encountered again and again: “You sit, both proud, like a father, but almost proud and scared that this thing is so much smarter than me. Like pride and sadness, almost like a feeling of melancholy, but ultimately joy.”
When I visited OpenAI headquarters in May, I found the culture quite impressive. Many of the people I interviewed had arrived when OpenAI was a nonprofit research lab, before the ChatGPT uproar, when most of us had never heard of the company. “My parents didn’t really know what OpenAI did,” product manager Joanne Jang told me, “and they said, ‘Are you leaving Google?'” Mark Chen, a researcher who was involved in creating the visual tool DALL-E 2, had a similar experience. “Before ChatGPT, my mom would call me every week and she would say, ‘Hey, you know you can stop slacking off and go work at Google or something.’” These people are not primarily motivated by money.
Even after GPT made headlines, being at OpenAI was like being in the eye of a hurricane. “It just feels a lot calmer than the rest of the world,” Jang told me. “From the beginning, it seemed more like a research lab, because we mainly only hired researchers,” Elena Chatziathanasidou, a recruiter, told me. “And then, as we grew, it began to become clear to everyone that progress would come from both engineering and research.”
I didn’t meet any tech experts there, not even people who had the kind of “we’re changing the world” bravado that I probably would have if I pioneered this technology. Diane Yoon, whose title is vice president of people, told me, “The word I would use for this workforce is seriousness…seriousness.”
Typically, when I visit a technology company, as a journalist, I meet very few executives, and those I interview are unforgiving. OpenAI just published a sign-up sheet and had people come talk to me.
