Why I Joined OpenAI

[Banditoz]

> ...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)

[pyrale]

Probably because "making the world a better place" has been a trope used so much in the industry that it's made it to a TV show [1]. It's fine to be passionate about your job. It's fine to be paid well. You don't need to make us believe that you're mother Theresa on top of it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

[robby_w_g]

Reminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right?

I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.

[deng]

The greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.

Gavin Belson

[its-kostya]

Right? Like what an incredibly naive thing to think, that BG is going to contain power consumption lmao. OpenAI is always going to run their hardware hot. If BG frees up compute, a new workload will just fill it.

Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow?

Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.

[lrvick]

Sam Altman is pro-extinctionist like most of the surveillance capitalist ghouls. He literally invests in mind uploading companies and believes only the rich deserve to "survive" the singularity he believes it is his job to bring about.

Sure, humans going extinct is good for the planet, I guess, but be up front about what you are really supporting.

[giancarlostoro]

The HBO “Silicon Valley” series’ version of “making the world a better place by” nonsense. The blog article has fallen for the marketing of OpenAI. OpenAI is making the world a worse place by inflating the cost of RAM and even getting rid of RAM chip providers from the consumer space. Not to mention all the wasted power on compute for all sorts of meaningless tasks. At least with something like Claude I am saving months if not years of engineering effort and resources in a few hours.

[petterroea]

Even a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all

[cheesepaint]

For me, it just sounds like a ChatGPT-generated sentence. Especially, it likes to write sentences like "it's not just about... - it's about ..." and it first sounds legit, but it doesn't really make much sense when you start to think about it.

[closeparen]

If you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.

[cyanydeez]

Surely, this time Capitalisms external costs will be solved by me making as much money as possible.

[Thaxll]

The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.

[almostdeadguy]

If you trust what the executives of OpenAI and Anthropic say about their respective projects, its a die roll as to whether or not they will totally destroy the world. A theme of the last 5-10 years has been tech dropping the whitewashing of their reputation and embracing the idea that they what they are doing is incredibly sociopathic and still somehow cool (to them, I guess). Guess not everyone got the memo.

[wheelerwj]

I stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…”

The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.

[mewpmewp2]

[flagged]

[perf99999999999]

Brendan, I'm a big fan of your book, and work. I don't have a problem with you joining OpenAI; best of luck there!

However, I'm not sure your analysis is quite correct, in this case.

If OpenAI can mobilize X (giga)dollars to buy Y amounts of energy, your work there will not reduce X or Y, it will simply help them produce more "tokens" (or whatever "unit of AI") for a given amount of energy.

So in a sense you're helping make OpenAI tools better, more effective, but it's not helping reduce resource usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[bagacrap]

One day if openai becomes a real company (and public), like the kind that takes money from customers and employe accountants and turns a profit, etc, there may be downward pressure on the "costs" side of the equation.

Also while the thirst for training may be insatiable, I could see the energy cost of "hey chat can you check the basketball score" coming down.

[ulnarkressty]

Was going to say the same thing, but I'm pretty sure he already knows that. Smart people can convince themselves of everything.

[pillefitz]

And the consequence of burning more tokens, of course, is more widespread adoption, weaving AI more deeply into the fabric of our reality.

[brendangregg]

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.

[brendangregg]

Again, many comments here saying I only care about the money, and while comp is an important factor I think it characterizes me as someone I'm not, and forgets what I've been doing for the past two decades. I've spent thousands of hours of my life writing textbooks for roughly minimum wage, as I want to help others like me (I came from nothing, with no access tech meetups or conferences, and books were the gateway to a better job). I've published technologies as open source that have allowed others to make millions and are the basis for many startups. I'm also helping pioneer remote work and hoping to set a good example for others to follow (as I've published about before). So I think I'm well known for caring about a lot of things during the past couple of decades.

[motbus3]

Read this Gregg. I'm the first one to always put your work and books in any comments related to you or your work here. But...

This is a company which at the first opportunity seized and stopped doing open research, cut open source contributions, converted itself to for profit after years of fiscal benefits, that scrapped its ethics committee and removed all engineers who opposed any of this.

Don't come with the excuse there is any work being done for the better of something.

One should never input one's own expectations into another, but, I feel disappointed. It is having the guy I saw growing from the first posts working for an evil machine on his own volition.

Do what you want. But that's what I feel about this disheartening news

[rybosworld]

Hey Brendan - first time listener, first time caller.

Inferring the overall tone from the comments, I think the folks here are struggling with what sounds like a logical fallacy from someone who is certainly a logical thinker.

> how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet.

The problem on the face of it being: Performance gains will not translate to less energy usage (and by extension less heat released into the atmosphere). Rather, performance gains will mean that more effective compute can be squeezed from the existing hardware.

If performance gains translate to better utilization of the hardware, it also follows that it will translate to more money for the company, allowing for the purchase of more GPUs. Ad infinitum.

My stance is that this is just businesses doing what they do. It's always required regulation to slow down the direct/indirect negative byproducts (petro companies being the most obvious example). I don't see how AI would inherently be different.

Is there another angle that I (we) am (are) missing where the performance efficiencies translate to net benefits for the planet?

[politelemon]

It would be good if the performance improvements made can be applicable across the industry so everyone benefits. But it doesn't sound unbelievable that OpenAi may want to keep some of it secret to keep an advantage over others?

[kgraves]

> I stood on the street after my haircut and let sink in how big this was, how this technology has become an essential aide for so many, how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet.

Brendan.

First of all congratulations on your new job. However,

It is easier to just say to everyone it is about the money, compensation and the stock options.

You're not joining a charity, or to save the planet, this company is about to unload on the public markets at an unfathomable $1TN valuation.

Don't insult your readers.

[bahmboo]

Thanks for taking the risk in this environment and posting about your experience from a personal standpoint. [environment: people will come at you from all angles with very passionate opinions]

[jcgrillo]

Interesting. Out of curiosity, how long do you think OpenAI can survive as a company? Put another way, what would be your guesses for probability of failure on 1yr, 3yr, and 5yr horizons?

EDIT: possibly a corollary--does Mia pay money for chatgpt or use a free plan?

[AnonHP]

I’m replying to your comment in the hopes of getting a response. In the blog post, you said:

> There's so many interesting things to work on, things I have done before and things I haven't.

What are the things you haven’t done before, if you could mention them?

[artninja1988]

I use LLMs daily and they've become an essential part of my life. Really hoping your work can help make LLMs and AI more broadly cheaper and more abundant.

Would be fantastic if you can find a way to make optimizations you find available more openly. The whole ecosystem benefits when efficiency improvements are shared. Looking forward to seeing where this goes and don't let the negativity from some get to you

[jhoho]

You might want to read about the rebound effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect_(conservation)

[jonesetc]

>Did fixing it from the inside work for any of those other issues?

No, it never does. Those people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but...it might just work for us.

[cyanydeez]

Consider your a engineer equivalent of a DoT engineer and your job will be to add just one more lane.

You arnt going to stop the excesses.

[journal]

I feel like I can do something about something too but no one is picking me to do anything about anything.

[vasco]

Turn them off!

[DeepYogurt]

You gonna open source it?

[indigodaddy]

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.

[biggggtalkguy]

Not the first time either. See this person's previous blog when leaving his earlier company. Lots of Kim kardashian vibe of self inflated self worth.

[notepad0x90]

It's a blog post, not an article. A narrative of events, not an interesting write-up on a topic.

[matt_daemon]

> 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?

[Upvoter33]

This part of the article was cringe for me. Like he wanted to impress Mia and once she didn’t react he realized he needed to change jobs.

BG and eBPF are awesome but this article read like a midlife crisis to me.

[Insanity]

For people who’s main computing devices are phones, this isn’t hard to believe at all.

Interacting outside of the tech bubble is eye opening. Conversely, the hair stylist might have mentioned the brand of a super popular scissor supplier/other equipment you’d have never heard of.

[padolsey]

The AI industry, and SV tech generally, has a pattern of recruiting talent by flattering people's self-image as builders and discoverers, which makes it psychologically very difficult for those people to reckon honestly with downstream harm.

[foltik]

It’s so jarring to hear this reality-detached writing style coming from someone who’s otherwise a great systems thinker.

This is like my worst nightmare as a systems engineer: that years of navigating bureaucracy at a place like Intel slowly brainrots me into prioritizing politics and self-promotion over the technical truth.

I hope this is just PR reflex and not an actual loss of grounding.

[webdevver]

imo the engineers who stay in their nuts-and-bolts lane - those are the ones who are at a real risk of 'brainrot', who sometimes at the ripe age of 50+ continue to misunderstand what motivates management, the executives, seemingly unable to model anyones minds other than their own (or that of a very predictable entity, like a computer.)

infact, you could argue that politics is in some sense the biggest, most complex dynamic system of them all, and thus poses the greatest 'engineering' challenge. and it invariably involves promotion of oneself, or an idea, or a certain direction, with real trade-offs that have positive impact on some people, and negative on others.

[import]

As a big fan of you; There are a lot of things feels off in the post, and as others mentioned it feels like you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re going to save the world but everyone knows it’s something else.

[amluto]

> 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.

[georgemcbay]

> 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.

I guess I'm a dinosaur but I think emailing the friend to ask what they are actually up to would be even better than involving an LLM to imagine it.

Asynchronous human to human communication is a pretty solved problem.

[mschild]

> A small local model or batched inference of a small model should do just fine.

Or, you know, Signal/Matrix/WhatsApp/{your_preferred_chat_app}. If you're already texting things, might as well do that.

[UltraSane]

I use it as something to talk to about incredibly nerdy and/or obscure things no one else would be willing to talk about.

[fragmede]

It's sad that we aren't all rich enough to have a personal assistant to tend to our sides 24/7? mean, it seems more useful than, say, cruise ships, but they get to exist.

[peyton]

It’s super dope, and you can have it talk to people for you in the local language when you go there. I’ve busted it out to explain what I’m thinking for me. Watching travel shows on TV or reading travel magazines is sadder.

[FattiMei]

I found funny the hairstylist did provide a pretty distopic reason to use ChatGPT... it seems that you are trying to please your new employer... Nevertheless I respect performance work and I'm studying for something similar. I hope to land a job in HPC

[selfawareMammal]

> it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined OpenAI to work on this challenge directly.

I couldn't go on reading.

[buran77]

I'm fine with people never justifying their personal choices. It's their business. But if they do bother to justify it then it's a show they put on for me. And reading this kind of explanation is like the show runner takes me for a fool. The net result is that I lose all respect for the person.

Unless they put on a show for themselves and that's who they try to fool. Probably why nobody mentions money in these shows. They're self motivational.

[bspammer]

Plenty of other hints too

> Do anything, do it at scale, and do it today

> It's not just GPUs, it's everything.

> I'm not the first, I'm just the latest.

[wscott]

That is normal on his blog. He is a brand that he has developed over many years, and he is constantly promoting that brand.

Yes, he has done a lot of good work in the past, but he has put as much effort into self-promotion and landed a series of interesting and well-paying gigs.

I can't blame him for that. It just makes me tired to watch.

[throwa356262]

Reminds me of the TechCrunch episode of Silicon Valley TV show. Everyone was there to make the big buck but all collectively pretended they were doing their work for the good of humankind.

This guy and Rob Pike should have a talk.

[robotpepi]

me neither. are all these self declared fans commenting here real? I hope they're bots.

[moomoo11]

I meet people like this irl. I block them.

[Phelinofist]

Agree, that statement sounds a bit like gaslighting yourself

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

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.

[ikidd]

I want to save the planet by getting the most amount of heat out of the tire fire we are currently tossing tires on.

[the_kLeZ]

Money.

Thanks for reading. Please subscribe to my newsletter to keep up to date with my works and the latest news about AI.

[rednafi]

Could have just said he joined for the money, which wouldn’t be the worst thing. Instead, we got this high-and-mighty mumbo-jumbo larp.

[dh2022]

Re: "it's about saving the planet" - according to Jevons paradox [0] if the cost of AI will decrease its total usage will increase. Definitely not saving the planet in this scenario.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[blibble]

that is a very long attempt at backwards rationalisation

just say it's for the money, people understand that

but this sort of post is simply gross

[fulafel]

Saving the planet and the Trump alliance (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...) don't seem to relaly jive.

[specialist]

Hi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters.

WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously.

We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc.

To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project.

There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really.

OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any.

Happy hunting.

[stonecharioteer]

I want to be as good as you at performance engineering. It's the direction I want for my career.

Something tells me that in a year we'll see a post about why you left OpenAI.

Sama won't listen to anyone. That's why. None of these CEOs are going to listen.

[SanjayMehta]

[flagged]

[thinkingkong]

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.

[ojbyrne]

The article says "I ended up having 26 interviews and meetings (of course I kept a log) with various AI tech giants."

I don't think that indicates that any one company interviewed him 20+ times.

[sgarland]

Seriously. I would expect him to be more of an offer-only scenario.

[7e]

He's summing interviews across all AI giants. But the ones about to IPO can interview someone almost infinitely many times, because everyone wants on the bandwagon.

[lxrogers]

according to most in the industry, the cheaper AI is the more we will need of it. So to actually reduce the energy used by AI, you should try to make it as inefficient as possible.

[burroisolator]

"it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet." Jevon's paradox probably will mean that lower costs will lead to more use.

[puttycat]

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

You're in for a surprise buddy.

[pyrale]

Strong LinkedIn vibes in this entry.

[tominous]

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

[popcorncowboy]

Your improving efficiency is their improving margin. It only saves the world if they stop selling more tokens.

[kopollo]

Could you please provide information about the efficiency optimization you plan to implement?

[testfrequency]

If OpenAI is responsible for “saving the planet” we are so fucked.

We are currently fucked as well to be clear as people genuinely have this disconnected mindset of reality.

[zomglings]

Honestly have never heard of this person. Why does HN care so much that he joined OpenAI?

[jhhh]

Did the article intentionally start with a LLM cliche to filter out all the people who hate reading obviously generated content? I would say it worked.

[laluser]

I have been attempting to write a lot more with AI, but it's so gimmicky. It's always spitting lines like this: " it's not just about x – it's about y." like in this post. I find it so frustrating that no matter the prompt I throw at it, it eventually repeats itself again after some time. Good technical and succinct writing is almost impossible to iterate on with AI for me.

[mawadev]

I like how my eyes went over the first sentence, barely parsing it and already discarding the information, because its obviously ai generated. Its like the circumstances we live in added a new layer of perception to my brain to guard itself against the flood of useless information!

[raincole]

I really hope it's intentional. The author is a smart, accomplished person. He even published books. It's sad if this kind of person thinks it's okay to just outsource their writing to AI.

[I_am_tiberius]

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.

[surajrmal]

No single person other than Sam Altman can stop them from using anonymized interactions for training and metrics. At least in the consumer tiers.

[satvikpendem]

It's a little too late for that, all the models train on prompts and responses.

[patrickaljord]

Unless OpenAI goes with a very liberal definition of AGI, he's going to wait decades for AGI.

[thefounder]

I think OpenAI will IPO at 1T. I don’t want to say bubble but it could be one of these stocks super hyped that never goes anywhere after the IPO(I.e airbnb during Covid)

[light_triad]

Mia was right. Listen to Mia