OpenAI Seems a Bit Unorganized, Chaotic, in Ex-Staffer Blog
EUROPEAN UNION, JUL 14 – OpenAI aims to join the EU's AI gigafactory project to boost domestic AI startups and infrastructure amid 76 expressions of interest, supporting the bloc's AI Act compliance.
- Calvin French-Owen, a former OpenAI engineer, published a blog post on July 15 describing his year working there and the rapid build of the Codex coding agent.
- He wrote that OpenAI grew from about 1,000 to over 3,000 employees in one year, leading to chaotic startup-like conditions with little centralized planning.
- French-Owen noted OpenAI relies almost exclusively on Slack for communication, receives very few emails, and encourages teams to act independently, causing overlapping efforts.
- Altman called Meta’s $100 million signing bonuses to poach OpenAI staff "crazy" in a podcast interview last month, highlighting intense competition for talent.
- The blog and statements suggest OpenAI’s fast growth strained its organization but empowered engineering innovation while competing in a highly dynamic AI market.
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18 Articles
Ex-OpenAI Employee: It's a 'Very Secretive' Company—With an X Obsession and 'No Email'
Former staffer Calvin French-Owen gives a rare inside look at one of the most high-profile companies in the world, describing a pressure cooker environment with unfathomable GPU bills.
OpenAI Engineer Quits, Says Company Is Pure Chaos Inside
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is setting a breakneck pace with his company, rolling out feature after feature to keep the multibillion-dollar gravy train steaming ahead. And that kind of drum beat, especially paired with ChatGPT's meteoric rise, is bound to cause plenty of chaos behind the scenes. In a blog post, former OpenAI engineer Calvin French-Owen, who helped build the company's new coding agent Codex, said there "wasn't any personal drama in my …
Pressure, exhaustion and a constant feeling of being in the middle of a race that never ends. So this former ChatGPT company worker has felt.
Former OpenAI engineer says the ChatGPT-maker doesn't really use email
"An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack," Calvin French-Owen, a former OpenAI engineer who left in June, wrote on his blog.Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesCalvin French-Owen worked at OpenAI from May 2024 to June 2025.He said OpenAI relies on Slack, and not email, as its main channel of communication among staff."There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there," he wrote …
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