Why I joined OpenAI
3 points by ldb
3 points by ldb
I have deep respect for Brendan's work (blog posts, the books, flamegraph, etc). However,
...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet
this just seems to me like trying to clean your own conscience in public and sounds pathetic
This was beyond cringe and I couldn't take the rest of the post seriously after this part.
(Luckily for me, this is literally the first sentence, so it was a short read for me.)
This type of "getting drunk on the kool-aid" is common in many places. E.g. in blockchain space people used to think (maybe still think) that blockchain/crypto will cure cancer, end inequality and wars, fix climate change etc. and it wasn't uncommon a few years back to read that someone's joining a blockchain startup to save the planet.
We're seeing the same with AI now.
Maybe they do not need to clear their conscience but just want to appear likeable. If you do 26 interviews with AI tech giants it would seem to me that there is a clear goal in mind: work at an AI tech company. After that it is choosing which one.
It does read like a puff piece for AI from a newly converted. They realize LLMs are addictive and everyone needs them, why not get in on the money that could be made from that.
This exact sentence also reads like ChatGPT with the "It’s not just X, it’s Y." pattern.
And once again later in the article:
It's not just GPUs, it's everything.
I thought that part was just a cute zippy line, not something to be taken literally! Of course, I'm assuming this was meant to be a purely personal note (as written in the post) rather than any sort of larger thing.
I think this post is off topic to lobste.rs (maybe at best having a person tag)... but as a post, it felt sincere and I feel like this response seems out of proportion :/
I realized how ChatGPT was becoming an essential tool for everyone. Just one example: 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.
He could've chosen any example of people using ChatGPT in their daily lives... and he chose an example of someone using ChatGPT to replace a friend of theirs. Is this seriously better than sending them an IM message, an email, or hell, a physical letter?
This is straight out of a dystopian novel, yet he presented it as something good. This feels like parody. Hell, this blog post could probably make for a decent dystopian short story, if a somewhat avantgarde one.
It took months to wrap up my prior job and start at OpenAI, so I was due for another haircut. I thought it'd be neat to ask Mia about ChatGPT now that I work on it, then realized it had been months and she could have changed her mind. I asked nervously: "Still using ChatGPT?". Mia responded confidently: "twenty-four seven!"
It's worse because it says ChatGPT was becoming an essential tool for everyone. Are people and friends tools? Do we as a society value those around us as just fixtures and appliances now?
The on-the-nose LLM-sounding text and this part makes we wonder if the blog post really is a parody. I hope there's a followup blog post confirming it. We'll see.
Meta point: hidden count is becoming a better indicator than post score on Lobsters. It would be useful to have seen that on the main page before I clicked through.
Can we have a 'slop' flag?
I stopped reading after the first paragraph. It was obvious AI spew.
/t/vibecoding seems to fit that bill pretty well, tbh. I'm about as interested in reading slop as I am in reading ads for it. (Besides that they often seem to be one and the same...)
This was requested and rejected. Consensus is to flag as spam. Domains have been blocked for obvious slop cases.
This is a lazy take. I too hate slop but it's pretty easy to tell there is a real human communicating something in this article, despite the first sentence using an LLMish turn of phrase.
Of course it's lazy. I have no spare energy to invest in figuring out where the slop ends and the human begins. I also have no interest in allowing that burden on the reader to turn into a social norm.
If you think the LLM adds anything, fine, burn the planet to stuff your writing with cliches -- but the prompt should be included alongside the article, so I can see what fluff didn't come from you.
The laziness is jumping to the conclusion that an LLM is involved at all. I would be agreeing with you if you posted this on an obvious slop article, but this article is plainly human written. You can't just go by a shallow analysis of em dashes or not-X-Y constructions. If you want to take a time-saving shortcut with lots of false positives, I have no problem with it. But do it for yourself, don't post telling everyone else with certainty that it's all generated from a prompt.
I find it funny how AI companies position themselves as saving on human labor, yet hire so much, including people who have AIs dedicated to replacing them: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-28/ai-virtual-brendans.html .
Of course, you might argue that labor is cheap for these companies considering how much money they're getting through the bubble but it's funny nonetheless. It also makes you wonder if these employees believe they're building something to replace themselves (and not just other people).
This should never have been under the "performance" tag, but maybe a new tag where people could share their cover letters publicly? Well no… it's just off-topic for this forum.