Reflections on OpenAI
I wanted to share my reflections because there's a lot of smoke and noise around what OpenAI is doing, but not a lot of first-hand accounts of what the culture of working there actually feels like.
Hasnain says:
“When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.
Put these things together, and you see a lot of core parts of infra that feel reminiscent of Meta. There was an in-house reimplementation of TAO. An effort to consolidate auth identity at the edge. And I'm sure a number of others I don't know about.”
Posted on 2025-07-16T06:46:46+0000