Overview

• Calvin French-Owen published a detailed blog post after leaving OpenAI in June, offering a first-hand account of working there during a year of explosive growth.
• He describes an all-Slack communication model that generated constant notifications and left employees with virtually no email.
• Rapid headcount expansion from 1,000 to 3,000 employees caused broken reporting structures, overlapping projects and duplicated engineering efforts.
• A cross-functional team endured a sleepless seven-week sprint to build and launch the Codex coding assistant under intense deadline pressure.
• Meta’s aggressive recruitment tactics and million-dollar signing bonuses are intensifying a high-stakes battle for AI engineering talent.