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Calvin French-Owen worked at OpenAI for about a year, but says he only received about 10 emails during his time at the ChatGPT maker.
French-Owen joined OpenAI in May 2024 and left in June, per his LinkedIn. The MIT graduate wrote about his experience working at OpenAI in a blog post published on Tuesday.
“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,” he wrote.
French-Owen said in his post that OpenAI didn’t rely on email as its main channel of communication between staff.
“An unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack,” French-Owen wrote, referencing the workplace messaging program owned by Salesforce.
“There is no email. I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there,” he continued.
French-Owen said using Slack over email can be “incredibly distracting,” but added that OpenAI’s practice is “pretty workable” if people curate their channels and notifications.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, is known for being exacting about emails and messages.
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In September 2023, New York Magazine’s Elizabeth Weil published a profile about Altman. Weil said Altman would track how quickly founders replied to his emails and texts when he was the president of Y Combinator.
In his blog post, French-Owen said he noticed a “very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline” in terms of engineering staff.
“In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly,” he wrote.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s cofounder and CEO, has been offering huge pay packages to poach OpenAI’s employees. Meta’s new superintelligence team includes researchers from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Altman said in a podcast interview that aired last month that Meta’s $100 million signing bonuses were “crazy.”
French-Owen and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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