A few weeks in at OpenAI

I started at OpenAI on April 14. It’s been a few weeks. The thing that hits first is the energy of the group, the intensity, the pace.

My first real exposure to AI was in college, twelve or thirteen years ago. The first serious use case I ever saw, though, was at BMW. We were pulling thousands of car feedback reviews off Twitter and running text classification on them. Basic NLP by today’s standards, but at the time it blew my mind. From there I got to run my own image classification training, for detecting manufacturing defects after the cars came off the line.

This was before most of the modern neural net frameworks we know today existed. I felt like I was fumbling in the dark. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was learning along with the rest of the community. Maybe I wasn’t as close to the bleeding edge as others, but I was still learning.

A couple of years later at GE Digital, I was 23 and acting as the architect on a project with a group of data scientists, orchestrating data collection and analysis across more than a hundred thousand compute, storage, and network assets, looking at resiliency in a whole new light. I still remember running my first data collection script and the analysis it kicked off. We found a needle in the haystack: a set of future failures we would not have caught any other way. That was the first time the impact really hit me.

Years later at Amazon, I got to do that for customers operating at the same scale.

OpenAI is the next step, and it’s the biggest one. Now I get to be with an organization shipping AI to customers with high velocity and a high sense of urgency. This is, literally, my dream job.

People who know me will tell you I sometimes scare them with how optimistic I am about this stuff. I look at every workflow, every use case, every dimension of business and even of life, and I see places where AI is going to make things better, cheaper, faster, and free people up to do more meaningful, higher-impact work.

It still hasn’t fully landed that I work here. I’m in a role with a level of impact I didn’t expect this early, at a moment I think matters for AI, and especially for the economy and the industries it touches. I’m grateful to be part of it.

The bar is high, the work is important, and it matters. My motto has always been to solve really hard problems with really smart people. The thread through every role I’ve had has been the same: deep technical work, real hands-on time with the technology, high customer impact, and a lot of direct customer engagement. This is the place where all of those converge.

The pace is insane. The ambition is bigger. OpenAI is serious about making sure the world benefits from AGI, and that mission lands with me. I’m sincerely excited for what comes next.