OpenAI's employees are top talents from all over the world who have made great efforts and sacrifices to realize OpenAI's vision. Recently, Jason Wei, an employee who switched jobs from Google to OpenAI, shared his day at OpenAI on social **, giving people a glimpse of how the artificial intelligence giant was trained.
Jason Wei's schedule shows that he worked 16 hours from waking up at 9 a.m. to going to bed at 1:15 a.m., with only brief breaks and meals. His work focuses on training large models on large amounts of data, dealing with infrastructure issues, monitoring model training progress, giving engineering cues to models, and brainstorming possible algorithm improvements. He also revealed that he works in the office six days a week, and he also works long hours every day.
Jason Wei's schedule sparked heated discussions among netizens, with some people marveling at his work intensity and efficiency, questioning his work-life balance, and some people ridiculing that "if you have an annual salary of one million, you will be asked if you can roll it".
In fact, Jason Wei is not the only 996 employee of OpenAI, as early this year, the resignation statement of Lenny Bogdonoff, a former OpenAI employee and member of the CodeX team, has raised everyone's attention to the intensity of OpenAI's work. Lenny Bogdonoff mentions that from the very beginning, he worked six days a week in the office, and the hours were long: from 8 a.m. until late at night. He has endured countless late-night firefighting efforts to support scale and defend against attacks. Although he himself did not complain, but said that he is "forever grateful for this once-in-a-lifetime experience", many people are still concerned about the problem of work pressure.
And last year, when OpenAI's former head of trust and safety, D**e Willner, resigned, he also revealed that resigning was a "fairly easy choice to make" given the work-life balance. Especially since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it has become "more and more difficult" to put family above work.
Why are OpenAI's employees working so hard? In addition to personal interests and passions, perhaps there is also OpenAI's mission and vision. Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI, once said that artificial intelligence is the biggest threat to mankind and the biggest opportunity for mankind. He hopes that OpenAI can create artificial intelligence that can coexist peacefully with humans, rather than being monopolized and exploited by a few people or organizations. In order to achieve this goal, OpenAI's employees have to constantly break through in technology and compete with other AI giants, while also ensuring the safety and reliability of AI.
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence giant, but it is also made up of a group of flesh-and-blood people. Their efforts deserve our respect and praise, and we hope that OpenAI can continue to work for the well-being of mankind, and we also hope that OpenAI's employees can take care of their health and enjoy life.