swyx 🇸🇬@swyx
> be greg brockman
> spawn in North Dakota
> do tutorial areas in Chemistry and Math
> read Alan Turing's Computing Machinery and Intelligence
> try to write chatbot
> fail
> Go to Harvard AND MIT
> get cold email from @patrickc
> drop out to join as employee #4 prelaunch
> build Stripe's credit card vault, auth, CTF in 2-3 weeks
> become Stripe's first CTO, age 26
> write #define CTO documenting the process
> 4 -> 250 people, looking for next thing
> tell @sama you want to work on AI. he may have something...
> leave Stripe while Sama cooks
> join @recursecenter
> self teach Deep Learning with pointers from friends like Dario, @ch402, @michael_nielsen, @goodfellow_ian
> Geoff Hinton says you need an Alex
> meet Ilya, love at first sight
> Get invited to The Dinner with Sama, Ilya, Elon, etc
> #define first CTO of OpenAI
> 3 months of recruiting: Alan Kay, Karpathy, Zaremba, Kingma, Schulman, Blackwell, Cheung, etc
> Announce at 2015 NeurIPS
> OpenAI's first office in your living room
> Jensen hand-delivers world's first DGX-1 to OpenAI
> build Gym, Universe. Solve Mario, Start Dota, but lose high profile gamesz
> very tough, now public, split with Elon
> Elon: "OpenAI is on a path of certain failure relative to Google."
> still have impostor syndrome on Machine Learning
> start being able to tweak @alecrad's code
> realize that You Can Just Selfteach Things... eventually leading to "It’s time to become an ML engineer" which inspires many
> Solve Dota at OpenAI Five
> announce GPT2, raise $1B from Microsoft
> get married :)
> announce DALL-E, GPT3
> announce GPT4, first demo of visual vibe coding
> the Blip
> announce GPT4o, first demo of Advanced Voice
> train DNA models with @arcinstitute
> back from Sabbatical
> "2025 is the year of agents"
> announce Operator, Stargate, o3/o4, GPT4o native imagegen
> keynote at @aidotengineer
> still making chatbots
this ai.engineer chat may be the most important interview I ever do. What would you ask @gdb that can significantly impact what you do/believe?
