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They’re not going to tell you
They’re startups. Probably average to horrific work hours.
People who self-select to work at these companies generally want to dedicate their entire life to work and want to move fast.
People really think “AI companies” are just hiring randoms. Do you have a MS/PHD in the field with relevant experience?
I got an offer at OpenAI recently. And no, I do not have a master’s or Phd. Bachelor’s is just fine if live in the Bay Area and have experience with unicorns.
The base pay does not touch there. It’s much lower. It’s instead filled with overflowing amounts of paper money.
I have a good friend who works at OpenAI as AI researcher. And know quite a few people in that company (the company I worked at previously has a lot of people who went to work at OpenAI this year).
From what I gathered about OpenAI…. don’t head there. Miserable WLB.
And I personally find Sam Altman the next Elon Musk. Once I valued the company at about 25~30 billion, I realized the pay is no different from other tech firms (except the pay is not liquid at all and come with all sorts of weird clauses).
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I already got burnt out by private stocks before. To me, it was red flags all over the place. Let alone OpenAI is a nonprofit parent entity of the OpenAI profit organization. Ya… nope. I’m at the point in my life in which I have no thoughts working so many hours for “hope the best 3~4 years down the road”.
Tech industry moves fast. I recall during the pandemic, a lot of tech employees were considering companies like Plaid, Flexport, Nuro, etc. Come today and I’m sure the employees there are regretting hard.
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Base pay at OpenAI is only 245k btw. It dropped significantly this year (which I presume is due to liquidity issues at a nonprofitable firm).
At OpenAI you HAVE to come to office at least 3 times a week (implicitly encouraged 5 times a week). And the office is in Mission Street in SF (I heard from my friend it is moving offices as there’s more people). You are expected to work until dinner (and yes, you eat dinner there). So I guess 8:30 to 8? Ya… I got a life. On the flip side, I heard from my friend that the vegetarian options are pretty good.
The biggest red flag was when I met up with my friend and after lunch, he was “quickly” on the phone to help with work. Like seriously? Humans are not machines. Are these guys working 6 days a week?
Oh. And my friend takes great pride at working at OpenAI. But is also extremely burnt out. He was there before chatgpt and all so he is on paper making a killing (so for him, it’s worth it). For those entering at 90 billion valuation… uh, valuation matters. Unless you really believe OpenAI will dominate the market, those PPUs (if it even is worth anything) are probably not the price at face value. Didn’t Microsoft at the time “only” value at 29 billion?
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And I guess another part is: I value PPUs at zero. Do I believe OpenAI will achieve “AGI”. Absolutely not. And technically, those PPUs are worth zero in the long run if OpenAI does not achieve “AGI” first.
Now, is the talent high? Absolutely. Plenty of MIT professors also working with OpenAI. As for my interviewers, I had an interviewer who worked at Deepmind. Insane talent. I’ve absolutely never seen that kind of talent when I was interviewing for jobs. But I also know peers at OpenAI and know there’s plenty of normal everyday people there.
I still would take basically every other tech company over OpenAI. But then again, I don’t value money as I used to (already am fine financially). I took pay cut for my current remote work with great WLB.
I do those freelance AI training gigs that I see advertised everywhere. I definitely was ready for it to be some kind of scam, but it’s been more than 6 months now and still going strong. I work maybe 25 hours a week, when I want. Get paid around $40 an hour. And the work is relatively easy, but does require a really careful eye for detail and good understanding of how to review written work and enforce style guidance. Speaking from what I’ve seen in traditional programming work in the past, those kinds of skills are hard to find in the CS field so I understand why they’re willing to pay so much for the people who can do it. Definitely not counting on the gravy train to hold out forever, but for the time being it’s really reliable, well paying work once you get situated with the right company so I’m not complaining.
Idk but at MSFT they are cramming Copilot down everyone’s throats and deprioritizing every project and feature that doesn’t use GPT. Finding it hard to drink the koolaid.