Advice | The battle for the soul of AI

The podcaster and MIT scientist Lex Fridman, who has emerged as the tech world’s confessor, expressed the rapid series of emotions I encountered again and again: “You sit back, both proud, like a parent, but almost as proud as afraid that this thing will be much smarter than me. Like both pride and sadness, almost like a melancholic feeling, but ultimately joy.”

When I visited OpenAI’s headquarters in May, I found the culture to be quite impressive. Many of the people I interviewed were around when OpenAI was a nonprofit research lab, before the ChatGPT stuff — while most of us had never heard of the company. “My parents didn’t really know what OpenAI did,” said Joanne Jang, a product manager, “and they said, ‘Are you leaving Google?’” Mark Chen, a researcher involved in creating the visual tool DALL-E 2, had a similar experience. “Before ChatGPT, my mom would call me every week and say, ‘Hey, you know what, you can quit that bullshit and go work at Google or something.’” These people aren’t primarily motivated by the money.

Even after GPT made headlines, OpenAI was like being in the eye of a hurricane. “It just feels a lot calmer than the rest of the world,” Jang told me. “From the beginning, it felt more like a research lab, because we were mainly just hiring researchers,” Elena Chatziathanasiadou, a recruiter, told me. “And as we grew, it became clear to everyone that progress would come from both technology and research.”

I didn’t meet any tech brothers there, or even people with the kind of “we’re changing the world” bravado that I probably would have if I were pioneering this technology. Diane Yoon, whose job title is vice president of people, told me, “The word I would use for this workforce is seriousness… seriousness.”

When I visit a tech company as a journalist, I usually meet very few executives, and those I do interview are ruthlessly on message. OpenAI just put out a sign-up form and people are coming to talk to me.