Again, many comments here saying I only care about the money, and while comp is an important factor I think it characterizes me as someone I'm not, and forgets what I've been doing for the past two decades. I've spent thousands of hours of my life writing textbooks for roughly minimum wage, as I want to help others like me (I came from nothing, with no access tech meetups or conferences, and books were the gateway to a better job). I've published technologies as open source that have allowed others to make millions and are the basis for many startups. I'm also helping pioneer remote work and hoping to set a good example for others to follow (as I've published about before). So I think I'm well known for caring about a lot of things during the past couple of decades.

It would be good if the performance improvements made can be applicable across the industry so everyone benefits. But it doesn't sound unbelievable that OpenAi may want to keep some of it secret to keep an advantage over others?

Thanks for taking the risk in this environment and posting about your experience from a personal standpoint. [environment: people will come at you from all angles with very passionate opinions]

I’m replying to your comment in the hopes of getting a response. In the blog post, you said:

> There's so many interesting things to work on, things I have done before and things I haven't.

What are the things you haven’t done before, if you could mention them?

> I stood on the street after my haircut and let sink in how big this was, how this technology has become an essential aide for so many, how I could lead performance efforts and help save the planet.

Brendan.

First of all congratulations on your new job. However,

It is easier to just say to everyone it is about the money, compensation and the stock options.

You're not joining a charity, or to save the planet, this company is about to unload on the public markets at an unfathomable $1TN valuation.

Don't insult your readers.

Interesting. Out of curiosity, how long do you think OpenAI can survive as a company? Put another way, what would be your guesses for probability of failure on 1yr, 3yr, and 5yr horizons?

EDIT: possibly a corollary--does Mia pay money for chatgpt or use a free plan?

> Comp is important of course,

The string "compens" appears exactly once in your post:

> But there are other factors to consider beyond a well-known product: what's my role, who am I doing it with, and what is the COMPENSation?

You did it for the money; don't try to rationalize it, because no one believes you. For that amount of cash, I'd probably jump on Altman's bubble for a year or two.

[dead]

You gonna open source it?

Reminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right?

I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.

The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.

Right? Like what an incredibly naive thing to think, that BG is going to contain power consumption lmao. OpenAI is always going to run their hardware hot. If BG frees up compute, a new workload will just fill it.

Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow?

Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.

Even a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all

The blog author is the same guy who wrote this when leaving his previous company https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-12-05/leaving-intel.h... :

> I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations.

> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations, which Intel can continue to do in my absence. Most of my recommendations aren't easy, however, and require accepting change, ELT/CEO approval, and multiple quarters of investment. I won't be there to push them, but other employees can (my CloudTeams strategy is in the inbox of various ELT, and in a shared folder with all my presentations, code, and weekly status reports). This work will hopefully live on and keep making Intel stronger. Good luck.

OpenAI deserves these big shots.

I stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…”

The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.

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For people who’s main computing devices are phones, this isn’t hard to believe at all.

Interacting outside of the tech bubble is eye opening. Conversely, the hair stylist might have mentioned the brand of a super popular scissor supplier/other equipment you’d have never heard of.

Not the first time either. See this person's previous blog when leaving his earlier company. Lots of Kim kardashian vibe of self inflated self worth.

It's a blog post, not an article. A narrative of events, not an interesting write-up on a topic.

> And we do not need gigawatts and gigawatts for this use case anyway. A small local model or batched inference of a small model should do just fine.

I guess I'm a dinosaur but I think emailing the friend to ask what they are actually up to would be even better than involving an LLM to imagine it.

Asynchronous human to human communication is a pretty solved problem.

I use it as something to talk to about incredibly nerdy and/or obscure things no one else would be willing to talk about.

It’s super dope, and you can have it talk to people for you in the local language when you go there. I’ve busted it out to explain what I’m thinking for me. Watching travel shows on TV or reading travel magazines is sadder.

The article says "I ended up having 26 interviews and meetings (of course I kept a log) with various AI tech giants."

I don't think that indicates that any one company interviewed him 20+ times.

Seriously. I would expect him to be more of an offer-only scenario.

He's summing interviews across all AI giants. But the ones about to IPO can interview someone almost infinitely many times, because everyone wants on the bandwagon.

No single person other than Sam Altman can stop them from using anonymized interactions for training and metrics. At least in the consumer tiers.

It's a little too late for that, all the models train on prompts and responses.

Unless OpenAI goes with a very liberal definition of AGI, he's going to wait decades for AGI.

I think OpenAI will IPO at 1T. I don’t want to say bubble but it could be one of these stocks super hyped that never goes anywhere after the IPO(I.e airbnb during Covid)