You gotta wonder if they really need all those people… would be a genius way to ...

alchemist1e9 · on Nov 21, 2023

I do wonder what exactly almost 800 people do at OpenAI. Some approximate breakdown by job function would be very interesting.

jtriangle · on Nov 21, 2023

At any company, the square root of the number of people working there do 80% of the work. So, more people makes that group larger, slowly.

That doesn't mean that a company can just cull the rest of the employees not in that group mind, just that a small number of them are responsible for most of the value while the rest work as a support structure to allow them to do what they do.

saulpw · on Nov 21, 2023

Yeah I think anyone on HN could write that website in a weekend. With uncensored GPT-4 you wouldn't need more than 10 people on staff and most of those would just be there to fix the printer.

Edit: I thought this would obviously be satire. Guess not..

code_runner · on Nov 21, 2023

You have to gather and store the data. You have to design and experiment with the model architecture. You have to train the various experiments.

You have to now invent a way to serve this at scale.

You do care about safety by default, so you employ people for that.

You need a team to market and design the products.

You have an api and you’re working on additional things like API hooks to call into services, which actually involves more models.

Now you have all of the standard web app at massive scale issues. You need to design, implement, and serve a frontend as well as the api.

You need a sales team to build relationships with enterprises and startups etc etc. you need a billing team.

Don’t forget about whisper, TTS, dalle etc. you need to do this for all of those as well!

You’re also doing this faster and better than the rest of the industry.

You also need lawyers, office staff, support, etc.