OpenAI changes direction on a dime. This was a thing we valued a lot at Segment–it's much better to do the right thing as you get new information, vs decide to stay the course just because you had a plan. It's remarkable that a company as large as OpenAI still maintains this ethos

Good research managers are insanely impactful and also incredibly limited. The best ones manage to connect the dots between many different research efforts and bring together a bigger model training. The same goes for great PMs

There must've been ~3-4 different Codex prototypes floating around before we decided to push for a launch. These efforts are usually taken by a small handful of individuals without asking permission. Teams tend to quickly form around them as they show promise.

The company pays a lot of attention to twitter. If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it. A friend of mine joked, "this company runs on twitter vibes".