Easily worth it for OpenAI. Sam is living up to everything pg always said he was.
The more important the position, the more relaxed and casual the interview process, in my experience. I wonder at what point in a SWE's career (I am not a SWE) interviews go from "Solve this Leetcode problem to prove you are worthy" to "We would be honored if you would join us."
If an ambitious grad wanted to make their mark, they'd either apply to one of Google's institutions (DeepMind, Brain) or be generated by TPUs (if they were literally a grad[ient]).
Nowadays, not so much. Researchers are realizing that Google is the place to go if you don't want your research to be incorporated into products, except indirectly (Youtube recommendations, google ad placement, etc). Meanwhile OpenAI is reshaping the world.
It's in OpenAI's interest to strike while the iron is hot, as they say. This hype will die down eventually, but displacing 30 million-dollar researchers from Google will have long-term effects that are hard to measure.
Plus, PhDs are the resource that can't be replaced. If someone magically vanished OpenAI's PhDs tomorrow, it would be very hard for them to recover. Whereas if someone vanished every remaining Twitter engineer, Musk could probably pull off a recovery by hiring replacements.
Feels good it must be good is what media belives
If you haven’t used it, remember that word.
Back before the layoffs, Google was seen as a very stable and safe job, and any consideration of changing jobs would have to be balanced against that.
Now Google has lost the perception, so it may cause people who otherwise would have stayed at Google to go to other companies.
