OpenAI Growth: Inside a Hypergrowth AI Company
In a revealing [blog post], former OpenAI engineer [Calvin French-Owen] describes what it’s really like to work at OpenAI during a period of incredible expansion. OpenAI grew from 1,000 to 3,000 employees in just one year, resulting in both breakthrough innovation and intense organizational turbulence.
: https://calv.info/openai
: https://twitter.com/calvinfo
OpenAI Growth: Breaking Points in Scale
French-Owen highlighted the challenges of [scaling fast]:
“Everything breaks when you scale that quickly: how to communicate as a company, the reporting structures, how to ship product, how to manage and organize people, the hiring processes, etc.”
OpenAI’s aggressive hiring reflects not just ambition but also the pressures of large compute costs. While reportedly projecting $4 billion in revenue for 2024, estimates put annual compute costs at $5 billion, pushing the company to grow at all costs.
: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/12/06/openai-executives-keep-leaving/
OpenAI Growth: The Codex Project
French-Owen led the development of [Codex], an AI coding agent based on GPT-3. The seven-week sprint to launch Codex was, in his words, “the hardest I’ve worked in nearly a decade.” Codex, which rolled out to [ChatGPT Plus] users, interprets natural language to generate code, aiming to democratize programming.
: https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
: https://chat.openai.com/
OpenAI Growth: Why French-Owen Left
Despite speculation about the wave of [OpenAI departures], French-Owen insists his exit wasn’t due to “drama.” Instead, it reflects his entrepreneurial spirit, shaped by past experience co-founding [Segment], which Twilio acquired for $3.2 billion. As he explained,
“I didn’t leave because of any ‘drama’. I want to get back to being a startup founder.”
: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-has-a-new-wave-of-executive-departures
: https://segment.com/
OpenAI Growth: What’s Next for French-Owen
Having contributed to OpenAI’s rapid ascent, French-Owen is now plotting his next venture. He shared on social media that he’s “still figuring out what’s next, but there’s a lot left to build out there,” embodying the drive that defines the [current landscape] in AI and technology startups.
: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/15/openai-former-engineer-blog/
