Brendan, I'm a big fan of your book, and work. I don't have a problem with you joining OpenAI; best of luck there!
However, I'm not sure your analysis is quite correct, in this case.
If OpenAI can mobilize X (giga)dollars to buy Y amounts of energy, your work there will not reduce X or Y, it will simply help them produce more "tokens" (or whatever "unit of AI") for a given amount of energy.
So in a sense you're helping make OpenAI tools better, more effective, but it's not helping reduce resource usage.
To answer a few people at once: I did mention compensation as a factor in the post, but I didn't elaborate details, so easy to miss. Comp is important of course, but so are the other factors. It feels like I can't go for a day without reading about the cost of AI datacenters in the news, and I can do something about it.
This article is so full of itself I can hardly stand to read it. I had to just sort of skim it instead. Sorry! This style just doesn't do it for me.
> Mia the hairstylist got to work, and casually asked what I do for a living. "I'm an Intel fellow, I work on datacenter performance." Silence.
How could she not know?
The AI industry, and SV tech generally, has a pattern of recruiting talent by flattering people's self-image as builders and discoverers, which makes it psychologically very difficult for those people to reckon honestly with downstream harm.
It’s so jarring to hear this reality-detached writing style coming from someone who’s otherwise a great systems thinker.
This is like my worst nightmare as a systems engineer: that years of navigating bureaucracy at a place like Intel slowly brainrots me into prioritizing politics and self-promotion over the technical truth.
I hope this is just PR reflex and not an actual loss of grounding.
As a big fan of you; There are a lot of things feels off in the post, and as others mentioned it feels like you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re going to save the world but everyone knows it’s something else.
> She was worried about a friend who was travelling in a far-away city, with little timezone overlap when they could chat, but she could talk to ChatGPT anytime about what the city was like and what tourist activities her friend might be doing, which helped her feel connected. She liked the memory feature too, saying it was like talking to a person who was living there.
This seems rather sad. Is this really what AI is for?
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 want to save the planet by getting the most amount of heat out of the tire fire we are currently tossing tires on.
I found funny the hairstylist did provide a pretty distopic reason to use ChatGPT... it seems that you are trying to please your new employer... Nevertheless I respect performance work and I'm studying for something similar. I hope to land a job in HPC
> it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet. I have joined OpenAI to work on this challenge directly.
I couldn't go on reading.
Money.
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Apparently, there's this guy who's really good at optimizing computer performance and makes a lot of money doing it. At the same time, he writes mediocre school essays that are actually a bit embarrassing. Guys, if you have the opportunity to land a very well-paid job, then do it. Take the money. Live your life. But please spare us the public self-castration.
Re: "it's about saving the planet" - according to Jevons paradox [0] if the cost of AI will decrease its total usage will increase. Definitely not saving the planet in this scenario.
Could have just said he joined for the money, which wouldn’t be the worst thing. Instead, we got this high-and-mighty mumbo-jumbo larp.
that is a very long attempt at backwards rationalisation
just say it's for the money, people understand that
but this sort of post is simply gross
Saving the planet and the Trump alliance (https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...) don't seem to relaly jive.
Your improving efficiency is their improving margin. It only saves the world if they stop selling more tokens.
"it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet." Jevon's paradox probably will mean that lower costs will lead to more use.
according to most in the industry, the cheaper AI is the more we will need of it. So to actually reduce the energy used by AI, you should try to make it as inefficient as possible.
Brendan can do whatever he wants. Hes that good. If anybody seriously needed to interview him 20+ times to figure it out, then the burden is now on them to not fuck it up.
> it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet.
You're in for a surprise buddy.
Strong LinkedIn vibes in this entry.
Performance and efficiency are important, but we need you to invent the monitoring tools and visualisations that will underpin alignment!
[flagged]
Could you please provide information about the efficiency optimization you plan to implement?
If OpenAI is responsible for “saving the planet” we are so fucked.
We are currently fucked as well to be clear as people genuinely have this disconnected mindset of reality.
Hi Brendan. Thanks for the update. Ignore the haters.
WRT "AI saving the planet", obviously.
We need ungodly amounts of machine learning. Weather modeling, forecasting, resilience planning, risk mgmt, planning, etc.
To implement virtual power plants (aka P2P distributed grid), everything needs to get smart. Just this transformation alone is a generational project.
There's dozens more of "must have" stacks we need to tackle climate crisis. Replace industrial heat. Decarbonize agriculture. Build out geothermal. Find and stop methane leaks. Pretty much everything needs a makeover, really.
OpenAI is as good a place (for you) to start as any.
Happy hunting.
I want to be as good as you at performance engineering. It's the direction I want for my career.
Something tells me that in a year we'll see a post about why you left OpenAI.
Sama won't listen to anyone. That's why. None of these CEOs are going to listen.
Honestly have never heard of this person. Why does HN care so much that he joined OpenAI?
Did the article intentionally start with a LLM cliche to filter out all the people who hate reading obviously generated content? I would say it worked.
If it's in your power, make sure user prompts and llm responses are never read, never analyzed and never used for training - not anonymized, not derived, not at all.
Mia was right. Listen to Mia
> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet
There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)