McGrew: OpenAI succeeded by balancing startup agility with opinionated scaling bets
Bob McGrew · Bob McGrew: AI Agents And The Path To AGI · Y Combinator · Jan 31, 2025 · at 6:04
Former OpenAI Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew explains why OpenAI's organizational structure outperformed larger corporate research labs.
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“And we took a different approach, which was really more like a startup where there was no sort of big centralized plan. But at the same time, people didn't have, you know, it wasn't just sort of let a thousand flowers bloom. Instead we had opinions about what needed to be done and things like how do you show scale as a way of, you know, making your idea get better. And that opinion was set by the research leadership, you know, again, early on people like Ilya, people like Dario. That was how we made sure that we didn't just sort of throw resources at everybody, but neither did we have just one set of ideas that were there. We found this sort of happy medium between the two.”
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