Calvin's OpenAI Reflections

Calvin French-Owen's full post is worth a read if you're curious about how OpenAI operates behind the scenes. Calvin and I met when he was my visiting partner in YC's S21 batch. I owe him for believing in me even before his journey at OpenAI.

It's a worthy read, but one thing struck me as I went through it.

Chat at the center

Chat runs really deep. Since ChatGPT took off, a lot of the codebase is structured around the idea of chat messages and conversations. These primitives are so baked at this point, you should probably ignore them at your own peril.

That line hit home for me. I spent sleepless nights on the /completions and /edits endpoints. Graham and I rewrote big chunks of our app once chat became the default.

Everything seems to be trending toward that black-box chat interface.

Ignore it at your peril though I still wonder what might've happened if chat-with-gpt-3.5.com used a different verb. Maybe the future of AI would be different if it was called "ask", or "learn". Perhaps innevitably, it would have been "chat".