I couldn't go on reading.
Unless they put on a show for themselves and that's who they try to fool. Probably why nobody mentions money in these shows. They're self motivational.
> Do anything, do it at scale, and do it today
> It's not just GPUs, it's everything.
> I'm not the first, I'm just the latest.
This guy and Rob Pike should have a talk.
“I don't want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place, better than we do.”
Beautiful satire in that show. I'm still throwing my own version of this quote every now and again at the office.
I didn't know it was possible for a sentence structure to cause such a thing.
What do you think is happening with the efficiency gains? You're making rich people richer and helping AI to become an integral (i.e. positive ROI from business perspective) part of our lives. And that's perfectly fine if it aligns with your philosophy. It's not for quite a few others, and you not owning up to it leads to all kinds of negativity in the comments.
may it happen that the efficiency gains decrease demand and thus postpone investment into and development of new and better energy sources? If one couldn't get by just by bringing 20 trucks with gas turbines, may be he would have invested in fusion development :)
What mechanism would make this happen?
Demand could decrease if AI became worse, but efficiency doesn't make AI worse - it actually makes possible at all to run bigger, better models (see the other comment with a link to Jevon's paradox), which increase, not decrease demand (more powerful models may have new capabilities that people want to use)
Alternatively, AI demand could decrease through political pressure (either anti-AI sentiment takes a foothold on the public, and/or government regulation strangle demand on the sector like it did for eg. on tobacco industry). But another way to reap the benefits of more efficient AI datacenters is to make it a talking point on how AI environmental impacts can be mitigated, which could curb anti-AI sentiment.
Either way, those possibilities don't decrease demand for AI - they are either neutral, or increase demand instead.
Of course once someone has money they can say it's not about the money, but that privilege is literally bought with...money.
Reducing runtime energy use over years won't really make up for the resource use that goes into building the data center. It's just moved around, similar to how Elon moves around money as needed to bolster the financials of a particular project.
Like with the airline industry it's not just the smog they blow on our food. Drink carts, seat belts, barf bags all have a resource intensive energy and materials pipeline.
Every server screw and power cable adds up.
Quite frankly, I think some people here are too quickly spooked and think what you say is sus. I simply see that as a sign that they aren't fully having a good faith discussion. Or they simply read things way differently than I do.
I'm simply writing this because I think there are enough people that have a similar reading to what you wrote. They simply don't mention it as people who feel "outraged" (a bit too dramatic of a term but English is my 2nd language). "Outraged" people seem simply more vocal to me.
For clarity: I feel neutral about this whole thing. I do appreciate the work you've done in the past.
I am a long time fan, I have the physical copy of each and every book that you have authored, I have watched each and every video that you are in, and I walk team members and clients through your USE method at every engagement I am on.
I would say to you that the "make the world a better place" has been excessively misquoted. Even the Silicon Valley episode on Tech Crunch parodies show how anything and everything is intended to "make the world a better place".
Please reconsider your use of the phrase given the well-earned negativity around it.
You have done a brilliant job elevating your chosen specialty to the world, and encouraging and inspiring others in the industry for a long time - so you should be fairly compensated for that lofty position. I don't envy the late nights or very early mornings you have ahead of you on conference calls with SF, but good luck at OpenAI mate !
Reality is, these AI giants are here and they are using a massive amount of resources. Love them or hate them, that is where we are. Whether or not you accept the job with them, OpenAI is gonna OpenAI.
Given how much the detractors scream about resource uses, you'd think they'd welcome the fact that someone of your calibre is going in and attempting to make a difference.
Which, leads me to believe you're encountering a lot of projecting from people who perhaps can't land the highest of comp roles, and shield their ego by ascribing to the concept of it being selling out, which they would of course never do.
However. I am putting my curious foot forward here:
What were the toughest ethical quandaries you faced when deciding to join OpenAI?
I'm surprised at this; all that experience wasn't enough to flag this article as obviously AI generated?
More to the point, with all that experience you still weren't able to issue prompts to make the output sound different from generic AI slop?
I hope there will be harder problem waiting for you, than using flamegraphs to optimize GenAI Porn.
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/14/openai-chatgpt-erotica-ment...
I loved your work back when I was an IC, and I'm sure this is a common sentiment across the industry amongst those of us who started systems adjacent! I still refer to your BPF tools and Systems Performance books despite having not written professional code for years now.
Can't wait to read content similar to what you wrote about when at Netflix and Intel albeit about the newer generation of GPUs and ASICs and the newer generation of performance problems!
> There's so many interesting things to work on, things I have done before and things I haven't.
What are the things you haven’t done before, if you could mention them?
Brendan.
First of all congratulations on your new job. However,
It is easier to just say to everyone it is about the money, compensation and the stock options.
You're not joining a charity, or to save the planet, this company is about to unload on the public markets at an unfathomable $1TN valuation.
Don't insult your readers.
No, it never does. Those people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but...it might just work for us.
EDIT: possibly a corollary--does Mia pay money for chatgpt or use a free plan?
My wife was paying for ChatGPT before I joined. I didn't ask Mia. I probably have three months of hair growth before my next chance to ask.
The string "compens" appears exactly once in your post:
> But there are other factors to consider beyond a well-known product: what's my role, who am I doing it with, and what is the COMPENSation?
You did it for the money; don't try to rationalize it, because no one believes you. For that amount of cash, I'd probably jump on Altman's bubble for a year or two.
Wanna buy a bridge?
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)
I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.
Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow?
Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.
> I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations.
> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations, which Intel can continue to do in my absence. Most of my recommendations aren't easy, however, and require accepting change, ELT/CEO approval, and multiple quarters of investment. I won't be there to push them, but other employees can (my CloudTeams strategy is in the inbox of various ELT, and in a shared folder with all my presentations, code, and weekly status reports). This work will hopefully live on and keep making Intel stronger. Good luck.
OpenAI deserves these big shots.
So why does that make him a “big shot”? Are you perhaps envious of him?
Why does openAI deserve him or anyone? Hard to say.
like many, i dislike the "i want to help save the world" generic posts, but it seems like most here are being quick to dismiss TFA (of course, there's no substance in GP, so what the heck was that?).
just want to help place a human face onto this guy while we're all here doxxing him, who has not only published a bunch of works, but was the guy in front of the camera in the Shouting in the Datacenter clip[0] !!
things are difficult, but i hang on to hope. and undoubtedly, i have tons to learn from this guy as a sysadmin myself.
OpenAI released an open source model only because they are capped on growth right now by the amount if hardware they have. Improve resource efficiency and you better believe they'll just crank up use of said resources until they capped again.
And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)
The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.
The obvious lie for a start
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.
How could she not know?
BG and eBPF are awesome but this article read like a midlife crisis to me.
Interacting outside of the tech bubble is eye opening. Conversely, the hair stylist might have mentioned the brand of a super popular scissor supplier/other equipment you’d have never heard of.
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.
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.
The GP quote also wasn't about a personal assistant use case, it was about filling a hole in personal connection. Its sad because we are more often today having less human connections and more digital, aka fake, ones.
Or, you know, Signal/Matrix/WhatsApp/{your_preferred_chat_app}. If you're already texting things, might as well do that.
I guess I'm a dinosaur but I think emailing the friend to ask what they are actually up to would be even better than involving an LLM to imagine it.
Asynchronous human to human communication is a pretty solved problem.
We are currently fucked as well to be clear as people genuinely have this disconnected mindset of reality.
> I'd been missing that human connection
At OpenAI.
I don't think that indicates that any one company interviewed him 20+ times.
I mean, good for him. If somebody wrote me an OpenAI sized check I'd take it too.
You're in for a surprise buddy.
Seems like that really hurt.
Man I don't care if you are best engineer in the planet but reading that post made me cringe. Keep your ego under control, please.
Just say you joined for the money and that Intel's stock didn't do a 10,000x run like Nvidia did and he completely missed it.
So the best chance at something like that again is OpenAI when they achieve a 1TN valuation with AGI.