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Three weeks after leaving his role at OpenAI, Calvin French-Owen has detailed his experience in a new post where he characterizes the ChatGPT-maker as high-pressure, secretive, and obsessed with "vibes" on social media.
French-Owen was a member of the company's technical staff for a little over a year. He chose to leave three weeks ago, but was "deeply conflicted about it." He feels "lucky" to have been a part of the company and the team behind, Codex, OpenAI's software engineering agent.
At the same time, he describes a high-intensity culture with widespread burnout. That tracks with recent reports of OpenAI leadership giving the entire staff a week off to recharge, Wired reports. French-Owen's team built Codex, an AI agent for vibe coding, in just 7 weeks.
"The Codex sprint was probably the hardest I've worked in nearly a decade," says French-Owen. "Most nights were up until 11am or midnight. Waking up to a newborn at 5:30am every morning. Heading to the office again at 7am. Working most weekends. We all pushed hard as a team, because every week counted."
Others seem to agree. "Most people [at OpenAI work] roughly 12 hours a day, 5 days a week," says one Redditor. "With some people working a lot harder (14 hours a day, for maybe 6 days a week), some people working less. Burn out is pretty normal." Perhaps the best move is to work hard, then leave on your own accord, which is the route French-Owen took.
All of this work is discussed over the messaging app Slack. "There is no email," French-Owen says. "I maybe received ~10 emails in my entire time there." Employees are empowered to move quickly and pursue their own ideas without a lot of internal red tape. The company moves quickly and "changes direction on a dime," he says.
OpenAI keeps its trade secrets close to the vest, even internally. It's "a very secretive place," French-Owen says. " I couldn't tell anyone what I was working on in detail." Leadership is especially unforthcoming about the company's financials, but one thing was clear to French-Owen: The company is spending gobs of cash on computing power. "Everything is a rounding error compared to GPU cost," French-Own says.
OpenAI's upcoming Texas data centers will double electricity use in the city where it's located, and CEO Sam Altman recently confirmed the company is spending "tens of millions of dollars" on users saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT.
Employees are also social media hawks who take viral posts seriously. "The company pays a lot of attention to Twitter," French-Owen says. "If you tweet something related to OpenAI that goes viral, chances are good someone will read about it and consider it. A friend of mine joked, 'This company runs on twitter vibes.' There's certainly still a lot of analytics around usage, user growth, and retention–but the vibes are equally as important."
That may mean OpenAI has a bias toward appeasing X users, making it vulnerable to a small group's opinions. The platform is male dominated, with 64% of its users being men, according to Statista. Elon Musk's influence also looms large on the platform, and has made the platform more right-leaning, Bloomberg reports. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is active on X. He posts daily, announcing product launches, fighting lawsuits, musing about the future of AI, and occasionally beefing with Elon Musk.
Given OpenAI's X obsession, it's likely OpenAI employees are reading French-Owen's account, which could have influenced how he portrayed the company. While his is just one perspective of some 3,000 employees currently at the company, it's among the most in-depth public accounts of its culture to date.
"People of different tenure and different parts of the organization have very different goals and viewpoints," French-Owen says.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.