In the latest episode of ‘Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates’, CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI was ‘not run by a bunch of 24-year-old programmers’, and agreed that it was concerning. Now, the hottest AI startup is on the lookout for young talent from among those already working in big tech companies earning millions of dollars, or hiding in their basement building the next big tech firm.
“In AI, at least in my opinion, the real 30 under 30 are those you’ve never heard of. They typically exist five layers down the organisational chart from the CEO,” said OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy, and developers’ all time favourite.
Further, he said that the young geniuses are usually not active on X (formerly Twitter), have an unmaintained LinkedIn, avoid podcasts, and might have been published at one point but no longer do so. “They are today’s Einsteins, directly inventing and building miracles. I wish they weren’t hidden inside big tech and startups, receiving very large paychecks, but here we are,” he added.
Clearly, OpenAI is in a race to attract young talent, and Karpathy is all worried and bored, surrounded mostly by AI engineers in their 30s, 40s and 50s.
“OpenAI recruiters on this thread lol. Well played, Andrej!” quipped Google DeepMind researcher Lucas Beyer.
OpenAI’s effort is clearly visible. For instance, there’s OpenAI Residency, a six-month program that provides a pathway to a full-time role at OpenAI for residents. The program seeks talented individuals from diverse backgrounds, who may not have traditional academic credentials but possess valuable skills and experiences in AI.
Additionally, it also has an online forum, ‘Young people in artificial intelligence’, where users can discuss AI and OpenAI-related topics. This community provides a platform for younger people to engage with others interested in AI and OpenAI, and it may serve as a resource for learning more about the company and its work.
Where are all the young talents hiding?
“I have found 70,000 researchers in AI here on Twitter but you are right, most are quiet and most have very few followers,” said Robert Scoble, former strategist at Microsoft.
Many young and talented engineers often work at renowned big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft, and they are frequently positioned low the organisational chart. In many cases, the CEO or the top layer isn’t even aware of their contributions and talent, making it challenging to recognise their potential.
“I’ve never met him (Larry Page), never met Sergey Brin either,” said Aravind Srinivasa, founder of Perplexity, who was formerly a researcher at OpenAI for a year and an intern at Google DeepMind in 2019.
“To be honest, if the talent is buried five layers down in the org chart, the organisation might suck,” said Yun-Ta Tsai, senior staff engineer at Tesla.
Further, he said, when he was at NVIDIA, Jensen and him were four degrees apart. At GoogleX, he and Sergey were three degrees apart. At Google Research, he and Larry were initially three degrees apart, but the chain grew larger over time.
“Nokia was the worst. Can’t count how many hops between me and the CEO. Anything above or equal to five becomes very inefficient,” said Tsai.
Finding AI Prodigies
Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, pointed out that currently, several young individuals popular on social media claim to be ‘leading AI experts’ despite making precisely zero contributions to the field. They receive undeserved and hurtful attention from the media and governments.
Further, LeCunn thinks that the open-source community is the best place to find genuine developers. “If a researcher has a Google Scholar page, their publications and citations are available. That’s enough to earn them credit and prestige in the research community. They absolutely don’t need social media,” he said.
Taking a dig at Karpathy and OpenAI, LeCun said, “If they work in a company that practices open research, they’ll have their name on papers and GitHub repos, they will give talks at conferences and workshops, they’ll be invited to give seminars in academia, they may even win awards.”
Going by LeCun’s words, the only way for OpenAI to attract young talent would be to go the open source route, or launch series of open source GPT models, where young talent can experiment.
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