~agentydragon/How I got to OpenAI

In May 2022, I started working at OpenAI as a resident on RL team, and eventually I got hired as full-time. As of today, I’m still at OpenAI, and I’m working on some ChatGPT related stuff and try to make progress on scalable alignment. I want to make a brief write-up of how this happened, because sometimes people ask about it and it might be helpful to other people in a similar situation. TL;DR, this is the last couple steps: My longer relevant history follows. I’ve always been good with math and computers. (I started out as a more general hacker, including electronics etc., but eventually specialized.) I did some competitive programming, high school programming seminars, olympiads etc. I got to district level rounds, and my top achievements were being ~#20-30 in competitive “algorithmic programming” (which is part of math olympiad in Czech Republic), and being #1 in competitive “practical programming” (which is more “write a program for task X” rather than “solve this theoretical prob

In May 2022, I started working at OpenAI as a resident on RL team, and eventually I got hired as full-time. As of today, I’m still at OpenAI, and I’m working on some ChatGPT related stuff and try to make progress on scalable alignment. I want to make a brief write-up of how this happened, because sometimes people ask about it and it might be helpful to other people in a similar situation. TL;DR, this is the last couple steps: My longer relevant history follows. I’ve always been good with math and computers. (I started out as a more general hacker, including electronics etc., but eventually spe