At the end of my job search, I did something I totally wasn’t expecting. I turned down all my academic job offers and signed the OpenAI offer instead.
I was nervous and stressed out during my decision-making process — it felt like a U-turn at the time — but in the end I’m really happy with how things turned out. There were two key factors at play for me:
1) I felt like I could best pursue the work I’m passionate about at OpenAI, and
2) San Francisco — where OpenAI is — is an amazing city for my partner and I to live and work.
I’ll discuss my decision-making process more in this post.