Jerry Tworek (ex-VP of Research, OpenAI — now CEO, Core Automation) on the two years his idea sat unfunded, and the one sentence that changed it

TL;DR: Jerry Tworek's own two-year stall didn't end with more proof. It ended with one sentence. He'd already built the thesis — pushing reinforcement learning against GPT-3 before there was budget or backing for it. The math worked in pieces. It just never scaled. Then his chief scientist looked at what he'd already built and said: now we have the GPUs, try to scale it. That's the whole story. Not a better idea. Someone with real authority finally saying go. https://preview.redd.it/rdtq5urzraoh1.jpg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4f6f6d4b2bf9426d99b6fa595fdbd63e40b47eed I remember that cold harsh reality of immense pressure, in the winter. We were a bunch of newly assigned Malaysians in a foreign land in Abu Dhabi, UAE, circa 2009 — already 2 months behind schedule on a 5-block condominium project. We were heavily under-resourced. Just handbooks, pen and paper, and the notion of quitting was never too far away. We were squeezed like a wrung out wet towel. Then the first coordinated drawings was finally done. In a private moment, my department head said gently, "See. You did a good job." He meant to sway me away from quitting. _____________________________ I've read enough of these by now to see the shape before the ending arrives: the person was already right, and the only unknown was who'd finally say so. It's never really the skill gap people think it is. It's whoever's still waiting on someone else's yes. Hmm — this reminds me of a post I covered a while back, about the moment the actual bottleneck turned out to be permission, not the math itself. What was your "not this quarter"? Drop it below. Clip credit: MTS, full interview on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.