@FinanceYF5: A Decade of AI in One Person's Story 1/ Expelled from high school, dropped out twice, worked over 30 jobs before age 22. Later, he participated in ChatGPT from zero to one, witnessed the months when hundreds of millions of users flooded in. Now he's thinking about what to do in the next decade. A personal account worth reading.

A Decade of AI in One Man’s Life

1/ Expelled from high school, dropped out twice, and held over 30 jobs before the age of 22.

Later, he was part of ChatGPT’s journey from 0 to 1, witnessing the months when hundreds of millions of users poured in.

Now he’s thinking about what to do for the next decade.

A self-narrative worth reading.

2/ His name is Lenny Bogdonoff.

He joined OpenAI when it had only 250 people — GPT-4 was still in training, and ChatGPT hadn’t launched yet.

His first task: rebuild the Jupyter code execution environment, an early prototype of what later became the “AI computer” concept.

He didn’t realize how important it was at the time. Most people didn’t either.

3/ ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

No one predicted it would reach this scale.

Traffic grew week after week, all GPUs were reallocated, and the entire company revolved around a single variable: compute.

Database IDs started to overflow, every early architectural decision broke one by one — a team of fewer than 10 people was supporting hundreds of millions of users.

4/ The most important thing he did at OpenAI wasn’t code.

It was realizing: ChatGPT’s user base far surpassed any outsourced annotation team.

If you could involve users in the data flywheel, model quality would be on another level.

Whether a model is good or not is largely a matter of operations and quality management — not just algorithm.

5/ In early 2024, he left OpenAI to become a VC.

He spent a year and a half diving deep into a new domain every day: AI’s impact on the physical economy, energy supply chains, raw materials…

He calls it the fastest period of non-technical learning in his career.

Then the fund was acquired, the founder left, and so did he.

6/ His core judgment now:

It’s not about “how powerful AI is,” but about the speed of intelligence — the distance from knowing something to taking action is being compressed by AI.

He has seen acceleration happen from the inside, and also where it gets stuck.

Where it gets stuck is often not a technical problem, but an organizational one.

7/ He wants to spend the next decade on that stuck place.

“Where AI is cheap and fast is not where the biggest returns are.”

Few people can see this clearly — people who have been inside the lab and also sat in the investor’s seat.

Which industry do you think has the slowest AI penetration but the greatest potential?

That’s all.

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