Ex-OpenAI engineer recalls 2019: GPT-2 made the scaling revolution obvious
seanmcdonaldxyz · x · 2026-10-03
Replying to @csvoss's departure, former OpenAI engineer Sean McDonald recalls joining in 2019 when the world only knew GPT-2 — a transformer producing surprisingly coherent but factually wrong, dreamlike text. Having tinkered with Markov chains and Karpathy's 2015 char-rnn in college, he says it was immediately obvious GPT-2, if scaled, would be a revolution. A fond farewell to his OpenAI run.
Related event: Seven-year OpenAI veteran departs, recalling GPT-2 era(3 posts)→
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