take home: 48 hours to implement a paper from scratch and reproduce key results. i chose the DPO paper. took me ~20 hours total. onsite (4 hours): 1. presented my take home, got grilled on every design decision 2. coding: implement a custom tokenizer with BPE from scratch 3. system design: design the inference infrastructure for a model serving 1B+ requests/day 4. culture fit: talked about responsible AI development still waiting. its been 2 weeks. recruiter says committee is still reviewing. not hopeful

OpenAI applied research - take home + onsite

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take home: 48 hours to implement a paper from scratch and reproduce key results.

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20 hours on a take home is brutal. thats basically a free week of labor. openai gets away with it because everyone wants to work there but its objectively exploitative

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implementing BPE from scratch is a classic openai question. the key is understanding the merge rules and being able to explain the tradeoffs between BPE, wordpiece, and sentencepiece

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2 weeks with no answer usually means borderline. theyre probably debating internally. not necessarily bad - quick rejections come fast