The former OpenAI engineer said that there was no drama behind his decision to quit, but that he simply wanted a new beginning. When engineer and MIT graduate Calvin French-Owen joined OpenAI in May 2024, the startup had around 1,000 employees. In a blog post published Tuesday, French-Owen detailed what it was like to work for the ChatGPT-maker for a little over a year, from May 2024 to June 2025. French-Owen found OpenAI to be "a very secretive place" as well as "a more serious place than you might expect." Before joining OpenAI, French-Owen was previously a co-founder of data startup Segment, which Twilio bought for $3.2 billion in 2020.