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Vicki Cheung

Cofounder, OpenAI

Search every verified Vicki Cheung interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Vicki Cheung, a cofounder of OpenAI, has discussed the challenges and lessons learned from managing cloud-native infrastructure for machine learning research. In a 2020 talk, she recounted an incident where an intern accidentally launched a job that consumed all available compute resources, which she estimated would have cost roughly a million dollars to complete. She emphasized the importance of setting reasonable limits and implementing cost monitoring to prevent such overuse, noting that the infrastructure had been made "too easy to scale." In a 2017 keynote, Cheung described OpenAI's use of Kubernetes to manage a cluster spanning multiple cloud providers and on-premises hardware, scaling up to 4,000 nodes. She explained that the infrastructure was designed to support large batch jobs, some running for weeks, and to allow researchers to scale experiments from one core to 10,000 cores as needed. Cheung highlighted the value of open-source software and Kubernetes' flexibility, which enabled the team to build custom tools while shielding researchers from underlying complexity.

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Other executives at OpenAI

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