OpenAI just opened its largest office outside San Francisco, in downtown Bellevue, Wash., and we were there for the grand opening to tour the space, check out the vibe, and record this week’s GeekWire Podcast.
Chatting inside the OpenAI game room, we share our observations about the Mad Men-meets-Pacific Northwest aesthetic — which features open floor plans and a wide variety of common areas — and try to figure out what it all says about OpenAI’s culture.
Plus, a conversation with Vijaye Raji, former Statsig CEO and now OpenAI’s CTO of applications, about Codex, infrastructure, hiring, and the evolution and growth of Silicon Valley tech giants in the region.
In our final segment, it’s the return of the GeekWire trivia challenge, with a question focusing on one of the earliest tech giants to establish an outpost in the Seattle area.
‘Hard to imagine going back’
One of the most interesting moments in the conversation with Raji came when he described how OpenAI’s own Codex tool has changed his day-to-day work, to the point where he’s personally making software again, or at least he’s prompting the software to make software.
“Codex has made coding a lot more delightful,” Raji said. “I’m back coding.”
He described a new daily rhythm: “Before you hop into a meeting, you ask it to go do a set of tasks, and then you jump into a meeting, and then when you come back, it’s done, and then you review it,” he said. “It’s so cool.”
Internally, Raji said teams using Codex are seeing 2-3x productivity gains in terms of code output. Beyond engineering, the tool has found its way into marketing, sales, and operations.
“It’s very hard for me to imagine going back to the way we used to write code anymore,” he said. “It’s fundamentally changed.”
OpenAI’s Codex, which got a Windows app this week, is part of an explosion of AI coding tools including GitHub Copilot (Microsoft), Amazon Q Developer, Google’s Gemini Code Assist, Anthropic’s Claude Code and others, all promising significant developer productivity gains.
A template for other OpenAI offices
As for the Bellevue office, Raji sees it as a potential model for OpenAI’s expansion elsewhere. The proximity to San Francisco headquarters, the shared time zone, the short distance from OpenAI partners Microsoft and Amazon, and the depth of local infrastructure talent make it an ideal test case.
“If we can make Seattle very, very successful, we can take that formula and apply it to more offices,” he said.
OpenAI currently has 250 employees in Bellevue, with room to grow to 1,400. The office houses teams working on infrastructure, ChatGPT, research, advertising, and partnerships.
Raji will be speaking at GeekWire’s AI event, Agents of Transformation, March 24. More info and tickets.
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Related coverage: Inside OpenAI’s new Bellevue office: A swanky statement about AI’s impact on the Seattle region
Audio editing by Curt Milton.
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