281–290 of 1001 posts
So part of their compensation for working is equity, and when they leave thay have to sign an additional agreement in order to keep their previously earned compensation? How is this legal? Mine as well tell them they have to give all their money back too. What's the consideration for this contract?
Extra respect is due to Jan Leike, then: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494
I think superalignment is absurd, and model "safety" is the modern AI company's "think of the children" pearl clutching pretext to justify digging moats. All this after sucking up everyone's copyright material as fair use, then not releasing the result, and profiting off it. All due respect to Jan here, though. He's being (perhaps dangerously) honest, genuinely believes in AI safety, and is an actual research expert,…
How can I be confident you aren't committing the fallacy of collecting a bunch of events and saying that is sufficient to serve as a cohesive explanation? No offense intended, but the comment above has many of the qualities of a classic rant.
If I'm wrong, perhaps you could elaborate? If I'm not wrong, maybe you could reconsider?
Don't forget that alignment research has existed longer than OpenAI. It would be a stretch to claim that the original AI safety researchers were using the pretexts you described -- I think it is fair to say they were involved because of genuine concern, not because it was a trendy or self-serving thing to do.
Some of those researchers and people they influenced ended up at OpenAI. So it would be a mistake or at least an oversimplification to claim that AI safety is some kind of pretext at OpenAI. Could it be a pretext for some people in the organization, to some degree? Sure, it could. But is it a significant effect? One that fits your complex narrative, above? I find that unlikely.
Making sense of an organization's intentions requires a lot of analysis and care, due to the combination of actors and varying influence.
There are simpler, more likely explanations, such as: AI safety wasn't a profit center, and over time other departments in OpenAI got more staff, more influence, and so on. This is a problem, for sure, but there is no "pearl clutching pretext" needed for this explanation.
I have some experience with rich people who think they can just put whatever they want in contracts and then stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day. Turns out they're right, they can put whatever they want in a contract. And again, they are correct that their wage slaves will 99.99% of the time sign whatever paper he pushes in front of them while saying "as a cond…
Even lowest level fast food workers can choose a different employer. An engineer working at OpenAI certainly has a lot of opportunities to choose from. Even when I only had three years in the industry, mid at best, I asked to change the contract I was presented with because non-compete was too restrictive — and they did it. The caliber of talent that OpenAI is attracting (or hopes to attract) can certainly do this too.
So part of their compensation for working is equity, and when they leave thay have to sign an additional agreement in order to keep their previously earned compensation? How is this legal? Mine as well tell them they have to give all their money back too. What's the consideration for this contract?
> What's the consideration for this contract? Consideration is almost meaningless as an obstacle here. They can give the other party a peppercorn, and that would be enough to count as consideration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law) There might be other legal challenges here, but 'consideration' is unlikely to be one of them. Unless OpenAI has idiots for lawyers.
So part of their compensation for working is equity, and when they leave thay have to sign an additional agreement in order to keep their previously earned compensation? How is this legal? Mine as well tell them they have to give all their money back too. What's the consideration for this contract?
In the past a lot of options would expire if you didn’t exercise them within eg. 90 days of leaving. And exercising could be really expensive. Speculation: maybe the options they earn when they work there have some provision like this. In return for the NDA the options get extended.
As for 'invalid because no consideration' - there is practically zero probability OpenAI lawyers are dumb enough to not give any consideration. There is a very large probability this reporter misunderstood the contract. OpenAI have likely just given some non-vested equity, which in some cases is worth a lot of money. So yeah, some (former) employees are getting paid a lot to shut up. That's the least unique contract ever and there is nothing morally or legally wrong with it.
It shouldn't be legal and maybe it isn't, but all schemes like this are, when you get down to it, ultimately about suppressing potential or actual evidence of serious, possibly criminal misconduct, so I don't think they are going to let the illegality get them all upset while they are having fun.
What crimes do you think have occurred here?
Employees and employer enter into an agreement: Work here for X term and you get Y options with Z terms attached. OK.
But, then later pulling Darth Vader… “Now that the deal is completing, I am changing the deal. Consent and it’s bad for you this way. Don’t consent and it’s bad that way. Either way, you held up your end of our agreement and I’m not.”
Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those who produced it, anyone could freely generate an infinite number of high-truthiness OpenAI anecdotes, freshly laundered by the inference engine, that couldn't be used against the original authors without OpenAI invalidating their own legal stance with respect to their own models.