That's not enforceable, right? I'm not a lawyer, but even I know no contract can strips you out of rights given by the constitution.
If the constitution protected you from this sort of thing then there'd be no such thing as "trade secret" laws.
OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#332The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. 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 w…
Clever, but no.
The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case, the latter case would be plain infringing copyrights and admitting to it.
In other words: GPT-4 gets to get away with occasionally spitting out something real verbatim. Llama2-7b-finetune-NYTArticles does not.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#333So 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?
That OpenAI are institutionally unethical. That such a young company can be become rotten so quickly can only be due to leadership instruction or leadership failure.
Look at Sam Altman's career and tweets. He's a clown at best, and at worst he's a manipulative crook who only cares about his own enrichment and uses pro-social ideas to give himself a veneer of trustworthiness.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a lawyer. This is not just a general release, and I have no idea how OpenAI's lawyers expect this to be legal.
Out of curiosity, what are the penalties for putting unenforceable stuff in an employment contract? Are there any?
Typically there is no penalty - and contracts explicitly declare that all clauses are severable so that the rest of the contract remains valid even if one of the scare-clauses is found to be invalid. IANAL
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#335We're apparently at the Scientology stage of the AI hype cycle. One funny observation is, if you ostensibly believe that you're about to invent the AGI godhead who will render the economic system obsolete in < ~5 years or so, how do stock return no-criticism lawsuits fit into that kind of worldview
AGI led utopia will be pretty easy if we're all under contractual obligation to not criticize any aspect of it, lest we be banished back to "work"
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#336What a lot of people seem to be missing here is that RSUs are usually double-trigger for private companies. Vested shares are not yours. They are just an entitlement for you to be distributed common stock by the company. You don't own any real stock until those RSUs are released (typically from a liquidity event like an IPO). Companies can cancel your vested equity for any reason. Read your employment contract carefu…
> if 7 years have elapsed since they were granted, they are now worthless Once vested, RSUs are the same as regular stock purchased through the market. The company cannot claw them back, nor do they "expire".
this is incorrect. Private company RSUs often have double trigger with second trigger being IPO/exit. The "semi" vested RSUs can expire if the company does not IPO in 7 years.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#337The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. 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 w…
Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…
Cool, just feed the ChatGPT+ the same half the Internet plus OpenAI founders' anecdotes about the company.
Ta-da.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#338Is this a legally enforceable suppression of free speech? If so, are there ways to be open about OpenAI, without triggering punitive action?
OpenAI is not the government. Yet.
If the courts enforce the agreement then that is state action.
So I think an argument can be made that NDAs and similar agreements should not be enforceable by courts.
See Shelley v. Kraemer
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#339The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. 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 w…
Clever, but no. The argument about LLMs not being copyright laundromats making sense hinges the scale and non-specificity of training. There's a difference between "LLM reproduced this piece of copyrighted work because it memorized it from being fed literally half the internet ", vs. "LLM was intentionally trained to specifically reproduce variants of this particular work". Whatever one's stances on the former case,…
Seems absurd that somehow the scale being massive makes it better somehow
You would think having a massive scale just means it has infringed even more copyrights, and therefore should be in even more hot water
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#340The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. 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 w…
NDAs don’t touch the copyright of your speech / written works you produce after leaving, they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words.
>they just make it breach of contract to distribute those words.
See, they aren't distributing the words, and good luck proving that any specific words went into training the model.