Extra respect is due to Jan Leike, then: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494
Discussion of Jan Leike's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391412 (67 comments)
OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Options aren't equity, they're only the option to buy equity at a specified price. Vesting just means you can actually buy the shares at the set strike pice. For example, you may join a company and be given options to buy 10,000 shares at $5 each with a 2 year vesting schedule. They may begin vesting immediately, meaning you can buy 1/24th of the total options each month (or 614 shares). Its also common for a delay u…
> buy all vested shares The last time I did this I didn't have to buy all of the shares.
I think they mean that you had to buy all the ones you wanted to keep.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#353That'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.
Non disparagement clauses are in so so many different employment contracts. It's pretty clear you're not a lawyer though.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#354The 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,…
Which has been established in court where?
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Note at offer time candidates do not know how many PPUs they will be receiving or how many exist in total. This is important because it’s not clear to candidates if they are receiving 1% or 0.001% of profits for instance. Even when giving options, some startups are often unclear or simply do not share the total number of outstanding shares. That said, this is generally considered bad practice and unfavorable for em…
> Additionally, tender offers are not guaranteed to happen and the cadence may also not be known. > PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years. i know for a fact that these bits are inaccurate, but i don't want to go into the details. the profit share is not known but you are told what the PPUs were valued at the…
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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
>To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade. Link? Is the ~2 year timeline a common estimate in the field?
It's the "fusion in 20 years" of AI?
Just like Tesla "FSD" :-)
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#357I 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…
> stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day 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.…
> Even lowest level fast food workers can choose a different employer.
Only thanks to a recent ruling by the FTC that non-competes are valid. in the most egregious uses, bartenders and servers were prohibited from finding another job in the same industry for two years.
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#358Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#359The 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,…
My take away is that we should talk about our experience in companies at a large enough scale
that it becomes non specific in principle, and not targeted at a single company.
Basically, we need our open source version of Glassdoor as a LLM ?
Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Right, but the employee would be able to refuse the consideration, and thus the contract, and the state of affairs wouldn't change. They would be free to say whatever they wanted.
Maybe. But whether the employee can refuse the gag has nothing to do at all with the legal doctrine that requires consideration.