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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#411

Post by diebeforei485 »

> For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet.

Yes, but:

(1) OpenAI salaries are not low like early stage startup salaries. Essentially these are highly paid jobs (high salary and high equity) that require an NDA.

(2) Apple has also clawed back equity from employees who violate NDA. So this isn't all that unusual.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#412

Post by ergocoder »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #352
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is tautological... You buy what you want to own???

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#413

Post by cyberpunk »

jimnotgym wrote: post #398

>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area. Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!

4o groks realtime video; how far away are we from letting it control robots bruv?

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#414

Post by [deleted] »

jahewson wrote: post #401
mwigdahl wrote: post #290

The 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…

Ha ha, but no. For starters, copyright falls under federal law and contacts under state law, so it’s not even possible to make this claim in the relevant court.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#415

Post by XorNot »

anigbrowl wrote: post #408
TeMPOraL wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It's not a copyright violation if you voluntarily provide the training material...

I don't know why copyright is getting involved here. The clause is about criticizing the company.

Releasing an LLM trained on company criticisms, by people specifically instructed not to do so is transparently violating the agreement.

Because you're intentionally publishing criticism of the company.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#416

Post by benreesman »

This has just been crazy both to watch and in some small ways interact with up close (I’ve had some very productive and some regrettably heated private discussions advising former colleagues and people I care about to GTFO before the shit really hits the rotary air impeller, and this is going to get so much worse).

This thread is full of comments making statements around this looking like some level of criminal enterprise (ranging from “no way that document holds up” to “everyone knows Sam is a crook”).

The level of stuff ranging from vitriol to overwhelming if maybe circumstantial (but conclusive that my personal satisfaction) evidence of direct reprisal has just been surreal, but it’s surreal in a different way to see people talking about this like it was never even controversial to be skeptical/critical/hostile to thing thing.

I’ve been saying that this looks like the next Enron, minimum, for easily five years, arguably double that.

Is this the last straw where I stop getting messed around over this?

I know better than to expect a ticker tape parade for having both called this and having the guts to stand up to these folks, but I do hold out a little hope for even a grudging acknowledgment.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#417

Post by romwell »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #361
romwell wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, just feed the ChatGPT+ the same half the Internet plus OpenAI founders' anecdotes about the company. Ta-da.

And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model? Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources.

>And be rightfully sacked for maliciously burning millions of dollars on a retrain to purposefully poison the model?

Does it really take millions dollars of compute to add additional training data to an existing model?

Plus, we're talking about employees that are leaving / left anyway.

>Not to mention: LLMs aren't oracles. Whatever they say will be dismissed as hallucinations if it isn't corroborated by other sources.

Excellent. That means plausible deniability.

Surely all those horror stories about unethical behavior are just hallucinations, no matter how specific they are.

Absolutely no reason for anyone to take them seriously. Which is why the press will not hesitate to run with that, with appropriate disclaimers, of course.

Seriously, you seem to think that in a world where numbers about death toll in Gaza are taken verbatim from Hamas without being corroborated by other sources, an AI model output will not pass the test of public scrutiny?

Very optimistic of you.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#418

Post by wtallis »

kmeisthax wrote: post #405
bluefirebrand wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, the law has this concept of 'de minimus' infringement, where if you take a very small amount - like, way smaller than even a fair use - the courts don't care. If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low, so courts aren't likely to care. If you're only training on a handful of works then you're taking more from them, meaning…

If your training process ingests the entire text of the book, and trains with a large context size, you're getting more than just "a handful of word probabilities" from that book.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#419

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

Buttons840 wrote: post #214

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?

Unfortunately this is how most startup equity agreements are structured. They include terms that let the company cancel options that haven’t been exercised for [various reasons]. Those reasons are very open ended, and maybe they could be challenged in a court, but how can a low level employee afford to do that?

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#420

Post by simianparrot »

concordDance wrote: post #390
ndriscoll wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right and that's why it's a farce. > Whoa whoa whoa, we can't let just anyone run these models. Only large corporations who will use them to addict children to their phones and give them eating disorders and suicidal ideation, while radicalizing adults and tearing apart society using the vast profiles they've collected on everyone through their global panopticon, all in the name of making people unhappy so that it's…

A corporate dystopia is still better than extinction. (Assuming the latter is a reasonable fear)

Neither is acceptable
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