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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

vox.com

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

#481

Post by jeltz »

swat535 wrote: post #201

I mean why would anyone be surprised about this is beyond me? I know many people on this site will not like what I am about to write as Sam is worshiped but let's face it: The head of this company is a master scammer who will do everything under the sun and the moon to earn a buck, including but notwithstanding to destroying himself along with his entire fortune if necessary in his quest of making sure other people d…

Since I do not follow OpenAI or Ycombinator I first learned that he was a scammer when he released is crypto currency. But I am surprised that so many did not catch on to it then. It is not like he has really tried to hide that he is a grifter.

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

#482

Post by bambax »

> All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI

Well... I know first hand that many well-informed, tech-literate people still think that all products from OpenAI are open-source. Lying works, even in that most egregious of fashion.

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

#483

Post by snowfield »

jay-barronville wrote: post #173

It probably would be better to switch the link from the X post to the Vox article [0]. From the article: “““ It turns out there’s a very clear reason for [why no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking]. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, fr…

There are also directly inscentiviced to not talk shit about a company they a lot of stock in.

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

#484

Post by devjab »

fartfeatures wrote: post #296
xpe wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want to share your model? Or is this more like a hunch?

Sounds like standard doomer crap tbh. I'm not sure which is more dangerous at this point - climate change denialism (it isn't happening) or climate change doomerism (we can't stop it, might as well give up)

I’m not sure where you found your information to somehow form that ludicrous last strawman… Climate change is real, you can’t deny it, you can’t debate it. Simply look at the data. What you can debate is the cause… Again a sort of pointless debate if you look at the science. Not even climate change deniers as you call them are necessary saying that we shouldn’t do anything about it. Even big oil is looking into ways to lessen the CO2 in the atmosphere through various means.

That being said, the GP you’re talking about made no such statement whatsoever.

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

#485

Post by bambax »

modeless wrote: post #255
twobitshifter wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have equity in a company and I care about its value, I’m not going to say anything to tank its value. If I sell my equity later on, and then disparage the company, what can OpenAI hope to do to me?

They can sue you into bankruptcy, obviously. Also, what if you can't sell? Selling is at their discretion. They can prevent you from selling some of your so-called "equity" to keep you on their leash as long as they want.

> * They can prevent you from selling some of your so-called "equity"*

But how much do you need? Sell half, forgo the rest, and you'll be fine.

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

#486

Post by [deleted] »

kmeisthax wrote: post #449
verve_rat wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they refuse the contract then they lose out on their options vesting. Basically, OpenAI's contracts work like this: Employment Contract the First: We are paying you (WAGE) for your labor. In addition you also will be paid (OPTIONS) that, after a vesting period, will pay you a lot of money. If you terminate this employment your options are null and void unless you sign Employment Contract the Second. Employment Con…

[deleted]

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

#487

Post by surfingdino »

KoolKat23 wrote: post #421
kmeisthax wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't even need to go this far. The word-probabilities are transformative use, a form of fair use and aren't an issue. The specific output at each point in time is what would be judged to be fair use or copyright infringing. I'd argue the user would be responsible for ensuring they're not infringing by using the output in a copyright infringing manner i.e. for profit, as they've fed certain inputs into the model…

MS Word does not actively collect and process all texts for all available sources and does not offer them in recombined form. MS Word is passive whereas the whole point of an LLM is to produce output using a model trained on ingested data. It is actively processing vast amounts of texts with intent to make them available for others to use and the T&C state that the user owns the copyright to the outputs based on works of other copyright owners. LLMs give the user a CCL (Collateralised Copyright Liability, a bit like a CDO) without a way of tracing the sources used to train the model.

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

#488

Post by treme »

orlandrescu wrote: post #363
smt88 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Awfully familiar to the other South-African emerald mine inheritor tech mogul.

Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.

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

#489

Post by godelski »

kmeisthax wrote: post #449
verve_rat wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If they refuse the contract then they lose out on their options vesting. Basically, OpenAI's contracts work like this: Employment Contract the First: We are paying you (WAGE) for your labor. In addition you also will be paid (OPTIONS) that, after a vesting period, will pay you a lot of money. If you terminate this employment your options are null and void unless you sign Employment Contract the Second. Employment Con…

> There is an escape valve in contract law for "nobody would sign this" kinds of clauses

Who would sign a contract to willfully give away their options?

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

#490

Post by andyjohnson0 »

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…

Clever, but the law is not a machine or an algorithm. Intent matters.

Training an LLM with the intent of contravening an NDA is just plain . Everyone would still get sued anyway.

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