Live data from Hacker News

Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

vox.com

51–60 of 567 posts

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#51
I don’t believe in the AGI claims, or in X-Risk. But I do think it’s apparent that AI will only become more powerful and ubiquitous. Very concerning that someone like Sam, with a history of dishonesty and narcissism that is only becoming more obvious time, may stand to control a large chunk of this technology.

He can’t be trusted, and as a result OpenAI cannot be trusted.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#52
post #6

If this really was a mistake the easiest way to deal with it would be to release people from their non disparagement agreements that were only signed by leaving employees under the duress of losing their vested equity. It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset. Edit: Looks…

This reads like more than standard restrictions. I hate those like everyone, they are just intended to chill complaints in my opinion with enough question to scare average people without legal expertise (like me, like most devs), just like non-competes used to seemingly primarily be used to discourage looking at other jobs, separate from whether it was enforceable - note the recent FTC decision to end non-competes. A…

Yeah, totally legit. Don't worry about it, it's not enforceable anyways. What, remove it from the contract? God no! Oh, I mean sorry, no one off contracts.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#53
post #6

If this really was a mistake the easiest way to deal with it would be to release people from their non disparagement agreements that were only signed by leaving employees under the duress of losing their vested equity. It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset. Edit: Looks…

>Edit: Looks like they're doing the right thing here

That's like P.Diddy saying I'm sorry.

That's damage control for being caught doing something bad ... again.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#54
post #4

What surprises me about these stories surrounding openAI is how they apologize while lying and downplaying any blame. Do they expect anybody to believe they didn’t know about clawback clauses?

Do they care? The mob will shout for a week or two and then turn their attention somewhere else. spez (the reddit chief) said something like that about their users, and he was absolutely right. A few days ago I was re-reading some of those threads about reddit API changes from ten months back where so many users claimed it was their last message and they were leaving for good. Almost none of them did. I checked two d…

It is hard to compete for high-end AI research and AI engineering talent. This definitely matters and they definitely should care. Their equity situation was already a bit of a barrier by being so unusual, now it's going to be a harder sell.

I know extremely desirable researchers who refuse to work for Elon because of how he has historically treated employees. Repeated issues like this will slowly add OpenAI to that list for more people.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#55
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Imagine if someone not representing ownership directly could just put clauses that alter the ownership and alter shareholder agreements.

Employment letters, with equity grants, are practically never signed by anyone on the board, and for companies of any size, practically never signed by the CEO. There are a bunch of people who can bind a company legally, and it's one of the things they figure as part of their governing docs, board process etc.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious. I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.

Give it a year, it will become very uncool as people realize only people not using AI to make their writing better would send syntactically or grammatically incorrect wording.

bet

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#59
post #6

If this really was a mistake the easiest way to deal with it would be to release people from their non disparagement agreements that were only signed by leaving employees under the duress of losing their vested equity. It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset. Edit: Looks…

For whatever it's worth (not much), Sam Altman did say they would do that > if any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too. very sorry about this. https://x.com/sama/status/1791936857594581428

Sure and anyone who has worked in a toxic workplace knows exactly what it means to require a direct path to leadership to resolve an issue instead of just resolving it.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#60

but sam said he was sorry in all lowercase so it must be okay

Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious. I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.

Throw it at an LLM with the simple command "fix", highlight every character that has a delta and send it back to them.

Add a grade in red at the top if you're feeling extra cheeky

Post reply on HN