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Not a mistake... "...But there's a problem with those apologies from company leadership. Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about..."
Honestly I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt on that, depending on their actions, because I'm sure they sign so many documents they just rely on their legal teams to ensure they're good.
I'll make a prediction here: OpenAI will in the coming years turn out just as ruthless and socially damaging as Facebook did.
I bet similar claw-back clauses are waaay more common than many on this thread would imagine at private co's. I've always been under the impression that 'vested equity' doesn't mean ~anything until you actually see liquidity. The company can generally fuck you before that point if they choose to. Hope I'm being overly cynical with this take.
And a bunch of not-well-informed employees who didn't understand the consequences of this clause when they originally signed
From Sam Altman: > this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have. Bullshit. Presumably Sam Altman has 20 IQ points on me. He obviously knows better. I was a CEO for 25 years and no contract was issued without my knowing every element in it. In fact, I had them all written by lawyers in plain English, resorting to all caps and…
I've read your posts for years on HN, don't undersell yourself.
Many CEOs don't know what is their company's contracts, nor do they think about it. While it is laudable that you paid such close attention, the fact is I've met many leaders who have no clue what is in their company's employment paperwork.
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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.
Following convention and using standard capitalization rules makes things easier on the reader. Going to all-lowercase is harder on the reader, and thus is disrespectful of the reader. I will die on this hill.
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A NICE DAY.
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“I have not been released from any exit agreement” is not disparagement.
“disparagement" is whatever is defined in the agreement, which reportedly (from one of the people who declined to sign it) includes discussing the existence of the agreement.
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?
Not trying to play the devil's advocate here, but I am thinking how this would play out if I ever opened a spinoff... Let's say I find a profitable niche while working for a project and we decide to open a separate spin off startup to handle that idea. I'd expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company. Now let's also say the company turns out to be disproportionately successful. I'd say I wo…
That sounds like a really bad idea for many many reasons. Lawyers are cheap compared to losing control, or even your stake, to legal shenanigans.
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Again, wrong. It's just not how the world works. It's legally not required, and in practice not done. If the board and CEO had to sit around approving every contract change in every country, my goodness they'd have no time left for anything else.
You're right that in general Sam Altman isn't countersigning every OpenAI employee contract. However, at some point a lawyer sat down and worked with people to write the form-contract, and someone said "you sure? you want them to sign an NDA on exit? with a clause that lets you claw back equity? (implicit: because that's not normal)"
To be clear, he may well have known. But it isn't a given and in the grand scheme of things on a CEO brain, it would have been way down the list of capturing mind share.
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Not a mistake... "...But there's a problem with those apologies from company leadership. Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about..."
Honestly I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt on that, depending on their actions, because I'm sure they sign so many documents they just rely on their legal teams to ensure they're good.
In other words, I'm pretty sure the Ed Dillingers are already in charge, not Walter Gibbs garage-tinkerers. [0]