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Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

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Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#121

Post by ethbr1 »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #55
nabla9 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parent and those quotes from the article aren't talking about employment letters. They're talking about incorporation/equity documents.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#123

Post by neglesaks »

tomcam wrote: post #102
neglesaks wrote: post #84

I'll make a prediction here: OpenAI will in the coming years turn out just as ruthless and socially damaging as Facebook did.

Less of a prediction and more of a descriptor of its current state

You ain't seen nothin' yet...

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#124

Post by cyanydeez »

tedivm wrote: 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…

LLM cares not whether something is said or whether the action is described.

No doubt, openai is as vacuous as their product is effect. GIGO.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#125

Post by discordance »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #11
mateus1 wrote: 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’s not easy to get out of an abusive relationship

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#126

Post by ants_everywhere »

ecjhdnc2025 wrote: post #29
refulgentis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been stultifying the older I get to see how easy it is for people to lie to themselves and others, everywhere. You have to be really attuned to "is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit 'but we're good people, so,'"

Right. The big change is bad faith argument developing into unapologetic bad faith developing into weaponised bad faith. It accelerated rapidly with some trends like the Tea Party, Gamergate, Brexit, Andrew Wakefield, covid antivax, and the Ukraine situation, and is in evidence on both sides of the trans rights debate, in doxxing, in almost every single argument on X that goes past ten tweets, etc. It's something man…

> It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.

It depends a bit by what you mean by left and right, but if you take something like Marxism that was always 100% a propaganda effort created by people who owned newspapers and the pervasiveness of propaganda has been a through line e.g. in the Soviet Union, agitprop etc. A big part of the Marxist theory is that there is no reality, that social experience completely determines everything, and that sort of ideology naturally lends itself to the belief that blankets of bad faith arguments for "good causes" are a positive good.

This sort of thinking was unpopular on the left for many years, but it's become more hip no doubt thanks to countries like Russia and China trying to re-popularize communism in the West.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#127

Post by nicklecompte »

ramesh31 wrote: post #80

They could have been cool. They could have been 2001 Google. They could have been the number one place any new PhD wanted to work. But no. The MBAs saw dollar signs, and everything went out the window. They fumbled the early mover advantage, and will be hollowed out by the competition and commodified by the PaaS giants. What a shame.

Instead of taking 15 years to drop the "don't be evil" act like Google, the new AI companies did it in two! e/acc, baby!

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#128

Post by ra7 »

fragmede wrote: post #78
ra7 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s only AI influencers that do this. I’ve noticed people use lowercase as some sort of power move. Like they’re so busy and important they don’t care about conventions.

it's because the stupidphone's stupid keyboard capitalizes for you in the wrong places, and you have to take extra effort to fix it when they get it wrong, or you turn it off, and then get lazy about fixing it when you do need the capitalization.

Does it? When I start a message, the keyboard automatically capitalizes. It also does it when a sentence starts after a period. I rarely ever have to fix capitalization.

(I typed this from my phone)

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#129

Post by danielmarkbruce »

adastra22 wrote: post #116
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comp clawbacks are quite common in finance, at least contractually. It's rare for it to go ahead, but it happens. It isn't some especially weird thing.

What is the structure of those compensations, and the mechanism for the clawbacks? Equity is taxed when it becomes the full, unrestricted property of the employee, so depending on the structure these threatened clawbacks could have either (1) been very illegal [essentially theft], or (2) could have had drastic and very bad tax consequences for all employees, current and former. I'm not surprised that they're rapidly…

Not sure how they deal with the tax. Ping John Stumpf (former Wells CEO) and ask, he probably has time on his hands and scar tissue and can explain it.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#130

Post by danielmarkbruce »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #86
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comp clawbacks are quite common in finance, at least contractually. It's rare for it to go ahead, but it happens. It isn't some especially weird thing.

> Comp clawbacks are quite common in finance, at least contractually Never negotiated on exit.

I don't think it was negotiated on exit. It was threatened on exit. The ability to do it was almost certainly already in place.
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