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Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#12TLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.
I never get it when people say something like "they're leaving because their stock vested". Every big tech employee I know gets refresher stocks every year. Except for the first 2 years at some companies (looking at you Amazon), every year you are vesting significant stock, and whenever you leave, you're walking away from at least 3 years unvested. 4 years is like 5 which is like 6
At my last startup, as an early employee I got something like ~250,000 shares of restricted stock. 3 years in I got renewal options for an additional 10,000 shares. With the renewal being 4% of the shares I was previously granted, it is not much of an incentive.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#13TLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.
I never get it when people say something like "they're leaving because their stock vested". Every big tech employee I know gets refresher stocks every year. Except for the first 2 years at some companies (looking at you Amazon), every year you are vesting significant stock, and whenever you leave, you're walking away from at least 3 years unvested. 4 years is like 5 which is like 6
If a stock sees explosive growth, the stock you were granted before the growth that has now vested might be worth far more than the stock you were granted after the growth.
Except at the very beginning of a company when the valuation is entirely meaningless, companies figure out the dollar amount they're going to grant, and convert that into a number of shares. This means post-growth you're getting much less. That leads to the balance shifting. Would you stick around for next year's $200k if you've already got $10m in the bank, probably not.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#14TLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.
I never get it when people say something like "they're leaving because their stock vested". Every big tech employee I know gets refresher stocks every year. Except for the first 2 years at some companies (looking at you Amazon), every year you are vesting significant stock, and whenever you leave, you're walking away from at least 3 years unvested. 4 years is like 5 which is like 6
If the stock is liquid, then this makes sense. However, if it's not, then you might not want to hold that much stock (or especially options) in a single company. It's also common for the refresher grants to be much smaller, especially if you were an early employee.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#15[flagged]
Yep, their pent up desire to say how morally or otherwise superior they are to the whole company no longer needs to be surpressed once they've left.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#16[flagged]
Have you been on LinkedIn recently? Everyone now writes a long sob story to the public about why they're leaving as if everyone else cares or believe what you're saying.
These guy think they're a lot more important anf have more clout so they're making it a blog post instead.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#17One less AI safetyist police at OpenAI. Good!
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#18[flagged]
Have you been on LinkedIn recently? Everyone now writes a long sob story to the public about why they're leaving as if everyone else cares or believe what you're saying. These guy think they're a lot more important anf have more clout so they're making it a blog post instead.
LinkedIn is cringe of such epic proportion that it is shameful.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#19TLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.
I never get it when people say something like "they're leaving because their stock vested". Every big tech employee I know gets refresher stocks every year. Except for the first 2 years at some companies (looking at you Amazon), every year you are vesting significant stock, and whenever you leave, you're walking away from at least 3 years unvested. 4 years is like 5 which is like 6
Refreshers never make up for the monster gains those early grants get at startup growth rates.
If you joined Tesla in 2019 and got a 5 year grant worth 1 million dollars, that is roughly 48000 shares over 5 years.
Even assuming a flat refresher, on that 5th year you would get another $200k worth of stock at the now 10x share price, coming in at like 850 shares. Compare that to the 9600 shares you have coming in from that initial grant. It’s a huge dive in total comp after that initial grant runs out even with a good refresher program.
The only companies where this isn’t a problem are big ones with mediocre growth (Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix-ish, etc).
Nvidia is another example of a company that effectively has employees pulling in multiple millions a year in stock that will fizzle out 4 years after their huge surge last year.
When you go from a TC of $3mil/year down to $300k/year, you definitely reevaluate if it’s time to retire or go do something new.
Re: Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
#20[flagged]
Not necessarily, I don't feel, but close.
There was a recent blog about an epidemic of Neotoddlerism that explained that four attributes that we have as children and should grow out of contribute to cluster B personality disorders:
- Attention seeking
- Entitlement
- Grandiosity
- Impulsivity
This seems like just attention seeking, possibly with grandiosity but I don't know the author so I don't know.