I'll make a prediction here: OpenAI will in the coming years turn out just as ruthless and socially damaging as Facebook did.
In the coming years? It pretty much already is
Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
231–240 of 567 posts
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
No one off contracts. lol. What nonsense. Then why did bother to have a meeting? You handled that one like a boss.
yup.
companies say that all the time.
another way they do it is to say, it is company policy, sorry, we can't help it.
thereby trying to avoid individual responsibility for the iniquity they are about to perpetrate on you. .
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#233If 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:
> Altman’s initial statement was criticized for doing too little to make things right for former employees, but in an emailed statement, OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations” — which goes much further toward fixing their mistake.
1. Get cash infusion from microsoft
2. Do microsoft playbook of 'oh I didn't mean to be shady we will correct' when caught.
3. In the meantime there are uncaught cases as well as the general hand waving away of repeated bad behavior.
4. What sama did would get him banned from some -fetish- circles, if that says something about how his version of 'EA' deals with consent concerns.
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#234There’s a recurring pattern here of OpenAI getting caught red handed doing bad things and then being all like “Oh it was just a misunderstanding, nothing more, we’ll get on to fixing that ASAP… nothing to see here…” It’s becoming too much to just be honest oversights.
This is what “Better to ask forgiveness than for permission” looks like when people start catching on.
It’s one of the startup catchphrases that brings people a lot of success when they’re small and people aren’t paying attention, but starts catching up when the company is big and under the microscope.
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#235but 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.
If I see a job application with spelling or grammar mistakes in it, then it's a huge red flag; it tells me that this person does not care about accuracy or they don't check their work very well. These are very important attributes to have in engineering.
If you see it in a job advert, I'd assume the same for the people who are doing the hiring.
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stopped browsing Reddit. I imagine the people who posted comments to Reddit saying they’re going to leave Reddit aren’t a representative sample.
Same. Redditor for 15 years and the API thing was the last straw. I didn’t post about not engaging with or using the platform anymore. Nor did I delete my account, since it still holds some value to me. But I slinked away into the darkness and now HN is my social media tool.
15y account here too - also quit. Tried lemmy for a while and didn't like it. At least it helped me kick the reddit habit. Don't even go there anymore
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#237HN hates cryptocurrencies but 'equity' to me is even worse than the worst shitcoins. It's an IOU that the company controls (and one people think is a tangle part of their 'compensation.') Just imagine if a company thinks you're about to jump ship and you have equity close to being vested. The company almost has a perverse incentive to fire you to nullify that equity. This gets much much worse when you know the typical vesting schedules that startups like to use. I know some of you working at the top companies might get your equity vested every month. But in my experience its much more common to be talking about yearly vesting schedules at startups where you have to stay for many years to get anything.
So think about that. They offer you an average to low base salary but sweeten the deal with some 'equity' saying that it gives you a stake in the company. Neglecting to mention of course, how many different ways equity can be invalidated; How a year in tech is basically a life time; And how the whole thing is kind of structured to prevent autonomy as an employee. Often founders will use these kind of offers to gauge 'interest' because surely the people who are willing to take an offer that's backed more by magic bean equity money (over real money) are truly the ones most dedicated to the companies mission. So not being grateful for such amazing offers would be taken as a sign of offence by most founders (who would prefer to pay in hopes and dreams if they could.)
Now... with a shitcoin... even though the price may tank to zero you'll at least end up with a goofy item you own at the end of the day. Equity... not so much.
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
It must have been part of the original employment document package, that the equity was cancellable. In the details of the equity grant, or similar, somewhere.
Must it? Not clear what you mean. Do you mean it is generic to do that in contracts? (Been a while since I was offered equity.) Or do you mean that even OpenAI would not try it without having set it up in the original contract? Because I hate to be the guy with the square brackets ;-)
If it wasn't in the original contracts for the equity, they wouldn't be able to claw back.
Fairly obviously, the mechanism can't be in the exit agreement because you didn't sign that yet.
Normally a company has to give you new "consideration" (which is the legal term for something of value) for you to want to sign an exit agreement - otherwise you can just not bother to sign. Usually this is extra compensation. In this case they are saying that they won't exercise some clause in an existing agreement that allows them to claw back.
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#239There’s a recurring pattern here of OpenAI getting caught red handed doing bad things and then being all like “Oh it was just a misunderstanding, nothing more, we’ll get on to fixing that ASAP… nothing to see here…” It’s becoming too much to just be honest oversights.
It doesn't matter because they hold all of the cards. It's the nature of power: you can get away with things that you normally couldn't. If you really want OpenAI to behave, you'll support their competitors and/or open source initiatives.
But their product isn’t really differentiated anymore and has really low switching costs: Opus is better at almost anything than the 4-series (training on MMLU isn’t a capability increase), Mistral is competitive and vastly more operator-aligned, both are cheaper and non-scandal plagued.
Mistral even has Azure distribution.
FAIR is flat open-sourcing competitive models and has a more persuasive high-level representation learning agenda.
What cards? Brand recognition?
Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
When the changes went through I nuked all my comments and then my account. I don't know if many others did the same, but if so it would mean that you wouldn't see our "I'm leaving" comments anymore, i.e. that we wouldn't be included in your samples.
Yeah, reading old threads is weird. The majority of everything is intact, but there's enough deleted or mangled comments that it is an effective minor inconvenience.