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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

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Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#301

But what's stopping the ex-staffers from criticizing once they sold off the equity?

The threat of a lawsuit.

You can't just sign a contract and then not uphold your end of the bargain after you've got the benefit you want. You'll (rightfully) get sued.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#303

This is bizarre. Someone hands you a contract as you're leaving a company and if you refuse to agree to whatever they dreamt up and sign the company takes back the equity you earned? That can't be legal

The argument would be that it's coercive. And it might be, and they might be sued over it and lose. Basically the incentives all run strongly in OpenAI's favor. They're not a public company, vested options aren't stock and can't be liquidated except with "permission", which means that an exiting employee is probably not going to take the risk and will just sign the contract.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#304

A lot of the brouhaha about OpenAI is silly, I think. But this is gross. Forcing employees to sign a perpetual non-disparagement agreement under threat of clawing back the large majority of their already earned compensation should not be legal. Honestly it probably isn't, but it'll take someone brave enough to sue to find out.

If I have equity in a company and I care about its value, I’m not going to say anything to tank its value. If I sell my equity later on, and then disparage the company, what can OpenAI hope to do to me?

Clout > money

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#305

This is bizarre. Someone hands you a contract as you're leaving a company and if you refuse to agree to whatever they dreamt up and sign the company takes back the equity you earned? That can't be legal

It might be that they agree to it initially when hired, so it doesn't matter if they sign something when they leave.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#306

The best approach to circumventing the nondisclosure agreement is for the affected employees to get together, write out everything they want to say about OpenAI, train an LLM on that text, and then release it. Based on these companies' arguments that copyrighted material is not actually reproduced by these models, and that any seemingly-infringing use is the responsibility of the user of the model rather than those w…

This would be hilarious and genius. Touché.

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#308

Unfortunately this is actually pretty common in Wall St, where they leverage your multiple years of clawback-able shares to make you sign non-disparagement clauses.

Sounds like a deal honestly. I’ll fast forward a few years of equity to mind my own business. I’m not trying to get into journalism

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading that thread it’s really interesting to me. I see how far we’ve come in a short couple of years. But I still can’t grasp how we’ll achieve AGI within any reasonable amount of time. It just seems like we’re missing some really critical… something… Idk. Folks much smarter than I seem worried so maybe I should be too but it just seems like such a long shot.

Personally, I think catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, possibly in part due to the pursuit of AGI. But as the saying goes, yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

Most existing big tech datacenters use mostly carbon free or renewable energy.

The vast majority of datacenters currently in production will be entirely powered by carbon free energy. From best to worst:

1. Meta: 100% renewable

2. AWS: 90% renewable

3. Google: 64% renewable with 100% renewable energy credit matching

4. Azure: 100% carbon neutral

[1]: https://sustainability.fb.com/energy/

[2]: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/products-services/the...

[3]: https://sustainability.google/progress/energy/

[4]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastruct...

Re: OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

#310

What a lot of people seem to be missing here is that RSUs are usually double-trigger for private companies. Vested shares are not yours. They are just an entitlement for you to be distributed common stock by the company. You don't own any real stock until those RSUs are released (typically from a liquidity event like an IPO). Companies can cancel your vested equity for any reason. Read your employment contract carefu…

The 7 year expiry time exists so IRS lets you give RSUs different tax treatment than regular stock. The idea is because they can expire, they could be worth nothing. And so the IRS cannot expect you to pay taxes on RSUs until the double-trigger event occurs.

But none of this means the company can just cancel your RSUs unless you agreed to them being cancelled for specific reason in your equity agreement. I have worked at several big pre-IPO companies that had big exits. I made sure there were no clawback clauses in the equity contract before accepting the offers.

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