311–320 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the past a lot of options would expire if you didn’t exercise them within eg. 90 days of leaving. And exercising could be really expensive. Speculation: maybe the options they earn when they work there have some provision like this. In return for the NDA the options get extended.
Options aren't vested equity though.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Want to share your model? Or is this more like a hunch?
IMO, we should pause this for now and put these resources (human and capital) towards reducing the impact of global warming.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... They definitely can be. When I worked for a small biotech company all of my options had a tiered vesting schedule.
Options aren't equity, they're only the option to buy equity at a specified price. Vesting just means you can actually buy the shares at the set strike pice. For example, you may join a company and be given options to buy 10,000 shares at $5 each with a 2 year vesting schedule. They may begin vesting immediately, meaning you can buy 1/24th of the total options each month (or 614 shares). Its also common for a delay u…
The last time I did this I didn't have to buy all of the shares.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d be more afraid of their less-than-above-board power than their litigation power. People with $10-100 billion dollars who are highly connected to every major tech company and many shadowy companies we’ve never heard of can figure out a lot of my secrets and make life miserable enough for me that I don’t have the ability/energy to follow through with legal proceedings, even if I don’t attribute the walls collapsing…
And that’s precisely the issue you ask a lawyer about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what other people have commented, you don't get equity. You get a profit sharing plan. You're chained to them for life. There is no divestiture.
Well, then, people are selling their souls. I got laid off by a different company and can't disparage them. I can tell the truth. I'm not signing anything that requires me to lie.
Wish I could say I would have been that strong. Many would not disparage a company they hold equity in, unless they went full baby genocide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It might be that they agree to it initially when hired, so it doesn't matter if they sign something when they leave.
Agreements with surprise terms that only get detailed later tend not to be very legal.
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…