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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

#401

Post by hehdhdjehehegwv »

somenameforme wrote: post #350
hehdhdjehehegwv wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually they probably are that busy and aren’t trying to impress students, they’re trying to grade a bunch of exams while reviewing a paper while writing up research while writing a grant and also having a personal life.

And if they treat them all with this degree of attention, then they're probably failing at all of them.

Many, perhaps most, successful academics are horrible mentors and parents/spouses. That isn’t pertinent to the fact that all faculty are, in fact, quite busy.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#402

Post by EMM_386 »

warcher wrote: post #202
lobsterthief wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Delete early, delete often. Never keep an old Reddit account around. I torch mine and build anew every year just out of principle.

I honestly have given up in this battle.

I'm curious, what do you think deleting accounts and starting new is going to do?

They'll just link it all together another way.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#404

Post by ycombinator_acc »

ssklash wrote: post #210

Why anyone trusts Altman or OpenAI with something as societally consequential as AI is beyond me.

It's neither consequential nor AI which we won't see, our children won't see, their children won't see, etc., so seems fine to trust Altman with chatbots.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#405

Post by dang »

istjohn wrote: post #107

I wonder if this HN post will get torpedoed as fast as the one from yesterday[0]. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40435440

I didn't see that comment but I did post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018 elsewhere in that thread, which addresses the same concerns. If anyone reads that and still has a concern, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering further.

The short version is that users flagged that one plus it set off the flamewar detector, and we didn't turn the penalties off because the post didn't contain significant new information (SNI), which is the test we apply (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Current post does contain SNI so it's still high on HN's front page.

Why do we do it this way? Not to protect any organization (including YC itself, and certainly including OpenAI or any other BigCo), but simply to avoid repetition. Repetition is the opposite of intellectual curiosity (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), which is what we're hoping to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

I hesitate to say "it's as simple as that" because HN is a complicated beast and there are always other factors, but...it's kind of as simple as that.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#406

Post by Lionga »

WiSaGaN wrote: post #288
Havoc wrote: post #122

I find it hard to believe that Sam didn’t know about something that draconian in something so sensitive as NDAs that affects to equity. He’s not exactly new to this whole startup thing and getting equity right is not a small part of that

He was obviously lying, and he probably also knew people would not believe it. I just don't know why he still chose to do it.

[flagged]

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#407

Post by solidasparagus »

hehdhdjehehegwv wrote: post #306
solidasparagus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is hard to compete for high-end AI research and AI engineering talent. This definitely matters and they definitely should care. Their equity situation was already a bit of a barrier by being so unusual, now it's going to be a harder sell. I know extremely desirable researchers who refuse to work for Elon because of how he has historically treated employees. Repeated issues like this will slowly add OpenAI to that…

Meanwhile the stock Google pays you can be cashed out same day. Really dumb move for OpenAI.

I think it might just be a consequence of an approach to business that, in aggregate, has been very effective.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#408

Post by _jab »

OpenAI's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month only continues to worsen.

It's pretty established now that they had some exceptionally anti-employee provisions in their exit policies to protect their fragile reputation. Sam Altman is bluntly a liar, and his credibility is gone.

Their stance as a pro-artist platform is a joke after the ScarJo fiasco, that clearly illustrates that creative consent was an afterthought. Litigation is assumed, and ScarJo is directly advocating for legislation to prevent this sort of fiasco in the future. Sam Altman's involvement is again evident from his trite "her" tweet.

And then they fired their "superalignment" safety team for good measure. As if to shred any last measure of doubt that this company is somehow more ethical than any other big tech company in their pursuit of AI.

Frankly, at this point, the board should fire Sam Altman again, this time for good. This is not the company that can, or should, usher humanity into the artificial intelligence era.

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#409

Post by kashyapc »

Great, if these documents are credible, this is exactly what I was implying[1] yesteday. Here, listen to Altman say how he is "genuinely embarrassed":

"this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have."

The first thing the above conjures up is the other disgraced Sam (Bankman-Fried) saying "this is on me" when FTX went bust. I bet euros-to-croissants I'm not the only one to notice this.

Some amount of corporate ruthlessness is part of the game, whether we like it or not. But these SV robber-barrons really crank it up to something else.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40425735

Re: Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees

#410

Post by dang »

heavyset_go wrote: post #400
casefields wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People always interested and fascinated by the algorithm whenever it comes up. Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies. PG always churlishly jumps in to say there’s nothing interesting about it and any discussion of it is boring. Pretty asinine response but I work in Hollywood and each studio lot has public tours giving anyone that wants a glimpse behi…

> Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies. Which is interesting, because it's sacrilege to insinuate that it's being gamed at all.

It's not sacrilege, it's just that people rarely have any basis for saying this beyond just it kind of feels that way based on one or maybe two datapoints, and feeliness really doesn't count. We take real abuse seriously and I've personally put hundreds (feels like thousands) of hours into that problem over many years - but there has to be some sort of data to go on.
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