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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?

#441

Post by eastbound »

windowsrookie wrote: post #428
jimnotgym wrote: post #398

>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area. Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!

Obviously if your job requires blue-collar style manual labor, no it's likely not going to be replaced anytime soon. But if your job is mostly sitting at a computer, I would be a bit worried.

Given the low quality of relationships between customers and blue-collared jobs, i.e. ever tried to get a job done by a plumber or a painter, if you don’t know how to do their job you are practically assured they will do something in your back that will fall off in 2 years, for the price of 2x your daily rate as a software engineer (when they don’t straight up send a paperless immigrant which makes you culprit of participation to unlawful employment scheme if it is discovered), well…

I’d say there is a lot of available money in replacing blue collared jobs with AI-powered robots. Even if they do crap, it’s still better quality that contractors.

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

#442

Post by 6510 »

cj wrote: post #370
sundalia wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, this is just the commenter saying what they want without an actual court case

The justice system moves an order of magnitude slower than technology. It’s the Wild West. The lack of a court case has no bearing on whether or not what they’re doing is right or wrong.

Sounds like the standard disrupt formula should apply. Cant we stuff the court into an app? I kinda dislike the idea of getting a different sentence for anything related to appearance or presentation.

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

#443

Post by kmeisthax »

orlandrescu wrote: post #363
smt88 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Sam Altman's career and tweets. He's a clown at best, and at worst he's a manipulative crook who only cares about his own enrichment and uses pro-social ideas to give himself a veneer of trustworthiness.

Awfully familiar to the other South-African emerald mine inheritor tech mogul.

I'm starting to think the relatives of South African emerald mine owners might not be the best people to trust...

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

#444

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

mise_en_place wrote: post #406

Why indeed? But that’s nobody’s business except OpenAI and its former employees. Doesn’t matter if it’s not legally enforceable, or in bad taste. When you enter into a contract with another party, it is between you and the other party. If there is something unenforceable about these contracts, we have the court system to settle these disputes. I’m tired of living in a society where everyone’s dirty laundry is aired o…

>OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.

>...

>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.

From OpenAI's charter: https://openai.com/charter/

Now read Jan Leike's departure statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391412

That's why this is everyone's business.

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

#445

Post by anon373839 »

underlogic wrote: post #300

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

Hard to evaluate this without access to the documents. But in CA, agreements cannot be conditioned on the payment of previously earned wages.

Equity adds a wrinkle here, but I suspect if the effect of canceling equity is to cause a forfeiture of earned wages, then ultimately whatever contract is signed under that threat is void.

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

#446

Post by xvector »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #403
xvector wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.a…

That's not a defense. If imaginary cloud provider "ZFQ" uses 10MW of electricity on a grid and pays for it to magically come from green generation, that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down. There is no free lunch here; "we buy our electricity from green sources" is greenwashing bullshit. Even if they…

> that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters.

> Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads.

No. This capacity would never never have been built out to begin with if it was not for the data center.

> By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

No. Renewable energy gets cheaper with scale, not more expensive.

> which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power.

There are contracts for renewal capacity to be built out or well into the gigawatts. Furthermore, solar is not the only source of renewable energy. Finally, nuclear energy is also often used.

> the IC industry uses a massive amount of water

A figurative drop in the bucket.

> It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands

HN is not a monolith.

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

#447

Post by snovv_crash »

ben_w wrote: post #430
wtallis wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your training process ingests the entire text of the book, and trains with a large context size, you're getting more than just "a handful of word probabilities" from that book.

If you've trained a 16-bit ten billion parameter model on ten trillion tokens, then the mean training token changes 2/125 of a bit, and a 60k word novel (~75k tokens) contributes 1200 bits. It's up to you if that counts as "a handful" or not.

If I invent an amazing lossless compression algorithm such that adding an entire 60k word novel to my blob only increases the size by 1.2kb, does that mean I'm not copyright infringing if I release that model?

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

#448

Post by LtWorf »

jimnotgym wrote: post #398

>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete. Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area. Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!

It has difficulties with middle school mathematical problems.

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

#449

Post by kmeisthax »

verve_rat wrote: post #286
eru wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the consideration for this contract? Consideration is almost meaningless as an obstacle here. They can give the other party a peppercorn, and that would be enough to count as consideration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law) There might be other legal challenges here, but 'consideration' is unlikely to be one of them. Unless OpenAI has idiots for lawyers.

Right, but the employee would be able to refuse the consideration, and thus the contract, and the state of affairs wouldn't change. They would be free to say whatever they wanted.

If they refuse the contract then they lose out on their options vesting. Basically, OpenAI's contracts work like this:

Employment Contract the First:

We are paying you (WAGE) for your labor. In addition you also will be paid (OPTIONS) that, after a vesting period, will pay you a lot of money. If you terminate this employment your options are null and void unless you sign Employment Contract the Second.

Employment Contract the Second:

You agree to shut the fuck up about everything you saw at OpenAI until the end of time and we agree to pay out your options.

Both of these have consideration and as far as I'm aware there's nothing in contract law that requires contracts to be completely self-contained and immutable. If two parties agree to change the deal, then the deal can change. The problem is that OpenAI's agreements are specifically designed to put one counterparty at a disadvantage so that they have to sign the second agreement later.

There is an escape valve in contract law for "nobody would sign this" kinds of clauses, but I'm not sure how you'd use it. The legal term of art that you would allege is that the second contract is "unconscionable". But the standard of what counts as unconscionable in contract law is extremely high, because otherwise people would wriggle out of contracts the moment that what seemed like favorable terms turned unfavorable. Contract law doesn't care if the deal is fair (that's the FTC's job), it cares about whether or not the deal was agreed to.

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

#450

Post by underdeserver »

mrweasel wrote: post #437

When companies create rules like this, that tells me that they are very unsure of their product. Either it doesn't works as they claim, or it's incredible simple to replicate. It can also be that their entire business plan is insane, in any case, there's something basic wrong internally at OpenAI for them to feel the need for this kind of rule. If OpenAI and ChatGPT is so far ahead for everyone else, and their produc…

Forget their product, they're shady as employers. Intentionally doing something borderline legal when they have all the negotiating power.
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