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OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

vox.com

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

#531

Post by KoolKat23 »

rcbdev wrote: post #475
KoolKat23 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to go this far. The word-probabilities are transformative use, a form of fair use and aren't an issue. The specific output at each point in time is what would be judged to be fair use or copyright infringing. I'd argue the user would be responsible for ensuring they're not infringing by using the output in a copyright infringing manner i.e. for profit, as they've fed certain inputs into the model…

OpenAI is outputting the partially copyright-infringing works of their LLM for profit. How does that square?

You, the user, is inputting variables into their probability algorithm that's resulting in the copyright work. It's just a tool.

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

#532

Post by ben_w »

Sharlin wrote: post #524
ben_w wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already know there's been a leadership failure due to the mere existence of the board weirdness last year; if there has been any clarity to that, I've missed it for all the popcorn gossiping related to it. Everyone including the board's own chosen replacements for Altman siding with Altman seems to me to not be compatible with his current leadership being the root cause of the current discontent… so I'm blaming Mi…

Everyone? What about the board that fired him, and all of those who’ve left the company? It seems to me more like those people are leaving who are rightly concerned about the direction things are going, and those people are staying who think that getting rich outweighs ethical – and possibly existential – concerns. Plus maybe those who still believe they can effect a positive change within the company. With regard to…

> Everyone? What about the board that fired him,

I meant of the employees, obviously not the board.

Also excluded: all the people who never worked there who think Altman is weird, Elon Musk who is suing them (and probably the New York Times on similar grounds), and the protestors who dropped leaflets on one of his public appearances.

> and all of those who’ve left the company?

Happened after those events; at the time it was so close to being literally employee who signed the letter saying "bring Sam back or we walk" that the rest can be assumed to have been off sick that day even despite the reputation the US has for very limited holidays and getting people to use those holidays for sick leave.

> It seems to me more like those people are leaving who are rightly concerned about the direction things are going, and those people are staying who think that getting rich outweighs ethical – and possibly existential – concerns. Plus maybe those who still believe they can effect a positive change within the company.

Obviously so, I'm only asserting that this doesn't appear to be due to Altman, despite him being CEO.

("Appear to be" is of course doing some heavy lifting here: unless someone wants to literally surveil the company and publish the results, and expect that to be illegal because otherwise it makes NDAs pointless, we're all in the dark).

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

#533

Post by PeterisP »

staticautomatic wrote: post #368
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.

Ok but peppercorn or not, what’s the consideration?

Getting a certain amount (according to their vesting schedule) of stock options, which are worth a substantial amount of money and thus clearly is "good and valuable consideration".

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

#534

Post by Gravityloss »

kmeisthax wrote: post #405
bluefirebrand wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems absurd that somehow the scale being massive makes it better somehow You would think having a massive scale just means it has infringed even more copyrights, and therefore should be in even more hot water

So, the law has this concept of 'de minimus' infringement, where if you take a very small amount - like, way smaller than even a fair use - the courts don't care. If you're taking a handful of word probabilities from every book ever written, then the portion taken from each work is very, very low, so courts aren't likely to care. If you're only training on a handful of works then you're taking more from them, meaning…

I think with some AI you could reproduce artworks of obscure indie artists who are working right now.

If you were a director at a game company and needed art in that style, it would be cheaper to have the AI do it instead of buying from the artist.

I think this is currently an open question.

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

#535

Post by exe34 »

lucubratory wrote: post #82
exe34 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could praise them for the opposite of what you mean to say, and include a copy of the clause in between each paragraph.

Acknowledging the NDA or any part of it is in violation of the NDA.

there is no NDA in Ba Sing Se!

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

#536

Post by bitcharmer »

jay-barronville wrote: post #173

It probably would be better to switch the link from the X post to the Vox article [0]. From the article: “““ It turns out there’s a very clear reason for [why no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking]. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, fr…

[flagged]

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

#537

Post by exe34 »

wongarsu wrote: post #46
exe34 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i worked at McDonald's in the mid-late 00s, I'm pretty sure there was a clause about never saying anything negative about them. i think they were a great employer!

Sorry, someone at corporate has interpreted this statement as criticism. Please give back all equity, or an amount equivalent to its current value.

i got f-all equity, I was flipping burgers for minimum wage.

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

#538

Post by bazoom42 »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #490
mwigdahl wrote: post #290

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…

Clever, but the law is not a machine or an algorithm. Intent matters. Training an LLM with the intent of contravening an NDA is just plain . Everyone would still get sued anyway.

It is a classic geek fallacy to think you can hack the law with logic tricks.

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

#539

Post by cynicalsecurity »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #239

I have some experience with rich people who think they can just put whatever they want in contracts and then stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day. Turns out they're right, they can put whatever they want in a contract. And again, they are correct that their wage slaves will 99.99% of the time sign whatever paper he pushes in front of them while saying "as a cond…

Why would anyone want to work at such horrible company.

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

#540

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

mwigdahl wrote: post #290

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…

I’m going to break rank from everyone else and explicitly say “not clever”. Developers that think that they know how the levels system works are a dime a dozen. It’s both easy and useless to take some acquired-in-passing largely incorrect surface level understanding of a legal mechanic and “pwned with facts and logic!” in whichever way benefits you.
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