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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?

#601

Post by danielbln »

heavyset_go wrote: post #131
N0b8ez wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade. Link? Is the ~2 year timeline a common estimate in the field?

We can't even get self-driving down in 2 years, we're nowhere near reaching general AI. AI experts who aren't riding the hype train and getting high off of its fumes acknowledge that true AI is something we'll likely not see in our lifetimes.

Is true AI the new true Scotsman?

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

#602

Post by [deleted] »

ben_w wrote: post #532
Sharlin wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#603

Post by danielbln »

benreesman wrote: post #416

This has just been crazy both to watch and in some small ways interact with up close (I’ve had some very productive and some regrettably heated private discussions advising former colleagues and people I care about to GTFO before the shit really hits the rotary air impeller, and this is going to get so much worse). This thread is full of comments making statements around this looking like some level of criminal enter…

OpenAI was incorporated 9 years ago, but you easily saw that it's the next Enron 10 years ago?

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

#604

Post by hackerlight »

concordDance wrote: post #387
candiddevmike wrote: post #266

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.

> catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, What are your timelines here? "Catastrophic" is vague but I'd put the climate change meaningfully affecting the quality of life of average westerner at end of century, while AGI could be before the middle of the century.

It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia. These will continue to get worse and more frequent. Millions of these people can't afford air conditioning.

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

#605

Post by baq »

genevra wrote: post #581
hackernewds wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the name OpenAI itself reminds me every day of this.

I knew their vision of open source AI wouldn't last but it surprised me how fast it was.

That vision, if it was ever there, died before ChatGPT was released. It was just a hiring scheme to attract researchers.

pg calls sama ‘naughty’. I call him ‘dangerous’.

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

#606

Post by hmottestad »

kmeisthax wrote: post #449
verve_rat wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Con…

If say that you were working at Reddit for quite a number of years and all your original options had vested and you had exercised them, then since Reddit went public you would now easily be able to sell your stocks, or keep them if you want. So then you wouldn’t need to sign the second contract. Unless of course you had gotten new options that hadn’t vested yet.

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

#607

Post by bayindirh »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #498
comfysocks wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but if you research lots of sources and still emit significant blocks of verbatim text without attribution, it’s still plagiarism. At least that’s how human authors are judged.

Plagiarism is not illegal, it is merely frowned on, and only in certain fields at that.

This is a reductionist take. Maybe it's not illegal per se where you live, but it always have ramifications, and these ramifications affect your future a whole lot.

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

#608

Post by jakderrida »

whatever1 wrote: post #463

So if I am a competitor I just need to pay a current employee like 2-3M to break their golden handcuffs and then they can freely start singing.

Not to seem combative, but that assumes that what they share would be advantageous enough to justify the costs... On the other hand, I'm thinking if I'm paying them to disclose all proprietary technology and research for my product, that would definitely make it worthwhile.

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

#609

Post by baq »

yumraj wrote: post #225

Compared to what seemed like their original charter, with non-profit structure and all, now it seems like a rather poisonous place. They will have many successes in the short run, but, their long run future suddenly looks a little murky.

They extracted a lot of value from researchers during their ‘open’ days, but it’s depleted now, so of course they move on to the next source of value. sama is going AGI or bust with a very rational position of ‘if somebody has AGI, I’d rather it was me’ except I don’t like how he does it one bit, it’s got a very dystopian feel to it.

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

#610

Post by baq »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #539
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.

Money
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