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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?

#621

Post by juped »

edanm wrote: post #385
romwell wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment. Incidentally, that's what Grigory Perelman, the mathematician that rejected the Fields Medal and the $1M prize that came with it, did. It wasn't a matter of an NDA either; it was a move to make his message heard (TL;DR: "publish or perish" rat race that the acad…

I think, when making a gesture, you need to consider its practical impact, which includes whether and how it will be understood (or not). In the OpenAI case, the gesture of "forgoing millions of dollars" directly makes you able to do something you couldn't - speak about OpenAI publicly. In the Grigory Perelman case, obviously the message was far less clear to most people (I personally have heard of him turning down t…

Perelman's point is absolutely clear if you listen to him, he's disgusted by the way credit is apportioned in mathematics, doesn't think his contribution is any greater just because it was the last one, and wants no part of the prize he considers tainted.

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

#622

Post by tinyhouse »

smt88 wrote: post #333
throwaway598 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That OpenAI are institutionally unethical. That such a young company can be become rotten so quickly can only be due to leadership instruction or leadership failure.

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.

Well, more than 90% of OpenAI employees backed him up when the board fired him. Maybe he's not the clown you claim he is.

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

#623

Post by jstummbillig »

I am confused about the source of the outrage. A situation where nobody is very clear about what the claim is but everyone is very upset, makes me suspicious.

Are employees being mislead about the contract terms at time of signing the contract? Because, obviously, the original contract needs to have some clause regarding the equity situation, right? We can not just make that up at the end. So... are we claiming fraud?

What I suspect is happening, is that we are confusing an option to forgo equity for an option to talk openly about OpenAI stuff (an option that does not even have to exist in the initial agreement, I would assume).

Is this overreach? Is this whole thing necessary? That seems besides the point. Two parties agreed to the terms when signing the contract. I have a hard time thinking of top AI researchers as coerced to take a job at OpenAI or unable to understand a contract, or understand that they should pay someone to explain it to them – so if that's not a free decision, I don't know what is.

Which leads me to: If we think the whole deal is pretty shady – well, it took two.

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

#624

Post by jbellis »

riehwvfbk wrote: post #394
crooked-v wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreements with surprise terms that only get detailed later tend not to be very legal.

Doesn't even have to be a surprise. Pretty much startup employment agreement in existence gives the company ("at the board's sole discretion") the right to repurchase your shares upon termination of employment. OpenAI's PPUs are worth $0 until they become profitable. Guess which right they'll choose to exercise if you don't sign the NDA?

I don't think rght to repurchase is routine. It was a scandal a few years ago when it turned out that Skype did that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/dianahembree/2018/01/10/startup...

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

#625

Post by nar001 »

whoistraitor wrote: post #462
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.

Indeed. I’ve heard first hand accounts that would make it impossible for me to trust him. He’s very good at the game. But I’d not want to touch him with a barge pole.

Any stories or events you can talk about? It sounds interesting

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

#626

Post by fennecbutt »

kmeisthax wrote: post #443
orlandrescu wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lmao no point in worrying about AI spreading FUD when people do it all by themselves.

You know what AI is actually gonna be useful for? AR source attachments to everything that comes out of our monkey mouths, or a huge floating [no source] over someone's head.

Realtime factual accuracy checking pls I need it.

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

#627

Post by hanspeter »

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #612
treme wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

By that logic nothing has started from scratch.

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

#628

Post by SirensOfTitan »

TechnicolorByte wrote: post #612
treme wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.

SpaceX didn’t start from scratch. Their initial designs were based on NASA designs. Stop perpetuating the “genius engineer” myth around Elon Musk.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch You must first invent the universe”

…no one “started from scratch", the sum of all knowledge is built on prior foundations.

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

#629

Post by huijzer »

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.

[flagged]

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

#630

Post by repeekad »

kaoD wrote: post #570
repeekad wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> done with the intent to not pay the original authors no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” and the legal precedent for using copyrighted works for the purpose of training is clear with the NYT case against open AI It’s why things like the recent deal with Reddit to train on their data (which Reddit owns and users give up when using the platform) are becoming so important, same with Twitter/X

> no one building this software wants to “steal from creators” > It’s why things like the recent deal[s ...] are becoming so important Sorry but I don't follow. Is it one or the other? If they didn't want to steal from the original authors, why do they not-steal Reddit now? What happens with the smaller creators that are not Reddit? When is OpenAI meeting with me to discuss compensation? To me your post felt somethin…

The law is slow and is always playing catch up in terms of prosecution, it’s not clear today because this kind of copyright has never been an issue before. Usually it’s just outright stealing content that was protected, no one ever imagined “training” to be a protected use case, humans “train” on copyrighted works all the time, ideally copyrighted works they purchased for said purpose… the same will start to apply for AI, you have to have rights to the data for that purpose, hence these deals getting made. In the meantime it’s ask for forgiveness not permission, and companies like Google (less openAI) are ready to go with data governance that lets them remove copyright requested data and keep the rest of the model working fine

Let’s also be clear that making deals with Reddit isn’t stealing from creators, it’s not a platform where you own what you type in, same on here this is all public domain with no assumed rights to the text. If you write a book and openAI trains on it and starts telling it to kids at bed time, you 100% will have a legal claim in the future, but the companies already have protections in place to prevent exactly that. For example if you own your website you can request the data not be crawled, but ultimately if your text is publicly available anyone is allowed to read it, and the question it is anyone allowed to train AI on it is an open question that companies are trying to get ahead on.

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