Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Post by ivalm »

nsoonhui wrote: post #467
cdchn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what other people have commented, you don't get equity. You get a profit sharing plan. You're chained to them for life. There is no divestiture.

Here's something I just don't understand. I have a profit sharing plan *for life*, and yet I want to publicly thrash it so that the benefits I can derive from it is reduced, all in the name of some form of ... what, social service?

Yeah, people do things financially not optimal for the sake of ethics. That’s a key part of living in a society. That’s part of why we don’t just murder each other.

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

#672

Post by KyleOneill »

KyleOneill wrote: post #665
TechnicolorByte wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals. We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.

The people downvoting have never read the Isaacson book obviously.

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

#673

Post by treme »

KyleOneill wrote: post #672
KyleOneill wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals. We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.

The people downvoting have never read the Isaacson book obviously.

More like ppl on this site know and respect Jobs for his talent as a revolutionary product manager-style CEO that brought us IPhone and subsequent mobile Era of computing.

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

#674

Post by jiggawatts »

subroutine wrote: post #646

This is an interesting update to the article... > After publication, an OpenAI spokesperson sent me this statement: “We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity nor will we if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit.” - Updated May 17, 2024, 11:20pm EDT

Neither of those statements negate the key point of the article.

I've noticed that both Sam Altman personally, and official statements from OpenAI sound like they've been written by Aes Sedai: Not a single untrue word while simultaneously thoroughly deceptive.[1]

Let's try translating some statements, as if we were listening to an evil person that can only make true statements:

"We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity" => "But we can and will if we want to. We just haven't yet."

"...if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit." => "But we're making everyone sign the agreement."

[1] I've wondered if they use a not-for-public-use version of GPT for this purpose. You know, a model that's not quite as aligned as the chat bots, with more "flexible" morals.

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

#676

Post by colibri727 »

treme wrote: post #666
colibri727 wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.

You seriously trying to take his credit away for reusable rocket with "nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”

No, in fact I'm praising Musk for his project management abilities and his ability to take risks.

>"nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." - Oscar Wilde

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

#677

Post by edanm »

mindcandy wrote: post #289
sneak wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What crimes do you think have occurred here?

I’m no lawyer. But, this sure smells like some form of fraud. Or, at least breach of contract. Employees and employer enter into an agreement: Work here for X term and you get Y options with Z terms attached. OK. But, then later pulling Darth Vader… “Now that the deal is completing, I am changing the deal. Consent and it’s bad for you this way. Don’t consent and it’s bad that way. Either way, you held up your end of…

I have no inside info on this, but I doubt this is what is happening. They could just say no and not sign a new contract.

I assume this was something agreed to before they started working.

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

#678

Post by xaPe »

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.

It didn't take long to drag Elon into this thread. The bitterness and cynicism is unreal.

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

#679

Post by seankurtz »

adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #191
thorum wrote: post #37

Extra respect is due to Jan Leike, then: https://x.com/janleike/status/1791498174659715494

Reading that thread it’s really interesting to me. I see how far we’ve come in a short couple of years. But I still can’t grasp how we’ll achieve AGI within any reasonable amount of time. It just seems like we’re missing some really critical… something… Idk. Folks much smarter than I seem worried so maybe I should be too but it just seems like such a long shot.

Everyone involved in building these things has to have some amount of hubris. Its going to come smashing down on them. What's going unsaid in all of this is just how swiftly the tide has turned against this tech industry attempt to save itself from a downtrend.

The whole industry at this point is acting like the tobacco industry back when they first started getting in hot water. No doubt the prophecies about imminent AGI will one day look to our descendents exactly like filters on cigarettes. A weak attempt to prevent imminent regulation and reduced profitability as governments force an out of control industry to deal with the externalities involved in the creation of their products.

If it wasn't abundantly clear...I agree with you that AGI is infinitely far away. Its the damage that's going to be caused by sociopaths (Sam Altman at the top of the list) in attempting to justify the real things they want (money) in their march towards that impossible goal that concerns me.

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

#680

Post by _heimdall »

theGnuMe wrote: post #631
_heimdall wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Options aren't equity, they're only the option to buy equity at a specified price. Vesting just means you can actually buy the shares at the set strike pice. For example, you may join a company and be given options to buy 10,000 shares at $5 each with a 2 year vesting schedule. They may begin vesting immediately, meaning you can buy 1/24th of the total options each month (or 614 shares). Its also common for a delay u…

Options can vest as do stock grants as well.

Unless I'm mistaken, the difference is that grants vest into actual shares while options only vest into the opportunity to buy the shares at a set price.

Part of my hiring bonus when joining one of the big tech companies were stock grants. As they vested I owned shares directly and could sell them as soon as they vested if I wanted to.

I also joined a couple startups later in my career and was given options as a hiring incentive. I never exercised the vested options so I never owned them at all, and I lost the optios after 30-90 days after leaving the company. For grants I'd take the shares with me and not have to pay for them, they would have directly been my shares.

Well, they'd actually be shares owned by a clearing house and promised to me but that's a very different rabbit hole.

Post reply on HN