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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?

#721

Post by formerly_proven »

jajko wrote: post #580
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.

But he is a manager, not an engineer although he sells himself off as such. He keeps smart capable folks around, abuses most of them pretty horribly, and when he intervenes with products its hit and miss. For example latest Tesla Model 3 changes must have been pretty major fuckup and there is no way he didn't ack it all. Plus all self-driving lies and more lies well within fraud territory at this point. Not even goin…

You’re confusing mommy and daddy issues. Mommy issues is what makes fash control freaks.

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

#722

Post by freehorse »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #614
wruza wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI started blending people to extract iron from their blood to produce more paperclips That’s neither efficient nor optimized, just a bogeyman for “doesn’t work”.

You're imagining a baseline of reasonableness. Humans have competing preferences, we never just want "one thing", and as a social species we always at least _somewhat_ value the opinions of those around us. The point is to imagine a system that values humans at zero : not positive, not negative.

Still there are much more efficient ways to extract iron than from human blood. If that was the case humans would have already used this technique to extract iron from the blood of other animals.

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

#723

Post by dmd »

iknownthing wrote: post #685
adamtaylor_13 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may sound harsh but I think some of these researchers have a sort of god complex. Something like "I am so brilliant and what I have created is so powerful that we MUST think about all the horrible things that my brilliant creation can do". Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive next token predictor.

"Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive speeder-up of a lump of lead."

"Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive hot water bottle that turns a crank."

"Meanwhile what they have created is just a very impressive rock where neutrons hit other neutrons."

The point isn't how it works, the point is what it does.

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

#724

Post by FeepingCreature »

freehorse wrote: post #722
FeepingCreature wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're imagining a baseline of reasonableness. Humans have competing preferences, we never just want "one thing", and as a social species we always at least _somewhat_ value the opinions of those around us. The point is to imagine a system that values humans at zero : not positive, not negative.

Still there are much more efficient ways to extract iron than from human blood. If that was the case humans would have already used this technique to extract iron from the blood of other animals.

However, eventually those sources will already be paperclips.

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

#725

Post by deadbabe »

hackernewds wrote: post #464
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.

the name OpenAI itself reminds me every day of this.

It’s “Open” as in “open Pandora’s box”, not “open source”. Always has been.

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

#726

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

jakderrida wrote: post #591
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…

>>contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it. Perfect! So it's so incredibly overreaching that any judge in California would deem the entire NDA unenforceable.. Either that or, in your effort to overstate a point, you exa…

Lots of companies try and impose things on their employees which a judge would obviously rule to be unlawful. Sometimes they just don’t think through it carefully; other times, it’s a calculated decision that few employees will care enough to actually get the issue in front of a judge in the first place. Especially relevant for something like a non disclosure agreement, where no judge is likely to have the opportunity to declare it unenforceable unless the company tries to enforce it on someone who fights back.

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

#727

Post by paulryanrogers »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #514

I wonder if employees rallying for Altman when the board was trying to fire him were obligated to do it by some secret agreement .

Even without explicit clauses, it's likely they feared the loss of a (perceived) great man would impact their equity -- regardless of his character. Sadly there is too much faith in these Jobs-esque 'great' men to drive innovation. It's a social illness IMO.

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

#728

Post by _heimdall »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #713
_heimdall wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hiri…

> Well, they'd actually be shares owned by a clearing house and promised to me but that's a very different rabbit hole. You still own the shares, not the clearing house. They hold them on your behalf.

Looks like I used the wrong term there, sorry. I was referring to Cede & Co, and in the moment assumed they could be considered a clearing house. It is technically called a certificate depository, sorry for the confusion there.

Cede & Co technically owns most of the stock certificates today [1]. If I buy a share of stock I end up actually owning an IOU for a stock certificate.

You can actually confirm this yourself if you own any stock. Call the broker that manages your account and ask who's name is on the stock certificate. It definitely isn't your name. You'll likely get confused or unclear answers, but if you're persistent enough you will indeed find that the certificate is almost certainly in the name of Cede & Co and there is no certificate in your name, likely no share identifier assigned to you either. You just own the promise to a share, which ultimately isn't a problem unless something massive breaks (at which point we have problems anyway).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cede_and_Company

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

#729

Post by twobitshifter »

modeless wrote: post #255
twobitshifter wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have equity in a company and I care about its value, I’m not going to say anything to tank its value. If I sell my equity later on, and then disparage the company, what can OpenAI hope to do to me?

They can sue you into bankruptcy, obviously. Also, what if you can't sell? Selling is at their discretion. They can prevent you from selling some of your so-called "equity" to keep you on their leash as long as they want.

That’s a good point, if you can get the equity liquid - I don’t think the lawsuit would go far or end up in bankruptcy. In this case, the truth of what happened at OpenAI would be revealed even more in a trial, which is not something they’d like and this type of contract with lifetime provisions isn’t likely to be enforced by a court IMO - especially when the information revealed is in the public’s interest and truthful.

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

#730

Post by olalonde »

baq wrote: post #605
genevra wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’.

I'm still finding it difficult to understand how their move away from the non-profit mission was legal. Initially, you assert that you are a mission-driven non-profit, a claim that attracts talent, capital, press, partners, and users. Then, you make a complete turnaround and transform into a for-profit enterprise. Why this isn't considered fraud is beyond me.
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