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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?

#841

Post by eastbound »

jimnotgym wrote: post #710
eastbound wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the low quality of relationships between customers and blue-collared jobs, i.e. ever tried to get a job done by a plumber or a painter, if you don’t know how to do their job you are practically assured they will do something in your back that will fall off in 2 years, for the price of 2x your daily rate as a software engineer (when they don’t straight up send a paperless immigrant which makes you culprit of par…

Shoddy contractors can then give you a shoddy service with a shoddy robot. Quality contractors will still be around, but everyone will try and beat them down on price because they care about that more than quality. The good contractors won't be able to make any money because of this and will leave the trade....just like now, just like I did

The argument “pay more to get better quality” would be valid if, indeed, paying more meant better quality.

Unfortunately, it’s something I’ve often done, either as a 30% raise for my employees or giving a tip to a contractor when I knew I’d take them again or taking the most expensive one.

EACH time the work was much worse off after the raise. The sad truth of humans is that you gotta keep them begging to extract their best work, and no true reward is possible.

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

#842

Post by tcbawo »

fastball wrote: post #743
DaSHacka wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others have mentioned, its likely many parts of this NDA are non-enforceable Its quite common for companies to put tons of extremely restrictive terms in an NDA they can't actually legally enforce to scare off potential future ex-employees from creating a problem.

I wouldn't say that is "quite common". If you throw a bunch of unenforceable clauses into an NDA/non-compete/whatever, that increases the likelihood of the whole thing being thrown out, which is not a can of worms most corporations want to open. So it is actually toeing a delicate balance most of the time, not a "let's throw everything we can into this legal agreement and see what sticks".

> If you throw a bunch of unenforceable clauses into an NDA/non-compete/whatever, that increases the likelihood of the whole thing being thrown out

I’m not sure that this is true. Any employment contract will have a partial invalidity/severability clause which will preserve the contract if individual clauses are unenforceable.

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

#843

Post by georgeburdell »

schmidt_fifty wrote: post #764
yashap wrote: post #760

For a company that is actively pursuing AGI (and probably the #1 contender to get there), this type of behaviour is extremely concerning. There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race, or makes life much shittier for most humans by making most of us obsolete. These risks are precisely why OpenAI was founded as a very open company with a charter that would firmly put the needs…

> There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race If this were true, intelligent people would have taken over society by now. Those in power will never relinquish it to a computer just as they refuse to relinquish it to more competent people. For the vast majority of people, AI not only doesn't pose a risk but will only help reveal the incompetence of the ruling class.

Look up where the people in power got their college degrees from and then look up the SAT scores of admitted students from those colleges.

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

#844

Post by AndrewKemendo »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #230
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to login because I haven’t seen anybody reference this in like a decade. If I remember correctly the author unsuccessfully tried to get that purged from the Internet

You're thinking of something else (and "purged from the internet" isn't exactly an accurate account of that, either).

Hmm maybe I’m misremembering then

I do recall there was some recantation or otherwise distancing from CEV not long after he posted it, but frankly it was long ago enough that my memories might be getting mixed

What was the other one?

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

#845

Post by pixl97 »

confidantlake wrote: post #784
robertlagrant wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or makes life much shittier for most humans by making most of us obsolete I'm not sure this is true. If all the things people are doing are done so much more cheaply they're almost free, that would be good for us, as we're also the buyers as well as the workers. However, I also doubt the premise.

Why would you need buyers if AI can create anything you desire?

Where are you getting energy and land from for these AI's to consume and turn into goods?

Moreso, by making such a magical powerful AI as you've listed, the number one thing some rich controlling asshole with more AI than you, would be to create an army and take what they want because AI does nothing to solve human greed.

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

#846

Post by punnerud »

cashsterling wrote: post #821

In my experience, and that of others I know, agreements of this kind are generally used to hide/cover-up all kinds of malfeasance. I think that agreements of this kind are highly unethical and should be illegal. Many year ago I signed a NDA/non-disparagement agreement as part of a severance package when I was fired from a startup for political reasons. I didn't want to sign it... but my family needed the money and I…

In EU all of these are mostly illegal and void, or strictly limited. You have to pay a good salary for the whole duration (up to two years), and let the employer know months before them leave. Almost right after they are fired.

Sound like a better solution?

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

#847

Post by staunton »

cashsterling wrote: post #821

In my experience, and that of others I know, agreements of this kind are generally used to hide/cover-up all kinds of malfeasance. I think that agreements of this kind are highly unethical and should be illegal. Many year ago I signed a NDA/non-disparagement agreement as part of a severance package when I was fired from a startup for political reasons. I didn't want to sign it... but my family needed the money and I…

> this is turning into huge power/money grab

The power grab happened a while ago (the shenanigans concerning the board) and is now complete. Care for humanity was just marketing or a cute thought at best.

Maybe humanity will survive life long enough that a company "caring about humanity" becomes possible, I'm not saying it's not worth trying or aspiring to such ideals, but everyone should be extremely surprised if any organization managed to resist such amounts of money to maintain any goal or ideal whatever...

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

#848

Post by timr »

MrScruff wrote: post #829
root_axis wrote: post #806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than these egregious gag contracts, OpenAI benefits from the image that they are on the cusp of world-destroying science fiction. This meme needs to die, if AGI is possible it won't be achieved any time in the foreseeable future, and certainly it will not emerge from quadratic time brute force on a fraction of text and images scraped from the internet.

Clearly we don’t know when/if AGI would happen, but the expectations of many people working in the field is it will arrive in what qualifies as ‘near future’. It probably won’t result from just scaling LLMs, but then that’s why there’s a lot of researchers trying to find the next significant advancement, in parallel with others trying to commercially exploit LLMs.

The same way that the expectation of many people working within the self-driving field in 2016 was that level 5 autonomy was right around the corner.

Take this stuff with a HUGE grain of salt. A lot of goofy hyperbolic people work in AI (any startup, really).

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

#850

Post by pixl97 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #776
schmidt_fifty wrote: post #764

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race If this were true, intelligent people would have taken over society by now. Those in power will never relinquish it to a computer just as they refuse to relinquish it to more competent people. For the vast majority of people, AI not only doesn't pose a risk but will only help reveal the incompetence of the ruling class.

>> There’s a very real/significant risk that AGI either literally destroys the human race > If this were true, intelligent people would have taken over society by now The premise you're replying to - one I don't think I agree with - is that a true AGI would be so much smarter, so much more powerful, that it wouldn't be accurate to describe it as "more smart". You're probably smarter than a guy who recreationally huff…

To every other mammal, reptile, and fish humans are the intelligence explosion. The fate of their species depends on our good will since we have so utterly dominated the planet by means of our intelligence.

Moreso, human intelligence is tied into the weakness of our flesh. Human intelligence is also balanced by greed and ambition. Someone dumber than you can 'win' by stabbing you and your intelligence ceases to exist.

Since we don't have the level of AGI we're discussing here yet, it's hard to say what it will look like in its implementation, but I find it hard to believe it would mimic the human model of its intelligence being tied to one body. A hivemind of embodied agents that feed data back into processing centers to be captured in 'intelligence nodes' that push out updates seems way more likely. More like a hive of super intelligent bees.

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