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

851–860 of 1001 posts

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

#851

Post by programjames »

pawelmurias wrote: post #643
kmeisthax wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to think the relatives of South African emerald mine owners might not be the best people to trust...

You are not responsible for the sins of your father regardless of how seriously fucked in the head he is.

From a game theory perspective, it can make sense to punish future generations to prevent someone from YOLO'ing at the end of their life. But that only works if they actually care about their children, so perhaps it should be, "you are less responsible for the sins of your father the more seriously fucked in the head he is."

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

#852

Post by DebtDeflation »

whimsicalism wrote: post #188
DebtDeflation wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial reaction was "Hold up - your RSUs vest, you sell the shares and pocket the cash, you quit OpenAI, a few years later you disparage them, and then when? They somehow try and claw back the equity? How? At what value? There's no way this can work." Then I remembered that OpenAI "equity" doesn't take the form of an RSU or option or anything else that can be converted into an actual share ever. What they call "e…

This is wrong on multiple levels. (to be clear I don't work at OAI) > They don't share the equivalent of a Cap Table with employees, so there's no way to tell what sort of ownership interest a PPU represents It is known - it represents 0 ownership share. They do not want to sell any ownership because their deal with MS gives MS 49% ownership and they don't want MS to be able to buy up additional stake and control the…

You're not saying anything that in any way contradicts my original post. Here, I'll simplify it - OpenAI's PPUs are not in any sense of the word "equity" in OpenAI, they are simply a subordinated claim to an unknown % of a hypothetical future profit.

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

#853

Post by rKarpinski »

milankragujevic wrote: post #751

It seems very off to me that they don't give you the NDA before you sign the employment contract, and instead give it to you at the time of termination when you can simply refuse to sign it. It seems that standard practice would dictate that you sign an NDA before even signing the employment contract.

They have multiple NDA's, including ones that are signed before joining the company [1].

[1]https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kovCotfpTFWFXaxwi/simeon_c-s...

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

#854

Post by breuleux »

esafak wrote: post #803
logicchains wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're probably smarter than a guy who recreationally huffs spraypaint, but you're still within the same class as intelligence. Both of you are so much more advanced than a cat, or a beetle, or a protozoan that it doesn't even make sense to make any sort of comparison. This is pseudoscientific nonsense. We have the very rigorous field of complexity theory to show how much improvement in solving various problems can…

What does P=NP have to do with anything? Humans are incomparably smarter than other animals. There is no intelligence test a healthy human would lose to another animal. What is going to happen when agentic robots ascend to this level relative to us? This is what the GP is talking about.

Succeeding at intelligence tests is not the same thing as succeeding at survival, though. We have to be careful not to ascribe magical powers to intelligence: like anything else, it has benefits and tradeoffs and it is unlikely that it is intrinsically effective. It might only be effective insofar that it is built upon an expansive library of animal capabilities (which took far longer to evolve and may turn out to be harder to reproduce), it is likely bottlenecked by experimental back-and-forth, and it is unclear how well it scales in the first place. Human intelligence may very well be the highest level of intelligence that is cost-effective.

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

#855

Post by whimsicalism »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #852
whimsicalism wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong on multiple levels. (to be clear I don't work at OAI) > They don't share the equivalent of a Cap Table with employees, so there's no way to tell what sort of ownership interest a PPU represents It is known - it represents 0 ownership share. They do not want to sell any ownership because their deal with MS gives MS 49% ownership and they don't want MS to be able to buy up additional stake and control the…

You're not saying anything that in any way contradicts my original post. Here, I'll simplify it - OpenAI's PPUs are not in any sense of the word "equity" in OpenAI, they are simply a subordinated claim to an unknown % of a hypothetical future profit.

> there's no way to tell what sort of ownership interest a PPU represents

Wrong. We know - it is 0, this directly contradicts your claim.

> this is all just play money anyway.

Again, wrong - because it is sellable so employees can take home millions. Play money in the startup world means illiquid options that can't be tender offered.

You're making it sound like this is a terrible deal for employees but I personally know people who are able to sell $1m+ in OAI PPUs to institutional investors as part of the tender offer.

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

#856

Post by schmidtleonard »

timr wrote: post #848
MrScruff wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sure, but blanket pessimism isn't very insightful either. I'll use the same example you did: self-driving. The public (or "median nerd") consensus has shifted from "right around the corner" (when it struggled to lane-follow if the paint wasn't sharp) to "it's a scam and will never work," even as it has taken off with the other types of AI and started hopping hurdles every month that naysayers said would take decades. Negotiating right-of-way, inferring intent, handling obstructed and ad-hoc roadways... the nasty intractables turned out to not be intractable, but sentiment has not caught up.

For one where the pessimist consensus has already folded, see: coherent image/movie generation and multi-modality. There were loads of pessimists calling people idiots for believing in the possibility. Then it happened. Turns out an image really is worth 16x16 words.

Pessimism isn't insight. There is no substitute for the hard work of "try and see."

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

#857

Post by whimsicalism »

fragmede wrote: post #378
whimsicalism wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think a lot of people have been able to become billionaires simply by building something that was initially significantly undervalued and then became very highly valued, no 'screwing'. there is such thing as a win-win and frankly these win-wins account for most albeit not all value creation in the world. you do not have to screw other people to get rich. whether people should be able to hold on to that billion is a…

I wouldn't know, I'm not a billionaire. But when you hear about Amazon warehouse workers peeing into bottles because they they don't have long enough bathroom breaks, or Walmart workers not having healthcare because they're intentionally scheduled for 39.5 hours, it's hard to see that anyone could get to a billion without screwing someone over. But like I said, I'm not a billionaire.

Who did JK Rowling screw? (putting aside her recent social issues after she already became a billionaire)

Having these discussions in this current cultural moment is difficult. I'm no lover of billionaires, but to say that every billionaire screwed people over relies on esoteric interpretations of value and who produces it. These interpretations (like the labor-theory of value) are alien to the vast majority of people.

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

#858

Post by whimsicalism »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #750
whimsicalism wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think a lot of people have been able to become billionaires simply by building something that was initially significantly undervalued and then became very highly valued, no 'screwing'. there is such thing as a win-win and frankly these win-wins account for most albeit not all value creation in the world. you do not have to screw other people to get rich. whether people should be able to hold on to that billion is a…

They aren’t win-wins It’s a ruse - it’s a con - it’s an accounting trick. It’s the foundation of capitalism If I start a bowling pin production company and own 100% of it, then whatever pins I sell all of the results go to me Now let say I want to expand my thing (that’s its own moral dilemma we won’t get into), so I promise a person with more money than they need to support their own life, to give me money in exchan…

Putting aside your labor theory of value nonsense (I'm very familiar with the classic leftist syllogisms on this), who did someone like JK Rowling screw to make her billion?

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

#859

Post by MOARDONGZPLZ »

ezconnect wrote: post #698
KeplerBoy wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of course it was trained on Yt data, but they gain nothing from admitting that openly.

They will gain a lot of lawsuit if they admit they trained on youtube dataset because not everyone gave consent.

Consent isn’t legally required. An admission, however, would upset a lot of extremely online people though. Seems lose lose.

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

#860

Post by idontpost »

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…

[dead]
Post reply on HN