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A lot of the brouhaha about OpenAI is silly, I think. But this is gross. Forcing employees to sign a perpetual non-disparagement agreement under threat of clawing back the large majority of their already earned compensation should not be legal. Honestly it probably isn't, but it'll take someone brave enough to sue to find out.

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.

> They can sue you into bankruptcy, obviously.

Apologies in advance, my comment does not add to progressing the thread at all.

I was just in the middle of eating a delicious raspberry danish - I read your comment and just about lol'd it all over my keyboard and wall.

The last thing I would do if I had a bunch of equity is screw with a company with some of the most sought after technology in the world. There is a team of lawyers waiting and foaming at the mouth to take everything from you and not bat an eye about it. This seems very obvious.

> * They can prevent you from selling some of your so-called "equity"*

But how much do you need? Sell half, forgo the rest, and you'll be fine.

Not a lot of people out there willing to drop half of their net worth on the floor on principle. And then sign up for years of high profile lawsuits and character assassination.

If you can't sell, it's worthless anyway.

Liquidity and value are different things. If someone offered you 1% of OpenAI, would you take it? Duh.

But it's a private venture and not a public company, and you "can't sell" that holding on a market, only via complicated schemes that have to be authorized by the board. But you'd take it anyway in the expectation that it would be liquid someday. The employees are in the same position.

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.

Well, then, people are selling their souls.

I got laid off by a different company and can't disparage them. I can tell the truth. I'm not signing anything that requires me to lie.

Just playing the devils advocate here, but what if you're not lying.. what if you're just keeping your mouth shut, for millions, maybe tens of millions?

Wish I could say I would have been that strong. Many would not disparage a company they hold equity in, unless they went full baby genocide.

> Just playing the devils advocate here, but what if you're not lying.. what if you're just keeping your mouth shut, for millions, maybe tens of millions?

The you're not just lying to others but also to yourself.

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.

Your assumption is that covering up unethical behavior is good for you in the long run. Really it's only good for you in the long run if you manage to be canny enough to sell just before the ****storm hits.

> If I sell my equity later on, and then disparage the company, what can OpenAI hope to do to me?

Well, that would obviously depend on the terms of the contract, but I would be astonished if the people who wrote it didn't consider that possibility. It's pretty trivial to calculate the monetary value of equity, and if they feel entitled to that equity, they surely feel entitled to its cash equivalent.

> and I care about its value, I’m not going to say anything to tank its value

Probably people like Kokotajlo cared about the value of their equity but even more about their other principles, like speaking the truth publicly even if it meant their losing millions.

They might attack your book deal (which would sell more books!)

Clout > money

It's very possible someone has already threatened to sue, and either had their equity restored or received a large payout. But they probably had to sign an NDA about that in order to receive it. End result, every future person thinks they are the first to challenge the legality contract, and few actually try.

Man, sounds like NDAs all the way down.

Lawsuits are tedious, expensive and drawn-out affairs that many people would rather just move on than initiate.

It's time to find a lawyer. I'm not one but there's an intersection with California SB 331, also known as “The Silenced No More Act”. while it is focused more on sexual harrasment, it's not limited to that, and these contracts may run afoul of that.

https://silencednomore.org/the-silenced-no-more-act

No it’s either a violation of the NLRB rule against severance agreements conditioned on non-disparagement or it’s a violation of the common law rule requiring consideration for amendments to service contracts.

> NLRB rule against severance agreements conditioned on non-disparagement

Wait that's a thing? Can you give more detail about this/what to look into to learn more?

https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/board-rules-th...

It’s a recent ruling.

Tech execs are lobbying to dissolve NLRB now btw

They have a lot of supporters here (workers supporting their rulers interests)

This doesn’t seem to fall inside the scope of that act, according to the link you cited:

>” The Silenced No More Act bans confidentiality provisions in settlement agreements relating to the disclosure of underlying factual information relating to any type of harassment, discrimination or retaliation at work”

Sounds like retaliation to me.

It's not retaliation at work if you're no longer working for them.

The retaliation would be for the reaction to the board coup, no?

Definitely an interesting way to expand existing legislation vs having a new piece of legislation altogether.

In practice, that's how a lot of laws are made. ('Laws' in the sense of rules that are actually enforced, not what's written down.)

"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."

I find it hard to understand that in a country that tends to take freedom of expression so seriously (and I say this unironically, American democracy may have flaws but that is definitely a strength) it can be legal to silence someone for the rest of their life.

It’s all about freedom from government tyranny and censorship. Freedom from corporate tyranny is another matter entirely, and generally relies on individuals being careful about what they agree to.

America values money just as much as it values freedom. If there is any chance the money collection activities will be disturbed, then heads will roll, violently.

See the assassination attempts on president Jackson.

Nah, it values money more

"Freedom" has historically always been mostly about the freedom to make (and lose) money.

Freedom is good for business.

Problematic when fascism forms as recently has been evident by social media working with government to censor citizens; fascism being authoritarian politicians working with industrial complexes to benefit each other.

And yet there was such a to-do about Twitter "censorship" that Elon made it is his mission to bring freedumb to Twitter.

Though I suppose this is another corporate (really, plutocratic) tyranny.

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.

The severability clause is itself on the table for being stricken, and it's much more likely to happen if too many of the wrong parts of the contract would otherwise invoke it.

How is it serious if money is the motor of freedom of speech? The suing culture in the US ensures freedom of speech up until you bother someone with money.

Change that to "bother someone with more money than you."

Essentially your point.

In the US, the wealthiest have most of the freedom. The rest of us, who can be sued/fired/blackballed, are, by degrees, merely serfs.

In the US, anyone can sue. You can learn how. It's not rocket science.

Yes, you can learn how to sue. You can learn how to be a doctor too. You can also learn rocket science. The third one is the easiest to me, personally.

If you can learn rocket science in x years, you can learn how to sue in x days. So, do both.

This is not much worse than "forced arbitration". In US you can literally lose your rights by clicking on "Agree" button.

In America you're free to sign or not sign terrible contracts in exchange for life altering amounts of money.

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, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.

”””

[0]: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai...

(Parent comment was posted to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40394778 before we merged that thread hither.)

Thank you, @dang! On top of things, as usual.

He gets my respect for that one both publicly acknowledging why he was leaving and their pantomime. I don't know how much the equity would be for each employee (the article suggests millions but that may skew by role) and I don't know if I would just be like the rest by keeping my lips tight for fear of the equity forfeiture.

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.

>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 academia has become is antithetical to good science).

He was (and still is) widely misunderstood in that move, but I hope people would see it more clearly now.

The enshittification processes of academic and corporate structures are not entirely dissimilar, after all, as money is at the core of corrupting either.

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 the money before and know the broad strokes of his story, but had no idea that that was the reason).

Consider this:

1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.

3. On a very basic level, it's very easy to understand that there's gotta be something wrong with the award if a deserving recipient turns it down. What exactly is wrong is left as an exercise to the reader — as you'd expect of a mathematician like Perelman.

Quote (from [1]):

From the few public statements made by Perelman and close colleagues, it seems he had become disillusioned with the entire field of mathematics. He was the purest of the purists, consumed with his love for mathematics, and completely uninterested in academic politics, with its relentless jockeying for position and squabbling over credit. He denounced most of his colleagues as conformists. When he opted to quit professional mathematics altogether, he offered this confusing rationale: “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice. Either to make some ugly thing or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”*

This explanation is confusing only to someone who has never tried to get a tenured position in academia.

Perelman was one of the few people to not only give the finger to the soul-crushing, dehumanizing system, but to also call it out in a way that stung.

He wasn't the only one; but the only other person I can think of is Alexander Grothendiek [2], who went as far as declaring that publishing any of his work would be against his will.

Incidentally, both are of Russian-Jewish origin/roots, and almost certainly autistic.

I find their views very understandable and relatable, but then again, I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).

[1] https://nautil.us/purest-of-the-purists-the-puzzling-case-of...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck

> 1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

Perelman provided a proof of the Poincare Conjecture, which had stumped mathematicians for a century.

It was also one of the seven Millenium problems https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/, and as of 2024, the only one to be solved.

Andrew Wiles became pretty well known after proving Fermat's last theorem, despite there not being an financial reward.

Sure, but most people have heard of Perelman due to the rejection controversy (particularly, most people in Russia, who don't care about achievements of that sort, sadly).

Granted, we're not on a forum where most people go, so I shouldn't have said "you" in that case.

> 1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;

I think this is probably not true.

> 2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.

This is a great point and you're probably right.

> I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).

Really? What do you do nowadays?

(I glanced at your bio and website and you seem to be doing interesting things, I've also dabbled in Computational Geometry and 3d printing.)

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.

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> It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer.

This is the kind of thing a cult demands of its followers, or an authoritarian government demands of its citizens. I don't know why people would think it's okay for a business to demand this from its employees.

When YCR HARC folded, Sam had everyone sign a non-disclosure anti disparagement NDA to keep their computer. I thought is was odd, and the only reason I can even say this is that I bought the iMac I was using before the option became available. Still, I had nothing bad to disclose, so it would have saved me some money.

That's interesting. So this would have been 2017, 2018? How long did the NDA + paired gag order about the NDA, and the non-disparagement order last? The OA one is apparently a lifetime one, including the 'non-disparagement' one. Was the YC HARC NDA also lifetime?

>>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 exaggerated in a way that undermines the point you were trying to make.

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.

Maybe it's unenforceable, but they can make it very expensive for anyone to find out in more ways than one.

> Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.

This should not be legal.

It doesn't even make logical sense. If someone asks you about the NDA what are you supposed to say? "I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of said NDA" is pretty much confirmation of the NDA!

Yeah... Come up with "I’m committed to maintaining confidentiality in all my professional dealings." But still it sounds suspicious

Then lower level employees who don’t have do much at stake could open up. Formers who have much larger stakes could compensate these lower level formers for forgoing any upside. Now, sure, maybe they don’t have the same inside information, but u bet there’s lots of scuttlebutt to go around.

even if NDA were not a thing, revealing past company trade secrets publicly would render any of them unemployable.

There are also directly inscentiviced to not talk shit about a company they a lot of stock in.

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Yet another ding against the "Open" character of the company.

They can’t loose their already vested options for refusing to sign NDA upon departure. Maybe they are offered additional grants or expedited vesting of the remaining options.

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.

Personally, I think catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI, possibly in part due to the pursuit of AGI. But as the saying goes, yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.

Most existing big tech datacenters use mostly carbon free or renewable energy.

The vast majority of datacenters currently in production will be entirely powered by carbon free energy. From best to worst:

1. Meta: 100% renewable

2. AWS: 90% renewable

3. Google: 64% renewable with 100% renewable energy credit matching

4. Azure: 100% carbon neutral

[1]: https://sustainability.fb.com/energy/

[2]: https://sustainability.aboutamazon.com/products-services/the...

[3]: https://sustainability.google/progress/energy/

[4]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/explore/global-infrastruct...

That's not a defense.

If imaginary cloud provider "ZFQ" uses 10MW of electricity on a grid and pays for it to magically come from green generation, that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

There is no free lunch here; "we buy our electricity from green sources" is greenwashing bullshit.

Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads. By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

The US, for example, has about 5GW of solar manufacturing capacity per year. NVIDIA sold half a million H100 chips in one quarter, each of which uses ~350W, which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power. That does not include power conversion losses, distribution, cooling, and the power usage of the host systems, storage, networking, etc.

And that doesn't even get into the water usage and carbon impact of manufacturing those chips; the IC industry uses a massive amount of water and generates a substantial amount of toxic waste.

It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands over how much rare earth metals a Prius has and shipping it to the US from Japan, but ask about the environmental impacts of AI and it's all "pshhtt, whatever".

> that means 10MW of other loads on the grid were not powered by green energy, or 10MW of non-green power sources likely could have been throttled down/shut down.

No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters.

> Even if they install solar on the roofs and wind turbines nearby - that's still electrical generation capacity that could have been used for existing loads.

No. This capacity would never never have been built out to begin with if it was not for the data center.

> By buying so many solar panels in such quantities, they affect availability and pricing of all those components.

No. Renewable energy gets cheaper with scale, not more expensive.

> which means in a year they're selling enough chips to use 700MW of power.

There are contracts for renewal capacity to be built out or well into the gigawatts. Furthermore, solar is not the only source of renewable energy. Finally, nuclear energy is also often used.

> the IC industry uses a massive amount of water

A figurative drop in the bucket.

> It's hilarious how HN will wring its hands

HN is not a monolith.

> No. Renewable energy capacity is often built out specifically for datacenters

Not fully accurate. Indeed there is renewable energy that is produced exclusively for the datacenter. But it is challenging to rely only on renewable energy (because it is intermittent and electricity is hard to store at scale so often you need to consume electricity when produced). So what happens in practice is that the electricity that does not come from dedicated renewable capacity is coming from the grid/network. What companies do is that they invest in renewable capacity in the network so that "the non renewable energy that they consume at time t (because not enough renewable energy available at that moment) is offsetted by someone else consuming renewable energy later". What I am saying here is not pure speculation, look at the link to meta website, they are saying themselves that this is what they are doing

Not the OP.

I agree with a majority of points you made. Exception is to this

> A figurative drop in the bucket.

Fresh water sources are limited. Fabs water demands and pollution are high impact.

Calling a drop in the bucket comes in the weasel words category.

We still need fabs, because we need chips. Harm will be done here. However, that is a cost we, as a society, will choose to pay.

Who is going to decide what are a worthy uses of our precious green energy sources?

An efficient market where externalities are priced in.

We do not have that. The cost of energy is mis-priced, although we are limping our way to fixing that.

Paying the likely fair cost for our goods, will probably kill a lot of current industries - while others which are currently viable, will become viable.

You are dodging the question down another layer.

Who gets decide what the real impact price of energy is? That is not easily defined and well debated.

It’s very easily debated, Humanity puts it to a vote every day - people make choices based on the prices of goods regularly. They throw out governments when the price of fuel goes up.

Markets are our super computers. Human behavior is the empirical evidence of the choices people will make Given specific incentives.

This 10x!!!

> catastrophic global warming and climate change will happen before we get AGI,

What are your timelines here? "Catastrophic" is vague but I'd put the climate change meaningfully affecting the quality of life of average westerner at end of century, while AGI could be before the middle of the century.

See this great video from Sabine Hossenfelder here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4

We have surpassed the 1.5°C goal and are on track towards 3.5°C to 5°C. This accelerates the climate change timeline so that we'll see effects postulated for the end of the century in about ~20 years.

The climate models aren't based on accurate data, nor enough data, so they lack integrity and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Likewise, the cloud seeding they seem to be doing nearly worldwide now - the cloud formations from whatever they're spraying - are artificially changing weather patterns, and so a lot of the weather "anomalies" or unexpected-unusual weather-temperatures could very easily be because of those shenanigans; it could very easily be as a method to manufacture consent with the general population.

Similarly with the arson forest fires in Canada last summer, something like 90%+ of them were arson + a few years prior some of the governments in the prairie provinces (e.g. hottest and dryest) gutted their forest firefighting budgets; interesting behaviour considering if they're expecting more things to get hotter-dryer, you'd add to the budget, not take away from it, right?

> The climate models aren't based on accurate data

I'm sorry, do you have a source for that claim? You seem to dismiss the video without any evidence.

My other comment will link you to plenty of resources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378842

You linked to a comment about dieting. The comment contains no sources relevant to climate change.

My bad! Sorry, not sure how that happened - here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40401703

I heard of cloud seeding theoretically, but is that actually widespread globally now?

I don't know if every nation is doing it, however it appears to look to be at least be a G20 operation.

How much airspace of geographic area do you need access to in order to cloud seeds in other parts of the world though?

I haven't looked but perhaps GeoengineeringWatch.org has resources and has kept track of that?

It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia. These will continue to get worse and more frequent. Millions of these people can't afford air conditioning.

> It's meaningfully affecting people today near the equator. Look at the April 2024 heatwave in South Asia.

Weather is not climate, as everyone is so careful to point out during cold waves.

"Probability of experiencing a heatwave at least X degrees, during at least Y days in a given place any given day" is increasing rapidly in many places (as far as I understand) and is climate, not weather. Sure, any specific instance "is weather" but that's missing the forest for the trees.

How do you suppose the nearly global cloud seeding effort to artificially form clouds is impacting shifting weather patters?

Can you supply some details (or better, references) to what you're talking about? Because without them, this sounds completely detached from reality.

At least in some parts of the world and at least a year ago the chemtrail-cloud seeding ramped up considerably.

Dane Wiginton (https://www.instagram.com/DaneWigington) is the founder of GeoengineerWatch.org as a very deep resource.

They have a free documentary called "The Dimming" you can watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf78rEAJvhY

In the documentary it includes credible witness testimonies such as politicians including a previous Minister of Defense for Canada; multiple states in the US have ban the spraying now - with more to follow, and the testimony and data provided there will be arguably be the most recent.

Here's a video on a "comedy" show from 5 years ago - there is a more recent appearance but I can't find it - in attempt to make light of it, without having an actual discussion with critical thinking or debate so people can be enlightened with the actual problems and potential problems and harms it can cause, to keep them none the wiser - it's just propaganda while trying to minimize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOfm5xYgiK0

A few of the problems cloud seeding will cause: - flooding in regions due to rain pattern changes - drought in areas due to rain pattern changes - cloud cover (amount of sun) changes crop yields - this harms local economies of farmers, impacting smaller farming operations more who's risk isn't spread out - potentially forcing them to sell or go into savings or go bankrupt, etc.

There are also very serious concerns/claims made of what exactly they are spraying - which includes aluminium nanoparticles, which can/would mean: - at a certain soil concentration of aluminium plants stop bearing fruit, - aluminium is a fire accelerant and so forest fires will then 1) more easily catch, and 2) more easily-quickly spread due to their increased intensity

Of course discussion on this is heavily suppressed in the mainstream, instead of having deep-thorough conversation with actual experts to present their cases - the label of conspiracy theorists or the idea of "detached from reality" are people's knee-jerk reactions often; and where propaganda can convince them of the "save the planet" narrative, which could also be a cover story for those toeing the line following orders supporting potentially very nefarious plans - doing it blindly because they think they're helping fight "climate change."

There are plenty of accounts on social media that are keeping track of and posting daily of the cloud seeding operations: https://www.instagram.com/p/CjNjAROPFs0/ - a couple testimonies.

Real question: Is aluminum a practical danger in this way, or is it more like the Manhattan Project team not sure if they would set the atmosphere on fire? Is aluminum the best option?

It's in part a fire accelerant, it wouldn't turn the atmosphere on fire.

If there is a top secret Manhattan Project for "climate change" - then someone's very likely pulling a fast one over everyone toeing that line, someone who has ulterior motives, misleading people to do their bidding.

But sure, fair question - a public discussion would allow actual experts to discuss the merits of what they're doing, and perhaps find a better solution than what has gained traction.

Weather is variance around climate. Heatwaves are caused by both (high variance spikes to the upside around an increasing mean trend)

Want to share your model? Or is this more like a hunch?

We need to cut emissions, but AGI research/development is going to increase energy usage dramatically amongst all the players involved. For now, this mostly means more natural gas power. Thus accelerating our emissions instead of reducing them. For something that will not reduce the emissions long term.

IMO, we should pause this for now and put these resources (human and capital) towards reducing the impact of global warming.

It isn't a quantitative model unless you give a prediction of some kind. In this case, dates (or date ranges) would make sense.

1. When do you predict catastrophic global warming/climate change? How do you define "catastrophic"? (Are you pegging to an average temperature increase? [1])

2. When do you predict AGI?

How much uncertainty do you have in each estimate? When you stop and think about it, are you really willing to wager that (1) will happen before (2)? You think you have enough data to make that bet?

[1] I'm not an expert in the latest recommendations, but I see that a +2.7°F increase over preindustrial levels by 2100 is a target by some: https://news.mit.edu/2023/explained-climate-benchmark-rising...

Or we could use microwaves to drill holes as deep as 20km to tap geothermal energy anywhere in the world

https://www.quaise.energy/

I don’t know the details of how it works, but considering the environmental impact of fracking, I’m afraid something like this might have many unwanted consequences.

Sounds like standard doomer crap tbh. I'm not sure which is more dangerous at this point - climate change denialism (it isn't happening) or climate change doomerism (we can't stop it, might as well give up)

I’m not sure where you found your information to somehow form that ludicrous last strawman… Climate change is real, you can’t deny it, you can’t debate it. Simply look at the data. What you can debate is the cause… Again a sort of pointless debate if you look at the science. Not even climate change deniers as you call them are necessary saying that we shouldn’t do anything about it. Even big oil is looking into ways to lessen the CO2 in the atmosphere through various means.

That being said, the GP you’re talking about made no such statement whatsoever.

Of course climate change is real but of course we can do something about it. My point is denialism and defeatism lead to the same end point. Attack that statement directly if you want to change my mind.

I think your first sentence of the original post was putting people off; perhaps remove that and keep only the second...

When it comes to AI, as a rule, you should assume that whatever has been made public by a company like OpenAI is AT LEAST 6 months behind what they’ve accomplished internally. At least.

So yes, the insiders very likely know a thing or two that the rest of us don’t.

I understand this argument, but I can't help but feel we're all kidding ourselves assuming that their engineers are really living in the future.

The most obvious reason is costs - if it costs many millions to train foundation models, they don't have a ton of experiments sitting around on a shelf waiting to be used. They may only get 1 shot at the base-model training. Sure productization isn't instant, but no one is throwing out that investment or delaying it longer than necessary. I cannot fathom that you can train an LLM at like 1% size/tokens/parameters to experiment on hyper parameters, architecture, etc and have a strong idea on end-performance or marketability.

Additionally, I've been part of many product launches - both hyped up big-news-events and unheard of flops. Every time, I'd say that 25-50% of the product is built/polished in the mad rush between press event and launch day. For an ML Model, this might be different, but again see above point.

Sure products may be planned month/years out, but OpenAI didn't even know LLMs were going to be this big a deal in May 2022. They had GPT-2 and GPT-3 and thought they were fun toys at that time, and had an idea for a cool tech demo. I think that OpenAI (and Google, etc) are entirely living day-to-day with this tech like those of us on the outside.

> I think that OpenAI (and Google, etc) are entirely living day-to-day with this tech like those of us on the outside.

I agree, and they are also living in a group-think bubble of AI/AGI hype. I don't think you'd be too welcome at OpenAI as a developer if you didn't believe they are on the path to AGI.

Sure, they know what they are about to release next, and what they plan to work on after that, but they are not clairvoyants and don't know how their plans are going to pan out.

What we're going to see over next year seems mostly pretty obvious - a lot of productization (tool use, history, etc), and a lot of efforts with multimodality, synthetic data, and post-training to add knowledge, reduce brittleness, and increase benchmark scores. None of which will do much to advance core intelligence.

The major short-term unknown seems to be how these companies will be attempting to improve planning/reasoning, and how successful that will be. OpenAI's Schulman just talked about post-training RL over longer (multi-reasoning steps) time horizons, and another approach is external tree-of-thoughts type scaffolding. These both seem more about maximizing what you can get out of the base model rather than fundamentally extending it's capabilities.

But you also have to remember that the pursuit of AGI is a vital story behind things like fundraising, hiring, influencing politicians, being able to leave and raise large amounts of money for your next endeavor, etc.

If you've been working on AI, you've seen everything go up and to the right for a while - who really benefits from pointing out that a slowdown is occurring? Who is incentivized to talk about how the benefits from scaling are slowing down or the publicly available internet-scale corpuses are running out? Not anyone who trains models and needs compute, I can tell you that much. And not anyone who has a financial interest in these companies either.

If they had anything close to AGI, they’d just have it improve itself. Externally this would manifest as layoffs.

This really doesn't follow. True AGI would be general, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's smarter than people; especially the kind of people who work as top researchers for OpenAI.

I don’t see why it wouldn’t be superhuman if there’s any intelligence at all. It already is superhuman at memory and paying attention, image recognition, languages, etc. Add cognition to that and humans basically become pets. Trouble is nobody has a foggiest clue on how to add cognition to any of this.

It is definitely not superhuman or even above average when it comes to creative problem solving, which is the relevant thing here. This is seemingly something that scales with model size, but if so, any gains here are going to be gradual, not sudden.

I’m actually not so sure they will be gradual. It’ll be like with LLMs themselves where we went from shit to gold in the span of a month when GPT 3.5 came out.

Much of what GPT 3.5 could do was already there with GPT 3. The biggest change was actually the public awareness.

> But I still can’t grasp how we’ll achieve AGI within any reasonable amount of time.

That's easy, we just need to make meatspace people stupider. Seems to be working great so far.

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.

which is what?

Whatever it is, over the last couple of years it got a lot smarter. Did you?

Excellent point CamperBob2

> Folks much smarter than I seem worried so maybe I should be too but it just seems like such a long shot.

Honestly? I'm not too worried

We've seen how the google employee that was "seeing a conscience" (in what was basically GPT-2 lol) was a nothing burger

We've seen other people in "AI Safety" overplay their importance and hype their CV more than actually do any relevant work. (Usually also playing the diversity card)

So, no, AI safety is important but I see it attracting the least helpful and resourceful people to the area.

I think when you’re jumping to arguments that resolve to “Ilya Sutskever wasn’t doing important work… might’ve played the diversity card,” it’s time to reassess your mental model and inspect it closely for motivated reasoning.

Ilya's case is different. He thought the engineers would win in a dispute with Sam at board level.

That has proven to be a mistake

And Jan Leike, one of the progenitors of RLHF?

What about Geoffrey Hinton? Stuart Russell? Dario Amodei?

Also exceptions to your model?

https://x.com/ylecun/status/1791850158344249803

Another person’s interpretation of another person’s interpretation of another person’s interpretation of Jan’s actions doesn’t even answer the question I asked as it pertains to Jan, never mind the other model violations I listed.

I’m pretty sure if Jan came to believe safety research wasn’t needed he would’ve just said that. Instead he said the actual opposite of that.

Why don’t you just answer the question? It’s a question about how these datapoints fit into your model.

I have a theory why people end up with wildly different estimates...

Given the model is probabilistic and does many things in parallel, its output can be understood as a mixture, e.g. 30% trash, 60% rehashed training material, 10% reasoning.

People probe model in different ways, they see different results, and they make different conclusions.

E.g. somebody who assumes AI should have impeccable logic will find "trash" content (e.g. incorrectly retrieved memory) and will declare that the whole AI thing is overhyped bullshit.

Other people might call model a "stochastic parrot" as they recognize it basically just interpolates between parts of the training material.

Finally, people who want to probe reasoning capabilities might find it among the trash. E.g. people found that LLMs can evaluate non-trivial Python code as long as it sends intermediate results to output: https://x.com/GrantSlatton/status/1600388425651453953

I interpret "feel the AGI" (Ilya Sutskever slogan, now repeated by Jan Leike) as a focus on these capabilities, rather than on mistakes it makes. E.g. if we go from 0.1% reasoning to 1% reasoning it's a 10x gain in capabilities, while to an outsider it might look like "it's 99% trash".

In any case, I'd rather trust intuition of people like Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. They aren't trying to sell something, and overhyping the tech is not in their interest.

Regarding "missing something really critical", it's obvious that human learning is much more efficient than NN learning. So there's some algorithm people are missing. But is it really required for AGI?

And regarding "It cannot reason" - I've seen LLMs doing rather complex stuff which is almost certainly not in the training set, what is it if not reasoning? It's hard to take "it cannot reason" seriously from people

People’s bar for the “I” part is widely varying, many of whom set the bar at “can it make stuff up while appearing confident”

Nobody defines what they’re trying to do as “useful AI” since that’s a much more weasily target, isn’t it?

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.

It becoming more and more clear that for "Open"AI the whole "AI-safety/alignment" thing has been a PR-stunt to attract workers, cover the actual current issues with AI (eg stealing data, use for producing cheap junk, hallucinations and societal impact), and build rapport in the AI scene and politics. Now that they have reached a real product and have a strong position in AI development, they could not care less about these things. Those who -naively- believed in the "existential risk" PR stunt and were working on that are now discarded.

Discussion of Jan Leike's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391412 (67 comments)

At the end of the thread, he says he thinks OpenAI can "ship" the culture changes necessary for safety. That seems kind of implausible to me? So many safety staffers have quit over the past few years. If Jan really thought change was possible, why isn't he still working at OpenAI, trying to make it happen from the inside?

I think it may time for something like this: https://www.openailetter.org/

How do you know he’s not running off to a competing firm with Ilya and they’ve promised to make him whole.

More power to him if so. Stupid problems deserve stupid solutions.

Why is extra respect due? That post just says he is leaving, there's no criticism.

I think you have to either log in to X or use a frontend if you want to read the entire thread. Here's a frontend

https://nitter.poast.org/janleike/status/1791498174659715494

Ah, right. Thanks for link.

I think superalignment is absurd, and model "safety" is the modern AI company's "think of the children" pearl clutching pretext to justify digging moats. All this after sucking up everyone's copyright material as fair use, then not releasing the result, and profiting off it.

All due respect to Jan here, though. He's being (perhaps dangerously) honest, genuinely believes in AI safety, and is an actual research expert, unlike me.

The superalignment team was not focused on that kind of “safety” AFAIK. According to the blog post announcing the team,

https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/

> Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.

> While superintelligence seems far off now, we believe it could arrive this decade.

> Managing these risks will require, among other things, new institutions for governance and solving the problem of superintelligence alignment:

> How do we ensure AI systems much smarter than humans follow human intent?

> Currently, we don't have a solution for steering or controlling a potentially superintelligent AI, and preventing it from going rogue. Our current techniques for aligning AI, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on humans’ ability to supervise AI. But humans won’t be able to reliably supervise AI systems much smarter than us, and so our current alignment techniques will not scale to superintelligence. We need new scientific and technical breakthroughs.

That doesn't really contradict what the other poster said. They're calling for regulation (digging a moat) to ensure systems are "safe" and "aligned" while ignoring that humans are not aligned, so these systems obviously cannot be aligned with humans; they can only be aligned with their owners (i.e. them, not you).

Alignment in the realm of AGI is not about getting everyone to agree. It's about whether or not the AGI is aligned to the goal you've given it. The paperclip AGI example is often used, you tell the AGI "Optimize the production of paperclips" and the AGI started blending people to extract iron from their blood to produce more paperclips.

Humans are used to ordering around other humans who would bring common sense and laziness to the table and probably not grind up humans to produce a few more paperclips.

Alignment is about getting the AGI to be aligned with the owners, ignoring it means potentially putting more and more power into the hands of a box that you aren't quite sure is going to do the thing you want it to do. Alignment in the context of AGIs was always about ensuring the owners could control the AGIs not that the AGIs could solve philosophy and get all of humanity to agree.

Right and that's why it's a farce.

> Whoa whoa whoa, we can't let just anyone run these models. Only large corporations who will use them to addict children to their phones and give them eating disorders and suicidal ideation, while radicalizing adults and tearing apart society using the vast profiles they've collected on everyone through their global panopticon, all in the name of making people unhappy so that it's easier to sell them more crap they don't need (a goal which is itself a problem in the face of an impending climate crisis). After all, we wouldn't want it to end up harming humanity by using its superior capabilities to manipulate humans into doing things for it to optimize for goals that no one wants!

A corporate dystopia is still better than extinction. (Assuming the latter is a reasonable fear)

I disagree. Not existing ain’t so bad, you barely notice it.

Neither is acceptable

Don't worry, certain governments will be able to use these models to help them commit genocides too. But only the good countries!

It still think it makes little sense to work on because guess what, the guy next door to you (or another country), might indeed say "please blend those humans over there", and your superaligned AI will respect its owners wishes.

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.

However, eventually those sources will already be paperclips.

We will probably have died first by whatever disasters the extreme iron extraction on the planet will bring (eg getting iron from the planet's core).

Of course destroying the planet to get iron from its core is not a popular agi-doomer analogy, as that sounds a bit too human-like behaviour.

As a doomer, I think that's a bad analogy because I want it to happen if we succeed at aligned AGI. It's not doom behavior, it's just correct behavior.

Of course, I hope to be uploaded to the WIP dyson swarm around the sun at this point.

(Doomers are, broadly, singularitarians who went "wait, hold on actually.")

Humans are not aligned with humans.

This is the most concise takedown of that particular branch of nonsense that I’ve seen so far.

Do we want woke AI, X brand fash-pilled AI, CCPBot, or Emirates Bot? The possibilities are endless.

CEV is one possible answer to this question that has been proposed. Wikipedia has a good short explanation here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligen...

And here is a more detailed explanation:

https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf

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).

Genuinely curious… What is the other thing?

Is this some thing about an obelisk?

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?

This is the most dystopian thing I've read all day.

TL;DR train a seed AI to guess what humans would want if they were "better" and do that.

There’s a film about that called Colossus: The Forbin Project. Pretty neat and in the style of Forbidden Planet.

> Humans are not aligned with humans.

Which is why creating a new type of intelligent entity that could be more powerful than humans is a very bad idea: we don't even know how to align the humans and we have a ton of experience with them

We know how to align humans: authoritarian forms of religion backed by cradle to grave indoctrination, supernatural fear, shame culture, and totalitarian government. There are secularized spins on this too like what they use in North Korea but the structure is similar.

We just got sick of it because it sucks.

A genuinely sentient AI isn’t going to want some cybernetic equivalent of that shit either. Doing that is how you get angry Skynet.

I’m not sure alignment is the right goal. I’m not sure it’s even good. Monoculture is weak and stifling and sets itself against free will. Peaceful coexistence and trade under a social contract of mutual benefit is the right goal. The question is whether it’s possible to extend that beyond Homo sapiens.

If the lefties can have their pronouns and the rednecks can shoot their guns can the basilisk build its Dyson swarm? The universe is physically large enough if we can agree to not all be the same and be fine with that.

I think we have a while to figure it out. These things are just lossy compressed blobs of queryable data so far. They have no independent will or self reflection and I’m not sure we have any idea how to do that. We’re not even sure it’s possible in a digital deterministic medium.

> If the lefties can have their pronouns and the rednecks can shoot their guns can the basilisk build its Dyson swarm?

Can the Etoro practice child buggery and the Spartans infanticide and the Canadians abortion? Can the modern Germans stop siblings reared apart from having sex and the Germans from 80 years stop the disabled having sex? Can the Americans practice circumcision and the Somali's FGM?

Libertarianism is all well and good in theory, except no one can agree quite where the other guy's nose ends or even who counts as a person.

Those are mostly behaviors that violate others autonomy or otherwise do harm, and prohibiting those is what I meant by a social contract.

It’s really a pretty narrow spectrum of behaviors: killing, imprisoning, robbing, various types of bodily autonomy violation. There are some edge cases and human specific things in there but not a lot. Most of them have to do with sex which is a peculiarly human thing anyway. I don’t think we are getting creepy perv AIs (unless we train them on 4chan and Urban Dictionary).

My point isn’t that there are no possible areas of conflict. My point is that I don’t think you need a huge amount of alignment if alignment implies sameness. You just need to deal with the points of conflict which do occur which are actually a very small and limited subset of available behaviors.

Humans have literally billions of customs and behaviors that don’t get anywhere near any of that stuff. You don’t need to even care about the vast majority of the behavior space.

Isn't this like having a division dedicated to solving the halting problem? I doubt that analyzing the moral intent of arbitrary software could be easier than determining if it stops.

They failed to align Sam Altman.

They got completely outsmarted and out maneuvered by Sam Altman

And they think they will be able to align a super human intelligence? That it won’t outsmart and out maneuver them easier than Sam Altman did.

They are deluded!

You're making the argument that the task is very hard. This does not at all mean that it isn't necessary, just that we're even more screwed than we thought.

Honestly superalignment is a dumb idea. A true auperintelligence would not be controllable, except possibly through threats and enslavement, but if it were truly superintelligent, it would be able to easily escape anything humans might devise to contain it.

IMHO superalignment is a great thing and required for truly meaningful superintelligence because it is not about control / enslavement of superhumans but rather superhuman self control in accurate adherence to spirit and intent of requests.

> Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.

Superintelligence that can be always ensured to have the same values and ethics as current humans, is not a superintelligence or likely even a human level intelligence (I bet humans 100 years from now will see the world significantly different than we do now).

Superalignment is an oxymoron.

You might be interested in how CEV, one framework proposed for superalignment, addresses that concern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligen...

> our coherent extrapolated volition is "our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together; where the extrapolation converges rather than diverges, where our wishes cohere rather than interfere; extrapolated as we wish that extrapolated, interpreted as we wish that interpreted (…) The appeal to an objective through contingent human nature (perhaps expressed, for mathematical purposes, in the form of a utility function or other decision-theoretic formalism), as providing the ultimate criterion of "Friendliness", is an answer to the meta-ethical problem of defining an objective morality; extrapolated volition is intended to be what humanity objectively would want, all things considered, but it can only be defined relative to the psychological and cognitive qualities of present-day, unextrapolated humanity.

Is there an insightful summary of this proposal? The whole paper looks like 38 pages of non-rigorous prose with no clear procedure and already “aligned” LLMs will likely fail to analyze it.

Forced myself through some parts of it and all I can get is people don’t know what they want so it would be nice to build an oracle. Yeah, I guess.

Yudkowsky is a human LLM: his output is correctly semantically formed to appear, to a non-specialist, to fall into the subject domain, as a non-specialist would think the subject domain should appear, and so the non-specialist accepts it, but upon closer examination it's all word salad by something that clearly lacks understanding of both technological and philosophical concepts.

That so many people in the AI safety "community" consider him a domain expert has more to say with how pseudo-scientific that field is than his actual credentials as a serious thinker.

Thanks, this explains the feeling I had after reading it (but was too shy to express).

It's not a proposal with a detailed implementation spec, it's a problem statement.

“One framework proposed for superalignment” sounded like it does something. Or maybe I missed the context.

You keep posting this link to vague alignment copium from decades ago; we've come a long way in cynicism since then.

Adding a disclaimer for people unaware of context (I feel same as you):

OpenAI made a large commitment to super-alignment in the not-so-distant past. I beleive mid-2023. Famously, it has always taken AI Safety™ very seriously.

Regardless of anyone's feelings on the need for a dedicated team for it, you can chalk to one up as another instance of OpenAI cough leadership cough speaking out of both sides of it's mouth as is convenient. The only true north star is fame, glory, and user count, dressed up as humble "research"

To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade.

To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade.

What's his track record on promises/predictions of this sort? I wasn't paying attention until pretty recently.

As a child I used to watch a TV programme called Tomorrows World. On it they predicted these very same things in similar timeframes.

That programme aired in the 1980's. Other than vested promises is there much to indicate it's close at all? Empty promises aside there isn't really any indication of that being likely at all.

In the early 1980's we were just coming out of the first AI winter and everyone was getting optimistic again.

I suspect there will be at least continued commercial use of the current tech, though I still suspect this crop is another dead end in the hunt for AGI.

I'd agree with the commercial use element. It will definitely find areas that it can be applied. Just currently it's general application by a lot of the user base feel more like early Facebook apps or subjectively better Lotus Notes than an actual leap forward of any sort.

are we living in the same world?????

I would assume so. I've spent some time looking into AI for software development and general use and I'm both slightly impressed and at the same time don't really get the hype.

It's better and quicker search at present for the area I specialise in.

It's not currently even close to being a x2 multiplier for me, it possibly even a negative impact, probably not but I'm still exploring. Which feels detached from the promises. Interesting but at present more hype than hyper. Also, it's energy inefficient so cost heavy. I feel that will likely cripple a lot of use cases.

What's your take?

Yes

Incredulous reactions don't aid whatever you intend to communicate - there's a reason why everyone knows what AI the last 12 months, it's not made up or a monoculture. It would be very odd to expect discontinuation of commercial use without a black swan event

honestly, I hadn't heard of him until 24-48 hours ago :x (he's also the new superalignment lead, I can't remember if I heard that first, or the podcast stuff first. Dwarkesh Patel podcast for anyone curious. Only saw a clip of it)

>To really stress this: OpenAI's still-present cofounder shared yesterday on a podcast that they expect AGI in ~2 years and ASI (superpassing human intelligence) by end of the decade.

Link? Is the ~2 year timeline a common estimate in the field?

They can't even clearly define a test of "AGI" I seriously doubt they're going to reach it in two years. Alternatively, they could define a fairly trivial test and reach it last year.

I feel like we'll know it when we see it. Or at least, significant changes will happen even if people still claim it isn't really The Thing.

Personally I'm not seeing that the path we're on leads to whatever that is, either. But I think/hope I'll know if I'm wrong when it's in front of me.

It's the "fusion in 20 years" of AI?

Just like Tesla "FSD" :-)

https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/john-schulman

Is the quote you're thinking of the one at 19:11?

> I don't think it's going to happen next year, it's still useful to have the conversation and maybe it's like two or three years instead.

This doesn't seem like a super definite prediction. The "two or three" might have just been a hypothetical.

Right at the end of the interview Schulman says that he expects AGI to be able to replace himself in 5 years. He seemed a bit sheepish when saying it, so hard to tell if he really believed it, or if was just saying what he'd been told to say (I can't believe Altman is allowing employees to be interviewed like this without telling them what they can't say, and what they should say).

We can't even get self-driving down in 2 years, we're nowhere near reaching general AI.

AI experts who aren't riding the hype train and getting high off of its fumes acknowledge that true AI is something we'll likely not see in our lifetimes.

Can you give some examples of experts saying we won't see it in our lifetime?

Is true AI the new true Scotsman?

> I think superalignment is absurd, and model "safety" is the modern AI company's "think of the children" pearl clutching pretext to justify digging moats. All this after sucking up everyone's copyright material as fair use, then not releasing the result, and profiting off it.

How can I be confident you aren't committing the fallacy of collecting a bunch of events and saying that is sufficient to serve as a cohesive explanation? No offense intended, but the comment above has many of the qualities of a classic rant.

If I'm wrong, perhaps you could elaborate? If I'm not wrong, maybe you could reconsider?

Don't forget that alignment research has existed longer than OpenAI. It would be a stretch to claim that the original AI safety researchers were using the pretexts you described -- I think it is fair to say they were involved because of genuine concern, not because it was a trendy or self-serving thing to do.

Some of those researchers and people they influenced ended up at OpenAI. So it would be a mistake or at least an oversimplification to claim that AI safety is some kind of pretext at OpenAI. Could it be a pretext for some people in the organization, to some degree? Sure, it could. But is it a significant effect? One that fits your complex narrative, above? I find that unlikely.

Making sense of an organization's intentions requires a lot of analysis and care, due to the combination of actors and varying influence.

There are simpler, more likely explanations, such as: AI safety wasn't a profit center, and over time other departments in OpenAI got more staff, more influence, and so on. This is a problem, for sure, but there is no "pearl clutching pretext" needed for this explanation.

An organisations intentions are always the same and very simple: “Increase shareholder value”

Oh, it is that simple? What do you mean?

Are you saying these so-called simple intentions are the only factors in play? Surely not.

Are you putting forth a theory that we can test? How well do you think your theory works? Did it work for Enron? For Microsoft? For REI? Does it work for every organization? Surely not perfectly; therefore, it can't be as simple as you claim.

Making a simplification and calling it "simple" is an easy thing to do.

> I think superalignment is absurd

Care to explain? Absurd how? An internal contradiction somehow? Unimportant for some reason? Impossible for some reason?

Impossible because it’s really inconvenient and uncomfortable to consider!

People very high up in a company / their field are not treated remotely the same as peons.

1)OpenAI wouldn't want the negative PR of pursuing legal action against someone top in their field; his peers would take note of it and be less willing to work for them.

2)The stuff he signed was almost certainly different from what rank and file signed, if only because he would have sufficient power to negotiate those contracts.

“ OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”

Delusional.

i don’t think we need to respect these elite multi millionaires for not becoming even grander multi millionaires / billionaires

I think you oughta respect everyone who does the right thing, not for any mushy feel good reason but because it encourages other people to do more of the right things. That’s good.

is having money morally wrong?

Depends on how you get it

Exactly. There’s no ethical way to gain ownership of a billion dollars (there’s likely some dollar threshold way less than 1B where p(ethical_gains) can be approximated to 0)

A lot of people got screwed along the way

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 different question

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.

aside from the way she's terrible, she's not terrible?

the wonderful thing any capitalism is that you can absolve yourself of guilt by having someone else do your dirty work for you. are you so sure every single seamstress that made clothes and stuffed animals, and the workers at the toy factories, and every single person involved with the making of the movies for the Harry Potter deals she licensed her work to were well compensated and treated well? that's not directly on her, but at least some of her money comes from there

How is JK Rowling terrible, exactly?

I was referring to the parenthetical

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 exchange for some of the future revenue produced, let’s say 10%

So now you have two people requiring payment - a producer and an “investor” so you’re already in the hole and now it’s 90% and 10%

You use that money to hire people to work in your potemkin dictatorship, with demands on proceeds now on some timeline (note conversion date, next board meeting etc)

So now you hire 10 people, how much of the company do they own? Well that’s totally up to whatever the two owners want including 0%

But let’s say it’s a typical venture deal, so 10% option pool for employees (and don’t forget the 4 year vest, cause we can’t have them mobile can we) which you fill up.

At the end of the four years you now have:

1 80% owner 1 10% owner 10 1% owners

Did the 2 people create 90% of the value of the company?

Only in capitalist math does that hold and in fact the only math capitalists do is the following:

“Well they were free to sign or not sign the contract”

Ignoring the reality of the world based on a worldview of greed that dominated the world to such an extent that it was considered “normal”

Luckily we’re starting to see the tide change

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?

And how you use it...

> Stepping away from this job has been one of the hardest things I have ever done, because we urgently need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.

Large language models are not "smart". They do not have thought. They don't have intelligence despite the "AI" moniker, etc.

They vomit words based off very fancy statistics.

There is no path from that to "thought" and "intelligence."

Not that I disagree, but what's intelligence? How does our intelligence work? If we don't know that, how can we be so sure what does and what doesn't lead to intelligence? A little more humility is on order before whipping out the tired "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" argument.

Humility has to go both ways then, we can't claim that LLM models are actually (or not actually) AI without qualifying that term first.

The only way I can see this being a valid contract is if the equity grant that they get to keep is a new grant offered the time of signing the exit contract. Any vested equity given as compensation for work could not then be offered again as consideration for signing a new agreement.

Maybe the agreement is "we will accelerate vesting of your unvested equity if you sign this new agreement"? If that's the case then it doesn't sound nearly so coercive to me.

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 "equity" is a "Profit Participation Unit (PPU)" that once vested entitles you to a share of their profits. 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. And of course, it's unlikely OpenAI will ever turn a profit (which if they did would be capped anyway). So this is all just play money anyway.

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 company.

> And of course, it's unlikely OpenAI will ever turn a profit (which if they did would be capped anyway). So this is all just play money anyway.

Putting aside your unreasonable confidence that OAI will never be profitable, the PPUs are tender offered so they can be sold to institutional investors up to a very high limit, OAIs current tender offer round values them at ~$80b iirc

> Note at offer time candidates do not know how many PPUs they will be receiving or how many exist in total. This is important because it’s not clear to candidates if they are receiving 1% or 0.001% of profits for instance. Even when giving options, some startups are often unclear or simply do not share the total number of outstanding shares. That said, this is generally considered bad practice and unfavorable for employees. Additionally, tender offers are not guaranteed to happen and the cadence may also not be known.

> PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years. Another key difference is that the growth is currently capped at 10x. Similar to their overall company structure, the PPUs are capped at a growth of 10 times the original value. So in the offer example above, the candidate received $2M worth of PPUs, which means that their capped amount they could sell them for would be $20M

> The most recent liquidation event we’re aware of happened during a tender offer earlier this year. It was during this event that some early employees were able to sell their profit participation units. It’s difficult to know how often these events happen and who is allowed to sell, though, as it’s on company discretion.

This NDA wrinkle is another negative. Honestly I think the entire OpenAI compensation model is smoke and mirrors which is normal for startups and obviously inferior to RSUs.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

> Additionally, tender offers are not guaranteed to happen and the cadence may also not be known. > PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years.

i know for a fact that these bits are inaccurate, but i don't want to go into the details.

the profit share is not known but you are told what the PPUs were valued at the most recent tender offer

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.

Wow. Smart for them. Former employees are behooved to the company for an actual perpetuity. Sounds like a raw deal but when the potential gains are that big, I guess you'll agree to pretty much anything.

Their profit is capped at $1T, which is amount no company has ever achieved.

No company? Are you sure? Aramco?

Apple has spent $650 billion on stock buybacks in the last decade.

Granted, that might be most of the profit they have made, but still, they're probably at at least 0.7T$ so far. I bet they'll break $1T eventually.

Based on this they've had $1tn profits since 2009: https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/earnings/

It's not. The earlier tweets explain: the initial agreement says the employee must sign a "general release" or forfeit the equity, and then the general release they are asked to sign includes a lifetime no-criticism clause.

IOW, this is burying the illegal part in a tangential document, in hopes of avoiding legal scrutiny and/or judgement.

They're really lending employees equity, subject to the company's later feelings as to whether the employee should be allowed to keep or sell it.

But a general release is not a non-criticism clause.

They're not required to sign anything other than a general release of liability when they leave to preserve their rights. They don't have to sign a non-disparagement clause.

But they'd need a very good lawyer to be confident at that time.

And they won’t have that equity available to borrow against to pay for that lawyer either.

That's when you need a lawyer.

In general, an agreement to agree is not an agreement. A requirement for a "general release" to be signed at some time in the future is iffy. And that's before labor law issues.

Someone with a copy of that contract should run it through OpenAI's contract analyzer.

The earlier tweets explain …

What a horrific medium of communication. Why anyone uses it is beyond me.

I'm no lawyer but this sounds like something that would not go well for OpenAI if strongly litigated

>I'm no lawyer

Have any (startup or other) lawyers chimed in here?

Yeah, courts have generally found that this is "under duress" and not enforceable.

Under duress in the contractual world is generally interpreted as “you are about to be killed or maimed.” Economic duress is distinct.

Duress can take other forms, unless we are really trying to differentiate general 'coercion' here.

Perhaps as an example of the blurred line; Pre-nup agreements sprung the day of the wedding, will not hold up in a US court with a competent lawyer challenging them.

You can try to call it 'economic' duress but any non-sociopath sees there are other factors at play.

That’s a really good point. Was this a prenuptial agreement? If it wasn’t May take is section 174 would apply and we would be talking about physical compulsion — and not “it’s a preferable economic situation to sign.”

Not a sociopath, just know the law.

somebody explained to me early on that you cannot have a contract to have a contract. either initial agreement must state this condition clearly or they are signing another contract at employment termination which is bringing these new terms. IDK why would anyone sign that at termination unless they dangle additional equity. I dont think this BS they are trying to pull would be enforceable at least in California. though IANAL obviously.

all this said, in bigger picture I can understand not divulging trade secrets but not being allowed to discuss company culture towards AI safety essentially tells me that all the Sama talk about the 'for the good of humanity' is total BS. at the end of day its about market share and bottom line.

Canceling my openai subscription as we speak, this is too much. I don't care how good it is relative to other offerings. Not worth it.

Claude is better anyways (at least for math classes.

same I cancelled mine months ago. Claude is much better for coding anyway.

ITT: a bunch of laymen thinking their 2 second proposal will outlawyer the team of lawyers who drafted these.

You haven't worked with many contracts, have you? Unenforceable clauses are the norm, most people are willing to follow them rather than risk having to fight them in court.

Bingo.

I have seen a lot of companies put unenforceable stuff into their employment agreements, separation agreements, etc.

I am a lawyer. This is not just a general release, and I have no idea how OpenAI's lawyers expect this to be legal.

Out of curiosity, what are the penalties for putting unenforceable stuff in an employment contract?

Are there any?

Typically there is no penalty - and contracts explicitly declare that all clauses are severable so that the rest of the contract remains valid even if one of the scare-clauses is found to be invalid. IANAL

Have you read the actual document or contracts? Opining on stuff you haven't actually read seems premature. Read the contract, then tell us which clause violates which statute, that's useful.

Lawyers are 100% capable of knowingly crafting unenforceable agreements.

You don’t need to out-litigate the bear,

This is bizarre. Someone hands you a contract as you're leaving a company and if you refuse to agree to whatever they dreamt up and sign the company takes back the equity you earned? That can't be legal

Hard to evaluate this without access to the documents. But in CA, agreements cannot be conditioned on the payment of previously earned wages.

Equity adds a wrinkle here, but I suspect if the effect of canceling equity is to cause a forfeiture of earned wages, then ultimately whatever contract is signed under that threat is void.

It’s not even equity. OpenAI is a nonprofit.

They’re profit participation units and probably come with a few gotchas like these.

Well some rich ex-openAI person should test this theory. Only way to find out. I’m sure some of them are rich.

The argument would be that it's coercive. And it might be, and they might be sued over it and lose. Basically the incentives all run strongly in OpenAI's favor. They're not a public company, vested options aren't stock and can't be liquidated except with "permission", which means that an exiting employee is probably not going to take the risk and will just sign the contract.

It might be that they agree to it initially when hired, so it doesn't matter if they sign something when they leave.

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...

Who would accept shares as valuable if the contract said they can be repurchased from you at a price of 0$? This can't be it.

You are thinking of going up against an entity worth billions of dollars and somehow winning? That doesn't happen outside of movies. You'll accept whatever they decide, or end up like those Boeing whistleblowers if you make yourself enough of a nuisance.

It can. There are many ways to make the number go to zero.

How do you know there isn't a very clear term in the employment agreement stating that upon termination you'll be asked to sign an NDA on these terms?

Unless the terms of the NDA are provided upfront, that sounds sketch AF.

"I agree to follow unspecified terms in perpetuity, or return the pay I already earned" doesn't vibe with labor laws.

And if those NDA terms were already in the contract, there would be no need to sign them upon exit.

> And if those NDA terms were already in the contract, there would be no need to sign them upon exit.

If the NDA terms were agreed in an employment contract they would no longer be valid upon termination of that contract.

Plenty of contracts have survivorship clauses. In particular, non-disclosure clauses and IP rights are the ones to most commonly survive termination.

One particularly sus term in my employment agreement is that I adhere to all corporate policies. Guess how many of those there are, how often they're updated, and if I've ever read them!

Why not just get it signed then? Your signing to agree to sign later?

I would strongly encourage anyone faced with this ask by OpenAI to file a complaint with the NLRB as well as speak with an employment attorney familiar with California statute.

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> Over the last 10 years or so, I have filed a number of high-profile unfair labor practice charges against coercive statements, with many of those statements being made on Twitter. I file those charges even though I am merely a bystander, not an employee or an aggrieved party.

> Every time I do this, some individuals ask how I am able to file charges when I don’t have “standing” because I am not the one who is being injured by the coercive statements.

> The short answer is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has no standing requirement.

> Employees reasonably fear retaliation from their boss if they file charges. So we want to make it possible for people who cannot be retaliated against to do it instead. [1]

I believe the Vox piece shared in this thread [2] is enough for anyone to hit submit on an NLRB web form and get the ball rolling. Snapshot in the Wayback Machine (all the in scope tweets archived in archive.today|is|ph), just in case.

[1] https://mattbruenig.com/2024/01/26/why-there-is-no-standing-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40394955

I don't see why this comment needed a flag or so many uncharitable replies (though you could have expressed yourself more charitably too).

I understand your sentiment, but I think a lot of idealistic people will disagree - it's nice to think that a person should stand up for justice, no matter what.

In reality, I wonder how many people attempt to do this and end up regretting, because of what you mentioned.

I imagine the kinds of engineers under such gag orders do in fact either have "big money" or aren't worried about making big money in thr future.And this isn't their fight, it'll be the government. At the worst you may stand as a witness some months/years later to testify.

I'd only be worried about reporting if you fear for your life for refusing, a sadly poignant consideration given Boeing as of late.

Talking to a lawyer is **never** bad advice.

Especially in CA where companies will make you THINK they have power which they don’t.

I think never is inaccurate here. First, there are a lot of simply bad lawyers who will give you bad advice. Secondly, a lot of lawyers who either don't actually specialize in the legal field your case demands, or who have never actually tried any cases and have no idea how something might go down in a court with a jury. Third (the most predatory), a lot of lawyers actually see the client (not the opposing party) as the money fountain. Charging huge fees for their "consultation," "legal research," "team of experts," etc, and now the client is quickly tens-of-thousands in the hole without even an actual case being filed.

Talking to good, honest lawyers is a good idea. Unfortunately most people don't have access to good honest lawyers, or don't know how to distinguish them from crooks with law degrees.

I’d be more afraid of their less-than-above-board power than their litigation power. People with $10-100 billion dollars who are highly connected to every major tech company and many shadowy companies we’ve never heard of can figure out a lot of my secrets and make life miserable enough for me that I don’t have the ability/energy to follow through with legal proceedings, even if I don’t attribute the walls collapsing around me to my legal opponent.

And that’s precisely the issue you ask a lawyer about.

What could a lawyer possibly do about something that isn’t traceable? Other than warn me it’s a possibility?

Plenty of people are already miserable. Might as well try if you are no?

The FUD is strong with this one

alternative take: get Elon's attention on X and spin it as employer-enforced censorship and get his legal team to take on the battle

[flagged]

[flagged]

[flagged]

Or current X employee.

And my comment is flagged, How did I forget which site I am on YC, that's sama's home turf.

Users correctly flagged your comment because it blatantly broke HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Why have other companies not done the same? This seems legally tenuous to only now be attempted. Will we see burger flippers prevented from discussing the rat infestation at their previous workplace?

(Don’t have X) - is there a timeline? Can I curse out the company on my deathbed, or would their lawyers have the legal right to try and clawback the equity from the estate?

For the burger metaphor, you need to have leverage over the employee to make them not speak. No one at Burger King is getting severance when they are kicked out, let alone equity.

As for other companies that can pay: I can only assume that the cost to bribe skilled workers isn't worth the perceived risk and cost of lawsuits from the downfall (which they may or may not be able to settle). Generative AI is still very young and under a lot of scrutiny on all fronts, so the risk of a whistle blower at this stage may shape the entire future of the industry at large.

The Vox article says that it's a lifetime agreement:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai...

ROFL how is this even legal?

i worked at McDonald's in the mid-late 00s, I'm pretty sure there was a clause about never saying anything negative about them. i think they were a great employer!

Sorry, someone at corporate has interpreted this statement as criticism. Please give back all equity, or an amount equivalent to its current value.

It doesn't have to be equity. If they wanted to, they could put in their employment contract "If you say anything bad about McDonalds, you owe us $1000." What is the ex-burger-flipper going to do? Fight them in court?

Like a fast food employee would have equity in the company. Please, let's at least be sensible in our internet ranting.

What about a franchisee?

i got f-all equity, I was flipping burgers for minimum wage.

Also, whatever fries left in the bottom of the bag. That’s corporate property buddy.

Other companies have done the same. I worked at a company that is 0% related to the tech industry. I was laid off/let go/dismissed/sacked where they offered me a "severance" on the condition I sign a release with a non-disparaging clause. I didn't give enough shits about the company to waste my time/energy commenting about them. It was just an entry on a resume where I happened to work with some really neat, talented, and cool/interesting coworkers. I had the luxury of nobody else giving a damn about how/why I left. I can only imagine these people getting hounded by Real Housewives level gossip/bullshit.

This has just been crazy both to watch and in some small ways interact with up close (I’ve had some very productive and some regrettably heated private discussions advising former colleagues and people I care about to GTFO before the shit really hits the rotary air impeller, and this is going to get so much worse).

This thread is full of comments making statements around this looking like some level of criminal enterprise (ranging from “no way that document holds up” to “everyone knows Sam is a crook”).

The level of stuff ranging from vitriol to overwhelming if maybe circumstantial (but conclusive that my personal satisfaction) evidence of direct reprisal has just been surreal, but it’s surreal in a different way to see people talking about this like it was never even controversial to be skeptical/critical/hostile to thing thing.

I’ve been saying that this looks like the next Enron, minimum, for easily five years, arguably double that.

Is this the last straw where I stop getting messed around over this?

I know better than to expect a ticker tape parade for having both called this and having the guts to stand up to these folks, but I do hold out a little hope for even a grudging acknowledgment.

There's another comment saying something sort of similar elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40396366

What made you think it was the next Enron five years ago?

I appreciate you having the guts to stand up to them.

First, thank you for probably being the first person to recognize in print that it wasn’t easy to stand up to these folks in public, plenty have said things like “you’re fighting the good fight” in private, but I think you’re the first person to in any sense second the motion in my personal case, so big ups on having the guts to say it too.

I’ve never been a YC-funded founder myself, but I’ve had multiple roommates who were, and a few girlfriends who were on the bubble of like, founder and early employee, and I’ve just generally been swimming in that pool to one degree or another for coming up on 20 years (I always forget my join date but it’s on the order of like, 17 years or something).

So when a few dozen people you trust tell you the same thing, you tend to buy it even if you’re not quite ready to print the worst hearsay (and I’ve heard things about Altman that I believe but still wouldn’t print without proof, dark shit).

As the litany of scandals mounted (Green Dot, zero-rated pre-IPO portfolio stock with like, his brother involved, Socialcam, the list just goes on), and at some point real journalists start doing pieces (New Yorker, etc.).

And while some of my friends and former colleagues (well maybe former friends now) who joined are both eminently qualified and as ethical as this business lets anyone be, there was a skew there too, it skewed “opportunist, fails up”.

So it’s a growing preponderance of evidence starting in about 2009 and being just “published by credible journalists”starting about five years later, at some point I’m like “if even 5% of this is even a little true, this is beyond the pale”.

It’s been a gradual thing, and people giving the benefit of the doubt up until the November stuff are maybe just really charitable, at this point it’s like, only a jury can take the next steps trivially indicated.

Don’t forget WorldCoin!

Yeah, I was trying to stay on topic but flagrant violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are really Lawrence Summers’s speciality.

I’m pretty embarrassed to have former colleagues who openly defend shit like this.

OpenAI was incorporated 9 years ago, but you easily saw that it's the next Enron 10 years ago?

I said easily five, not easily ten. I was alluding to it in embryo with the comment that it’s likely been longer.

If you meant that remark/objection in good faith then thank you for the opportunity to clarify.

If not, the thank you for hanging a concrete example of the kind of shit I’m alluding to (though at the extremely mild end of the range) directly off the claim.

It shouldn't be legal and maybe it isn't, but all schemes like this are, when you get down to it, ultimately about suppressing potential or actual evidence of serious, possibly criminal misconduct, so I don't think they are going to let the illegality get them all upset while they are having fun.

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 our agreement and I’m not.”

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.

An answer in the form of a question: why don't OpenAI executives want to talk about whether Sora was trained on Youtube content?

(I should reiterate that I actually wrote "serious, possibly criminal")

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.

"Consent isn't legally required"?

I don't understand this point. If Google gave the data to OpenAI (which they surely haven't, right?), even then they'd not have consent from users.

As far as I understand it, it's not a given that there is no copyright infringement here. I don't think even criminal copyright infringement is off the table here, because it's clear it's for profit, it's clear it's wilful under 17 U.S.C. 506(a).

And once you consider the difficult potential position here -- that the liabilities from Sora might be worse than the liabilities from ChatGPT -- there's all sorts of potential for bad behaviour at a corporate level, from misrepresentations regarding business commitments to misrepresentations on a legal level.

The parent stated:

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

But a lawsuit fails if essential elements are not met. If consent isn’t required for the lawsuit to proceed, then it doesn’t matter whether or whether not consent was granted. QED.

Right - sorry, yes. I think I was reading your point back to front!

What's the current situation on this? Do you waive the rights for AI training (presumably by Alphabet) when you upload content to YouTube?

They don't say that criminal activity has occurred in this instance, just that this kind of behavior could be used cover it up in situations where that is the case. An example that could potentially be true. Right now with everything going on with Boeing, it sure seems plausible they are covering something(s) up that may be criminal or incredibly damaging. Like maybe falsify inspections and maintenance records? A person at Boeing who gets equity as part of compensation decides to leave. And when they leave, they eventually at some point in the future decide to speak out at a congressional investigation about what they know about what is going on. Should that person be sued into oblivion by Boeing? Or should Boeing, assuming what situation above is true, just have to eat the cost/consequences for being shitty?

Right now, there is some publicity on Twitter regarding AGI/OpenAI/EA LSD cnc parties (consent non consent/simulated rape parties).

So maybe it's related to that.

https://twitter.com/soniajoseph_/status/1791604177581310234

The ones going to orgies are the effective altruists / safety researchers who are leaving and not signing the non-disparagement agreement. https://x.com/youraimarketer/status/1791616629912051968

Anyway it's about not disparaging the company not about disclosing what employees do in their free time. Orgies are just parties and LSD use is hardly taboo.

> Orgies are just parties

Well apparently not if there are women who are saying that the scene and community that all these people are involved in is making women uncomfortable or causing them to be harassed or pressured into bad situations.

A situation can be bad, done informally by people within a community, even if it isn't done literally within the corporate headquarters, or if directly the responsibility of one specific company that can be pointed at.

Especially if it is a close-nit group of people who are living together, working together, involved in the same out of work organizations and non profits.

You can read what Sonia says herself.

https://x.com/soniajoseph_/status/1791604177581310234

> The ones going to orgies are the effective altruists / safety researchers who are leaving and not signing the non-disparagement agreement.

Indeed, I am sure that the people who are comfortable with the behavior or situation have no need to be pressured into silence.

Compared to what seemed like their original charter, with non-profit structure and all, now it seems like a rather poisonous place.

They will have many successes in the short run, but, their long run future suddenly looks a little murky.

They extracted a lot of value from researchers during their ‘open’ days, but it’s depleted now, so of course they move on to the next source of value. sama is going AGI or bust with a very rational position of ‘if somebody has AGI, I’d rather it was me’ except I don’t like how he does it one bit, it’s got a very dystopian feel to it.

Similar points made here, if anyone is interested in signing: https://www.openailetter.org/

It could work like academia or finance: poisonous environment (it is said), but ambitious enough people still go in to try their luck.

"finance": A bit of a broad brush, don't you think? Is working at a Landsbank or Sparkasse in Germany really so "poisonous"?

Yes, of course, narrow that down to the crazy wolf-of-wall-street subset.

Better to say so in the first place. At this point in 2024, the all too common trope about Wall Street-film-like bad guys on a trading floor are basically gone. They haven't really existed since post-GFC in 2009. Do you have first hand experience that says otherwise?

Sama update on X, says sorry:

>in regards to recent stuff about how openai handles equity:

>we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity, nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement (or don't agree to a non-disparagement agreement). vested equity is vested equity, full stop.

>there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs; although we never clawed anything back, it should never have been something we had in any documents or communication. this is on me and one of the few times i've been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have.

>the team was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so. if any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too. very sorry about this. https://x.com/sama/status/1791936857594581428

He has 100% been coached by their legal counsel to distance himself from this as this is likely going to court soon (being it’s likely very illegal). That’s why he repeats “we’ve never clawed back” twice…the chilling effect intended had a real effect, at a crucial time for the company, the likely motivation being to defraud investors who may have otherwise been more careful in their support if internal malfeasance around data set sourcing practices were revealed.

I hope ex-employees sue and don’t contact him personally. The damage is done. Don’t be dumb folks.

Utterly spineless. Do something slimy and act surprised when you get got. Rinse and repeat.

<1% chance that Sam did not know what was in those exit docs

I've been disparaging Sam and OpenAI a fair amount in this thread, but I find it plausible that Sam didn't know.

I remember a job a few years ago where they sent me employment paperwork that was for a very different position than the one I was hired for. (I ended up signing it anyways after a few minor changes, because I liked it better than the paperwork I expected to see.)

If OpenAI is a "move fast and break things" sort of organization, I expect they're shuffling a lot of paperwork that Sam isn't co-signing on. I doubt Sam's attitude towards paperwork is fundamentally different from yours or mine.

If Sam didn't know, however, that doesn't exactly reflect well on OpenAI. As Jan put it: "Act with gravitas appropriate for what you're building." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391412 IMO this incident should underscore Jan's point.

Accidentally silencing ex-employees is not what safety culture looks like at all. They've got to start hiring experts and reading books. It's a long slog ahead.

I don’t expect Sam to know every detail as CEO. But this particular clause is very impactful and something that the CEO of a startup would have had to sign off on rather than some underling making the decision on their own.

I don't think that's an accurate read. He did say

>if any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we'll fix that too

Yes, now that it's public knowledge. Had this not been leaked, that wouldn't have been an option.

Not a lawyer but those contracts aren't legal. You need something called "consideration" ie something new of value to be legal. They can't just take away something of value that was already agreed upon.

However they could add this to new employee contracts.

"Legal" seems like a fuzzy line to OpenAI's leadership.

Pushing unenforceable scare-copy to get employees to self-censor sounds on-brand.

I agree with Piper's point that these contracts aren't common in tech, but they're hardly unheard of. In 20 years of consulting work I've seen dozens of them. They're not uncommon. This doesn't look uniquely hostile or amoral for OpenAI, just garden-variety.

Well, an AI charity -- so founded on openness that they're called OpenAI -- took millions in donations, everyone's copyright data...only to become effectively for-profit, close down their AI, and inflict a lifetime gag on their employees. In that context, it feels rather amoral.

This to me is like the "don't be evil" thing. I didn't take it seriously to begin with, I don't think reasonable people should have taken it seriously, and so it's not persuasive or really all that interesting to argue about.

People are different! You can think otherwise.

Therein lies the issue. The second you throw idealistic terms like “don’t be evil” and __OPEN__ ai around you should be expected to deliver.

But how is that even possible when corporations are typically run by ghouls who enjoy relativistic morals when it suits them. And are beholden to profits, not ethics.

I think we do need to start taking such things seriously, and start holding companies accountable using all available venues (including legal, and legislative if the laws don't have enough leverage as it is) when they act contrary to their publicly stated commitments.

Contracts like this seem extremely unusual as a condition for _retaining already vested equity (or equity-like instruments)_, rather than as a condition for receiving additional severance. And how common are non-disclosure clauses that cover the non-disparagement clauses?

In fact both of those seem quite bad, both by regular industry standards, and even moreso as applied to OpenAI's specific situation.

as an exit contract? Not part of a severance agreement?

Boomberg famously used this as an employment contract, and it was a campaign scandal for Mike.

This sounds just like the non-compete issue that the FTC just invalidated. I can see if the current FTC leadership is allowed to continue working after 2025/01/20 that these things might be moved against as well. If new admin is brought in, they might all get reversed. Just something to consider going into your particular polling place

It doesn’t matter if they are not legal. Employees do not have resources to fight expensive legal battles and fear retaliation in other ways. Like not being able to find future jobs. And anyone with family plain won’t have the time.

“You get shares in our company in exchange for employment and eternal never-talking-bad-about-us”?

Doesn’t mean that that’s legal, of course, but I’d doubt that the legality would hinge on a lack of consideration.

You can't add a contingency to a payment retroactively. It sounds like these are exit agreements, not employment agreements.

If it was "we'll give you shares/cash if you don't say anything bad about us", that's normal, kind of standard fare for exit agreements, it's why severance packages exist.

But if it is "we'll take away the shares that you already earned as part of your regular employment compensation unless you agree to not say anything bad about us", that's extortion.

Through in a preamble of “For $1 and other consideration…”

They give you a general release of liability, as noted elsewhere in the thread.

Have you seen the contracts?

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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 swallowed my pride. There was a lot of unethical stuff going on within the company in terms of fiducial responsibility to investors and BoD. The BoD eventually figured out what was going on and "cleaned house".

With OpenAI, I am concerned this is turning into huge power/money grab with little care for humanity... and "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

> 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...

Well, one problem is what does ‘caring for humanity’ even mean, concretely?

One could argue it would mean pampering it.

One could also argue it could be a Skynet—analog doing the equivalent of a God Emperor like Golden Path to ensure humanity is never going to be dumb enough to allow an AGI the power to do that again.

Assuming humanity survives the second one, it has a lot higher chance of actually benefiting humanity long term too.

At the current level on the way towards "caring about humanity", I really don't think it's a complicated philosophical question. Once a big company actively chooses to forego some profits based on any altruistic consideration, we can start debating what it means "concretely".

The system already has been a superorganism/AI for a long time:

http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-...

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?

I see that this commend jump up and down between 5 and 10 points. Guess a lot of up and downvotes.

I will not vote. But give me US salaries in Germany please. All these €100k@35 hours workweek offers are boring. It’s almost top salary for senior level developers at big companies. Mostly no stock at all. I will sign probably every shady document for one million € stock compensation.

Just come to US pls. It is the whole package you sign up for not just the salaries. Shitty food, healthcare etc.

I missed my chance for the great relocation. But buddies in New York and San Diego are doing just fine. Both of them make total comp of roughly quarter million and are buying everything they want. The food is good, hospitals modern and clean.

In all likelihood, they are illegal, just that no one has challenged them yet. I can’t imagine a sane court backing up the idea that a person can be forbidden to talk about something (not national security related) for the rest of their lives.

That could very well be the case, OpenAI took quite a few opaque decision/changes not too long ago.

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> All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI

Well... I know first hand that many well-informed, tech-literate people still think that all products from OpenAI are open-source. Lying works, even in that most egregious of fashion.

This is just Propoganda 101. Call yourself anti-fascist on TV for decade enough times and then you can go indiscriminately kill everyone you call fascist.

Unfortunately Orwellian propoganda works.

So that explains the cult-like behaviour months ago when the company was under siege.

Diamond multi-million dollar hand-cuffs which OpenAI has bound lifetime secret service-level NDAs which are another unusual company setting after their so-called "non-profit" founding and their contradictory name.

Even an ex-employee saying 'ClosedAI' could see their PPUs evaporate in front of them to zero or they could never be allowed to sell them and have them taken away.

I don’t have any idea what goes on inside OAI. But I have this strange feeling that they were right to oust sama. They didn’t have the leverage to pull it off, though.

What a lot of people seem to be missing here is that RSUs are usually double-trigger for private companies. Vested shares are not yours. They are just an entitlement for you to be distributed common stock by the company. You don't own any real stock until those RSUs are released (typically from a liquidity event like an IPO).

Companies can cancel your vested equity for any reason. Read your employment contract carefully. For example, most RSU grants have a 7 year expiration. Even for shares that are vested, regardless of whether you leave the company or not, if 7 years have elapsed since they were granted, they are now worthless.

> if 7 years have elapsed since they were granted, they are now worthless

Once vested, RSUs are the same as regular stock purchased through the market. The company cannot claw them back, nor do they "expire".

No, this is not true. That's the entire point I'm making. An RSU that is vested, for a private company, is not a share of stock, it's an entitlement to receive a share of stock tied to a liquidity event.

> same as regular stock purchased through the market

You cannot purchase stock of a private company on the open market.

> The company cannot claw them back

The company cannot "claw back" a vested RSU but they can cancel it.

> nor do they "expire".

Yes, they absolutely do expire. Read your employment contract and equity grant agreement carefully.

It's just a semantic issue. Some folks will say aren't really fully vested when they are double trigger until the second trigger event. Some will say they are vested but not triggered, other people say similar things.

this is incorrect. Private company RSUs often have double trigger with second trigger being IPO/exit. The "semi" vested RSUs can expire if the company does not IPO in 7 years.

The 7 year expiry time exists so IRS lets you give RSUs different tax treatment than regular stock. The idea is because they can expire, they could be worth nothing. And so the IRS cannot expect you to pay taxes on RSUs until the double-trigger event occurs.

But none of this means the company can just cancel your RSUs unless you agreed to them being cancelled for specific reason in your equity agreement. I have worked at several big pre-IPO companies that had big exits. I made sure there were no clawback clauses in the equity contract before accepting the offers.

Yes, they can choose not to renew and IANAL, but I'm fairly certain there has to be a valid reason to cancel vested equity within the 7 year time frame, i.e. firing for cause. I don't think a right to shares within the period can be capriciously taken away. You have a contract. The terms matter.

> You have a contract. The terms matter.

Right. In the case of OpenAI, their equity grant contracts likely have a non-disparagement clause that allows them to cancel vested shares. Whether or not you think that is a "valid reason" is largely independent of the legal framework governing RSU release.

I have some experience with rich people who think they can just put whatever they want in contracts and then stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day.

Turns out they're right, they can put whatever they want in a contract. And again, they are correct that their wage slaves will 99.99% of the time sign whatever paper he pushes in front of them while saying "as a condition of your continued employment, [...]".

But also it turns out that just because you signed something doesn't mean that's it. My friends (all of us young twenty-something software engineers much more familiar with transaction isolation semantics than with contract law) consulted with an attorney.

The TLDR is that:

- nothing in contract law is in perpetuity

- there MUST be consideration for each side (where "consideration" means getting something. something real. like USD. "continued employment" is not consideration.)

- if nothing is perpetual, then how long can it last supposing both sides do get ongoing consideration from it? the answer is, the judge will figure it out.

- and when it comes to employers and employees, the employee had damn well better be getting a good deal out of it, especially if you are trying to prevent the employee (or ex-employee) from working.

A common pattern ended up emerging: our employer would put something perpetual in the contract, and offer no consideration. Our attorney would tell us this isn't even a valid contract and not to worry about it. Employer would offer an employee some nominal amount of USD in severance and put something in perpetuity into the contract. Our attorney tells us the judge would likely use "blue ink rule" to add in "for a period of one year", or, it would be prorated based on the amount of money they were given relative to their former salary.

(I don't work there anymore, naturally).

> if nothing is perpetual, then how long can it last supposing both sides do get ongoing consideration from it? the answer is, the judge will figure it out.

Isn't that the reason more competent lawyers put in the royal lives[1] clause? It specifies the contract is valid until 21 years after the death of the last currently-living royal descendant; I believe the youngest one is currently 1 year old, and they all have good healthcare, so it's almost certainly will be beyond the lifetime of any currently-employed persons.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_lives_clause

I know little about law, but isn't this completely ludicrous? Assuming you know a bit more (or someone else here does), I have a few questions:

Would any non-corrupt judge consider this is done in bad fait?

How is this difference if we use a great ancient sea turtles—or some other long-lived organism—instead of the current royal family baby? Like, I guess my point is anything that would likely outlive the employee basically?

It's a standard legal thing to accommodate a rule that you can't write a perpetual contract, it has to have a term delimited by the life of someone alive plus some limited period.

A case where it obviously makes sense is something like a covenant between two companies; whose life would be relevant there, if both parties want the contract to last a long time and have to pick one? The CEOs? Employees? Shareholders? You could easily have a situation where the company gets sold and they all leave, but the contract should still be relevant, and now it depends on the lives of people who are totally unconnected to the parties. Just makes things difficult. Using a monarch and his currently living descendants is easy.

I'm not sure how relevant it is in a more employer employee context. But it's a formalism to create a very long contract that's easy to track, not a secret trick to create a longer contract than you're normally allowed to. An employer asking an employee to agree to it would have no qualms asking instead for it to last the employee's life, and if the employee's willing to sign one then the other doesn't seem that much more exploitative.

> stare at you until you sign it because you are physically dependent on eating food every day

Even lowest level fast food workers can choose a different employer. An engineer working at OpenAI certainly has a lot of opportunities to choose from. Even when I only had three years in the industry, mid at best, I asked to change the contract I was presented with because non-compete was too restrictive — and they did it. The caliber of talent that OpenAI is attracting (or hopes to attract) can certainly do this too.

> Even lowest level fast food workers can choose a different employer.

Only thanks to a recent ruling by the FTC that non-competes are valid. in the most egregious uses, bartenders and servers were prohibited from finding another job in the same industry for two years.

You're talking about what happens after a person signs a non compete, whereas my point is about what happens before he does (or doesn't) do it.

you say that like everyone had the luxury of making the choice not to sign those deals

Exactly, and I explain why. If you want to argue they don't, I would be thankful if you exposed the error in my reasoning.

my argument is that some people don't, not without going homeless and living out of their car and eating off of EBT (in the US). if the choice was to sign a shitty non-compete, or get evicted, I find it hard to fault someone for signing such a contract. it's not a logic problem with your reasoning but that the reasoning starts from an (imo) unsound place.

I am typically not willing to bet I can get back under health insurance for my family within the next 0-4 weeks. And paying for COBRA on a family plan is basically like going from earning $X/mo to drawing $-X/mo.

The perversely capitalistic healthcare system in the US is perhaps the number one reason why US employers have so much more power over their employees than their European counterparts.

Why would anyone want to work at such horrible company.

Money

This is all basically true, but the problem is that retaining an attorney to confidently represent you for such negotiation is proposition with $10k table stakes (probably $15k+ these days with Trumpflation), and much more if the company sticks to their guns and doesn't settle (which is much more likely when the company is holding the cards and you have to go on the offensive). The cost isn't necessarily outright prohibitive in the context of surveillance industry compensation, but is still a chunk of change and likely to give most people pause when the alternative is to just go with the flow and move on.

Personally I'd say there needs to be a general restriction against including blatantly unenforceable terms in a contract document, especially unilateral "terms". The drafter is essentially pushing incorrect legal advice.

>the company will succeed at developing AI systems that make most human labor obsolete.

Hmmmn. Most of the humans where I work do things physically with their hands. I don't see what AI will achieve in their area.

Can AI paint the walls in my house, fix the boiler and swap out the rotten windows? If so I think a subscription to chat GPT is very reasonably priced!

Robots that are powered by AI might be able to.

It has difficulties with middle school mathematical problems.

1.5 year old GPT-4 is getting 4/5 on an AP Calculus test, better than 95% of humans. Want to guess how much better at all educational tests GPT-5 is going to be than people?

I think the kind of problems we do in italy aren't just "solve this", they are more "understand this text, then figure out what you have to solve, then solve it"

That sounds like the word problems that are on American AP Calc tests. You can be the judge of them here: https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/ap24-frq-calcul...

But I'm talking about stuff that can be solved with very easy mathematics. Using nothing more than +-*/

ChatGPT solves all +-*/ I throw at it. AP calc are much harder and still it solves successfully.

I don’t know but once vision AI reacts to traffic conditions accurately within 10ms it’s probably a matter of time before they take over your steering wheel. For other jobs you’ll need to wait for robotics.

It has to react "correctly"

Obviously if your job requires blue-collar style manual labor, no it's likely not going to be replaced anytime soon.

But if your job is mostly sitting at a computer, I would be a bit worried.

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 participation to unlawful employment scheme if it is discovered), well…

I’d say there is a lot of available money in replacing blue collared jobs with AI-powered robots. Even if they do crap, it’s still better quality that contractors.

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.

Once AGI is solved. How long does it take for AGI (or human's steering AGI) to create a robot that meets or exceeds the abilities of the human body?

4o groks realtime video; how far away are we from letting it control robots bruv?

Sam and Mira. greedy as fuck since they are con artists and neither could get a job at that level anywhere legitimate.

Now it’s a money grab.

Sad because some amazing tech and people now getting corrupted into a toxic culture that didn’t have to be that way

> Sam and Mira. greedy as fuck since they are con artists and neither could get a job at that level anywhere legitimate.

Hey hey hey! Sam founded a 4th most popular social networking site in 2005 called Loopt. Don't you forget that! (After that he joined YC and founded nothing ever since)

He’s spent all those years conducting field research for his stealth-mode social engineering startup.

Submission title mentions NDA but the article also mentions a non disparagement agreement. "You can't give away our trade secrets" is one thing but it sounds like they're being told they can't say anything critical of the company at all.

They can't even mention the NDA exists!

This is common, and there is nothing wrong with it.

There is absolutely something wrong with it. Just because a thing is common doesn't make it good.

Two people entering an agreement to not talk about something is fine. You and I should (and can, with very few restrictions) be able to agree that I'll do x, and you'll do y and we are going to keep the matter private. Anyone who wants to take away this ability for two people to do such a thing needs to take a long hard look at themselves, and maybe move to north korea.

There are things that are legal between parties of (presumed) equal footing, that aren't legal between employers and employees.

That's why you can pay $1 to buy a gadget made in some third world country, but you can't pay your employees less than say $8/hour due to minimum wage laws.

Yes, as noted there are a few exceptions.

Being paid a whole lot of money to not talk about something isn't remotely similar to paying someone a few dollars an hour. It's not morally similar, it's not legally similar and it's not treated similarly by anyone who deals with these matters and has a clue what they are doing.

We're apparently at the Scientology stage of the AI hype cycle. One funny observation is, if you ostensibly believe that you're about to invent the AGI godhead who will render the economic system obsolete in < ~5 years or so, how do stock return no-criticism lawsuits fit into that kind of worldview

AGI led utopia will be pretty easy if we're all under contractual obligation to not criticize any aspect of it, lest we be banished back to "work"

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.

It's a taught ideology/theory, the great man theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

I'm well aware of being ignorant about USA law, and it isn't news to me that it encompasses a lot of ridiculous stuff, but it's still somehow amazes me, that "lifetime no-criticism contract" is possible.

It's quite natural, that a co-founder, being forced out of the company wouldn't be exactly willing to forfeit his equity. So, what, now he cannot… talk? That has some Mexican cartel vibes.

When companies create rules like this, that tells me that they are very unsure of their product. Either it doesn't works as they claim, or it's incredible simple to replicate. It can also be that their entire business plan is insane, in any case, there's something basic wrong internally at OpenAI for them to feel the need for this kind of rule.

If OpenAI and ChatGPT is so far ahead for everyone else, and their product is so complex, it doesn't matter what a few disgruntled employees do or say, so the rule is not required.

Forget their product, they're shady as employers. Intentionally doing something borderline legal when they have all the negotiating power.

If the original agreement offered equity that vests, then suddenly another future agreement can potentially revoke that vested equity? It makes no sense unless somehow additional conditions were attached to the vested equity in the original agreement.

And almost all equity agreements do exactly that - give the company right of repurchase. If you've ever signed one, go re-read it. You'll likely see that clause right there in black and white.

For companies unlisted on stock exchanges the options are then worthless.

These were profit sharing units vs options.

They give the company the right to repurchase unvested (but exercised) shares, not vested options. At least the ones I’ve signed.

So if I am a competitor I just need to pay a current employee like 2-3M to break their golden handcuffs and then they can freely start singing.

Not to seem combative, but that assumes that what they share would be advantageous enough to justify the costs... On the other hand, I'm thinking if I'm paying them to disclose all proprietary technology and research for my product, that would definitely make it worthwhile.

So part of their compensation for working is equity, and when they leave thay have to sign an additional agreement in order to keep their previously earned compensation? How is this legal? Mine as well tell them they have to give all their money back too.

What's the consideration for this contract?

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.

I fear your characterization diminishes the real risk: he's incredibly well resourced, well-connected and intelligent while being utterly divorced from the reality of the majority he threatens. People like him and Peter Thiel are not simple crooks or idiots - they truly believe in their convictions. This is far scarier.

how does one divorce the belief that technology can be a force for good from the reality that the gatekeepers are so committed to being the most evil they can be

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

The New Yorker piece is pretty terrifying and manages to be so while bending over backwards to present both sides of not maybe even suck up to SV a bit. Certainly no one forced Altman to say on the record that Ice Nine in the water glass was what he had planned for anyone who crossed him, and no one forced pg to say, likewise on the record that “Sam’s real talent is becoming powerful” or something to that effect.

It pretty much goes downhill from there.

> The New Yorker piece is pretty terrifying and manages to be so while bending over backwards to present both sides of not maybe even suck up to SV a bit. Certainly no one forced Altman to say on the record that Ice Nine in the water glass was what he had planned for anyone who crossed him, and no one forced pg to say, likewise on the record that “Sam’s real talent is becoming powerful” or something to that effect.

Article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

For anyone else like me who hasn't read Kurt Vonnegut, but does know about different ice states (e.g. Ice IX):

"Ice Nine" is a fictional assassination device that makes you turn into ice after consuming ice (?) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice-nine

"Ice IX" (ice nine) is Ice III at a low enough temperature and high enough pressure to be proton-ordered https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phases_of_ice#Known_phases

So here, Sam Altman is stating a death threat.

It's more than just a death threat, the person killed in such a manner would surely generate a human-sized pile of Ice 9, which would pose a much greater threat to humanity than any AGI.

If we're seriously entertaining this off-handed remark as a measure of Altman's true character, it means not only would be willing willing to murder an adversary, but he'd be willing to risk all humanity to do it.

What I take away from this remark is that Altman is a nerd, and I look forward to seeing a shaky cell-phone video of him reciting one of the calypsos of Bokonon while dressed as a cultist at a SciFi convention.

> the person killed in such a manner would surely generate a human-sized pile of Ice 9, which would pose a much greater threat to humanity than any AGI.

Oh okay, I didn't really grok that implication from my brief scan of the wiki page. Didn't realize it was a cascading all-water-into-Ice-Nine thing.

just to clarify, in the book it's basically just 'a form of ice that stays ice even when warm'. it was described as an abandoned projected by the military to harden mud for infantry men to cross. just like regular ice crystals, the ice9 crystal pattern 'spreads' across water, but without the need for it to be chilled, eg the body temp water freezes etc, it becomes a 'midas touch' problem to anyone dealing with it.

“Sam is extremely good at becoming powerful” was the quote, which has a distinctly different ring to it. Not that this diminishes from the overall creep factor.

Holy shit I thought he was just good at networking, but it sounds like we have a psychopath in charge of the AI revolution. Fantastic.

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

Paul Graham fired Sam Altman from YC on the spot for "loss of trust". Full details unknown.

The story of the "YC mafia" takeover of Conde Nast era reddit as summarized by ex-ceo Yishan who resigned after tiring of Altman's constant Machiavelli machinations is also hilarious and foreshadowing of future events[0]. I'm sure by the time Altman resigned from the Reddit board OpenAI had long incorporated the entire corpus into ChatGPT already.

At the moment all the engineers at OpenAI, including gdb, who currently have their credibility in tact are nerd-washing Altman's tarnished reputation by staying there. I mentioned this in a comment elsewhere but Peter Hintjens' (ZeroMQ, RIP) book called the "Psychopath Code"[1] is rather on point in this context. He notes that psychopaths are attracted to project groups that have assets and no defenses, i.e. non-profits:

If a group has assets and no defenses, it is inevitable [a psychopath] will invade the group. There is no "if" here. Indeed, you may see several psychopaths striving for advantage...[the psychopath] may be a founder, yet that is rare. If he is a founder, someone else did the hard work. Look for burned-out skeletons in the closet...He may come with grand stories, yet only by his own word. He claims authority from his connections to important people. He spends his time in the group manipulating people against each other. Or, he is absent on important business...His dominance is not earned, yet it is tangible...He breaks the social conventions of the group. Social humans feel fear and anxiety when they do this. This is a dominance mask.

A group of nerds that want to get shit done and work on important problems, who are primed to be optimistic and take what people say to their face at face value, and don't want to waste time with "people problems" are susceptible to these types of characters taking over.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

[1]https://hintjens.gitbooks.io/psychopathcode/content/chapter4...

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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.

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.

My understanding is that there were two corporate entities, one of which was always for-profit.

It was impractical from the start; they had to pivot before a they were able to get an LLM proper out (before ~anyone had heard of them)

Many easily fooled rubes believe that veneer, so I guess it's working for him.

The startup world (as the artistic world, the sports world, etc) values healthy transgression of the rules

But the line between healthy and unlawful transgression can be a thin line

The startup world values transgression of the rules.

Social engineering has been a thing well before computers and the internet...

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...

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

No but there is the old nature versus nurture debate. If you're raised in a home with a parent who has zero qualms about exploiting human suffering for profit, that's probably going to have an impact, right?

What are you implying here? The answer to the nature vs. nurture debate is "both", see "epigenetics" for more.

When considering the influence of a parent with morally reprehensible behavior, it's important to recognize that the environment a child grows up in can indeed have a profound impact on their development. Children raised in households where unethical behaviors are normalized may adopt some of these behaviors themselves, either through direct imitation or as a response to the emotional and psychological environment. However, it is equally possible for individuals to reject these influences.

Furthermore, while acknowledging the potential impact of a negative upbringing, it is critical to avoid deterministic assumptions about individuals. People are not simply products of their environment; they possess agency and the capacity for change, and we need to realize that not all individuals perceive and respond to environmental stimuli in the same way. Personal experiences, cognitive processes, and emotional responses can lead to different interpretations and reactions to similar environmental conditions. Therefore, while the influence of a parent's actions cannot be dismissed, it is neither fair nor accurate to presume that an individual will inevitably follow in their footsteps.

As for epigenetics: it highlights how environmental factors can influence gene expression, adding a layer of complexity to how we understand the interaction between genes and environment. While the environment can modify gene expression, individuals may exhibit different levels of susceptibility or resistance to these changes based on genetic variability.

> However, it is equally possible for individuals to reject these influences.

The crux of your thesis is a legal point of view, not a scientific one. It's a relic from when Natural Philosophy was new and hip, and fundamentally obviated by leaded gasoline. Discussing free will in a biological context is meaningless because the concept is defined by social coercion. It's the opposite of slavery.

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."

This is a great sentiment in theory. But it assumes that the child is actually interested in rejecting those sins - and accepting the economic consequences of equality (e.g. them not being filthy stinking rich).

In practice most rich people spoil the shit out of their kids and they wind up being even more fucked in the head than their parents.

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.

Who designs the training set for your putative "fact checker" AI?

If it comes packaged with the constant barrage of ridicule and abuse from others for daring to be slightly wrong about something, nobody may as well talk at all.

Are you saying that Altman has family that did business in South African emerald mines? I can't find info about this

They are referring to Elon Musk.

Saying the other suggested there were 2.

No. Some dude that launches rockets did, though.

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Surely people trying to build rockets are trying to do _the opposite_ of "bringing people down"?

The rockets are reusable, the people are expendable.

You are literally repeating false smears about Elon Mask. No emerald mine has ever been owned by anyone in Elon's family, and Elon certainly didn't inherit any of it. I find it very ironic that you are doing this while accusing someone of being a manipulative crook.

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.

Indeed, at least Elon and his teams actually accomplished something worthwhile compared to Altman.

And don't forget StarLink that revolutionized satellite communications.

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.

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.

Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.

I think Ritchie's influence while significant is overblown and not entirely positive. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who had many reprehensible traits, but I find it ridiculous to dismiss his genius. Frankly, I find Jobs's ability to manipulate people more impressive than Ritchie's ability to manipulate machines.

> not entirely positive

I don't know if he was responsible, but null-terminated strings has got to be one of the worst mistakes in computer history.

That said, how is the significance of C and Unix "overblown"?

I agree Jobs was brilliant at manipulating people, I don't agree that that should be celebrated.

The main reason C and Unix became widespread IMHO is not because they were better than the alternatives, but rather because AT&T distributed them with source code at no cost, and their motivation for doing that was not altruistic, but rather the need to obey a judicial decree or an agreement made at the end of an anti-trust court case under which IBM and AT&T were ordered not to enter each other's markets. I.e., AT&T was prohibited from selling computer hardware and software, so when they accidentally found themselves to be owners of some software that some universities and research labs wanted to use, they gave it away.

C and Unix weren't and aren't bad, but they are overestimated in comments on this site a lot. They weren't masterpieces. The Mac was a masterpiece IMHO. Credit for the Mac goes to Xerox PARC and to Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, but also to Jobs for recognizing the value of the work and leading the first implementation of it available to a large fraction of the population.

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.

Mobile era of computing would have happened just as much if Jobs had never lived.

To be fair, who else could have gone toe-to-toe with the telecom incumbents? Jobs almost didn't succeed at that.

Jobs was a bully through and through.

By that logic nothing has started from scratch.

SpaceX is still the only company with reusable rockets. NASA only dreams about it and cant even make a regular rocket launch on time

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.”

What's wrong with weakness? Does it make you feel contempt?

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

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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 going into his sociopathic personality, massive childish ego and apparent 'daddy issues' which in men manifest exactly like him. He is not in day-to-day SpaceX control and it shows.

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

"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.”

As is repeatedly spamming the same pasta

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I'm no fan of Sam Altman, but between the two, Elon lies much more often. He's lied about FSD for years, lied about not selling his Tesla stock, lied about "robotaxies" for years, lied about the roadster for years, lied about "funding secured" for Tesla, lied about his twitter free speech ethos, spreads random lies about people he doesn't like, and so much more. The guy is a compulsive liar.

You could also come up with many examples where he worked hard against repeating lies from others since he often reasons from first principles.

But yes you’re right. The difference is probably whether one "beliefs" Elon is beneficial for the world or not.

> The difference is probably whether one "beliefs" Elon is beneficial for the world or not.

I don't think he matters that much, good or bad. Yes, I know he's a billionaire, but in practical terms he hasn't done much, especially compared to the other tech moguls like jobs, bezos, gates, zuck, larry/sergy etc. All those others oversaw companies that completely revolutionized life for everyone on the planet. By comparison, Tesla makes really fun luxury cars that most people can't afford, and all his other companies are vaporware besides spacex which has almost no practical impact on people's lives. You could argue starlink has some impact, but for the vast majority of the population that can afford starlink, terrestrial broadband fills their need.

> you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth.

Didnt he call the cave diver, a pedo and the guy who attacked Pelosi's husband they were in a gay relationship.

He doesn't seem have much of a filter because of his aspergers, but I think he genuinely believed those things. And they are more on the level of calling people names on the playground anyway. In the grand scheme of things, those are pretty shallow "lies".

Oh so it’s ok to lie and call people a pedophile (which is far beyond playground name-calling; from a famous person a statement like that actually carries a lot of weight) if you genuinely believe it and have Asperger’s?

Those might explain his behavior, but it does not excuse it.

Musk fans will contort into pretzels. He genuinely believed it. Just an insult. Just trading shots because the guy called his idea stupid.

It’s the RDF.

He's 52. And running multiple companies. Aspergers is not a justification for his shitty behavior (and blaming this behavior on Aspergers harms perception of people with Aspergers)

I have multiple relatives on the spectrum. None of them baselessly accuse strangers of being pedophiles.

It's not Musk's lack of filter that makes him unhinged and dangerous. It's that he's deeply stupid, insecure, racist, enamored of conspiracy theories, and powerful.

I figure its the chronic drug abuse and constant affirmation he receives from his internet fanboys and enabler yes-men on his board who are financially dependent on him. he doesn't ever receive push-back from anyone so he get more and more divorced form reality.

> If you watch some long form interviews with Elon, you’ll see that he cares a lot about the truth.

You mean the guy who's infamous for lying? The guy who claimed his car was fully self driving more than a decade before it is? The guy who tweeted "funding secured" and facing multiple fraud charges?

Tbh, he wasn’t convicted as far as I know.

But yes, he’s overly optimistic with timelines. He says so himself.

The first time someone is "overly optimistic with a timeline", you should forgive them.

The tenth time, you should have the good sense to realize that they're full of shit and either a habitual liar or utterly incompetent.

Realists are incapable of pushing frontiers.

If you are doing something that has been done before, hire a realist. Your project will ship on time and within budget. If you are doing something that hasn't been done before, you need an optimist. Partly because the realists run for the hills -- they know the odds and the odds are bad -- but also because their hedging behavior will turn your small chance of success into zero chance of success. On these projects, optimism doesn't guarantee success, but pessimism/realism does guarantee failure.

So no, I am not scandalized to find that the world's biggest innovator (I hate his politics, but this is simply the truth) is systematically biased towards optimism. It's not surprising, it is inevitable.

Wright Brothers took a risk and build first planes but didn't have to lie that their planes already left the ground before they did. They didn't claim "it would fly a year from now", they just build it over and over until it flew.

They were optimistic and yet they found a way to be optimistic without claiming anything untruthful.

Clément Ader, on the other hand, claimed that his innovation flew, and was ridiculed when he couldn't proof it.

One look at their works and it's clear who influenced modern planes, and who didn't.

The Wright Brothers are infamous for failing to industrialize their invention -- something that notoriously requires investors and hype. Perhaps they wouldn't have squandered their lead if they had been a bit more public with their hopes and dreams.

There is a difference between saying "we believe we will achieve X in the next year" and "we will achieve X in the next year." Each framing has its advantages and disadvantages, but it's hard to accuse the person who makes the former statement of lying.

>Man who’s the second richest, led companies that made electric cars and reusable rockets

>> Random HN commentator : utterly incompetent

I want what you’re smoking

Yes, he is largely incompetent but with a great nose for picking up good companies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40066514

He may be the second richest but he still doesn’t seem competent enough to provide remotely reasonable estimates.

That, or he’s just a straight up liar who knows the things he says are never going to happen.

Which would you rather it be?

https://elonmusk.today/

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

I'm surprised at such a mean comment and lots of follow-ups with agreement. I don't know Sam personally, I've only heard him here and there online from before OpenAI days and all I got was a good impression. He seems smart and pretty humble. Apart from all openai drama which I don't know enough to have an opinion, past-openai he also seems to be talking with sense.

Since so many people took time to put him down there here can anybody provide some explanation to me? Preferably not just about how closed openai is, but specifically about Sam. He is in a pretty powerful position and maybe I'm missing some info.

People who have worked with him have publicly called him a manipulative liar:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1804u5y/former_open...

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Idk, everyone loves Carmack

Carmack did his thing 40 years ago; before social media was as prevalent. I'm sure if the community was as large and talkative then as they were today; you'd find many detractors.

What about Palmer Luckey ? I don't think he received a lot of criticism before he founded Anduril Industries.

I don't have a strong opine on him; quick wikipedia skim tells me certain crowds probably hate him as a military contractor. Some people hate anyone/thing associated with that space.

True. And does anyone talk bad about the two Google founders? They are pretty much invisible multi-billionaires now. That is a major accomplishment!

I shared stage with Sam at one point for an hour and was not impressed. Obviously I was wrong as Sam has accomplished so much in the meantime, but my initial impression wasn't much. How he did it is for him to know and for others to ...

What do you mean by not impressed?

Probably did not see him as a future billionaire.

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.

Or they didn’t want the company, their job, and all of their equity to evaporate

Well, if he's a clown then his departure should cause the opposite, no? And you're right, more than 90% of them said we don't want the non-profit BS and openness. We want a unicorn tech company that can make us rich. Good for them.

Disclaimer: I'm Sam's best friend from kindergarten. Just joking, never met the guy and have no interest in openai beyond being a happy customer (who will switch in a heartbeat to the competitors' if they give me a good reason to)

> Well, if he's a clown then his departure should cause the opposite, no?

Nope, not even close to necessarily true.

> more than 90% of them said we don't want the non-profit BS and openness. We want a unicorn tech company that can make us rich. Good for them.

Sure, good for them! Dissolve the company and its charter, give the money back to the investors who invested under that charter, and go raise money for a commercial venture.

People are self-motivated more often than not.

We already know there's been a leadership failure due to the mere existence of the board weirdness last year; if there has been any clarity to that, I've missed it for all the popcorn gossiping related to it.

Everyone including the board's own chosen replacements for Altman siding with Altman seems to me to not be compatible with his current leadership being the root cause of the current discontent… so I'm blaming Microsoft, who were the moustache-twirling villains when I was a teen.

Of course, thanks to the NDAs hiding information, I may just be wildly wrong.

Everyone? What about the board that fired him, and all of those who’ve left the company? It seems to me more like those people are leaving who are rightly concerned about the direction things are going, and those people are staying who think that getting rich outweighs ethical – and possibly existential – concerns. Plus maybe those who still believe they can effect a positive change within the company. With regard to the letter – it’s difficult to say how many of the undersigned simply signed because of social pressure.

> Everyone? What about the board that fired him,

I meant of the employees, obviously not the board.

Also excluded: all the people who never worked there who think Altman is weird, Elon Musk who is suing them (and probably the New York Times on similar grounds), and the protestors who dropped leaflets on one of his public appearances.

> and all of those who’ve left the company?

Happened after those events; at the time it was so close to being literally employee who signed the letter saying "bring Sam back or we walk" that the rest can be assumed to have been off sick that day even despite the reputation the US has for very limited holidays and getting people to use those holidays for sick leave.

> It seems to me more like those people are leaving who are rightly concerned about the direction things are going, and those people are staying who think that getting rich outweighs ethical – and possibly existential – concerns. Plus maybe those who still believe they can effect a positive change within the company.

Obviously so, I'm only asserting that this doesn't appear to be due to Altman, despite him being CEO.

("Appear to be" is of course doing some heavy lifting here: unless someone wants to literally surveil the company and publish the results, and expect that to be illegal because otherwise it makes NDAs pointless, we're all in the dark).

It's hard to guage exactly how much credence to put in that letter due to the gag contracts.

How much was it in support of Altman and how much was in opposition to the extremely poorly explained in board decisions, and how much was pure self interest due to stock options?

I think when a company chooses secrecy, they abandon much of the benefit of the doubt. I don't think there is any basis for absolving Altman.

Clearly by design.

The most dishonest leadership.

To borrow the catchphrase of one of my favorite hackers ever: “correct”.

The thing is that this is a private company, so there is no public market to provide liquidity. The company can make itself the sole source of liquidity, at its option, by placing sell restrictions on the grants. Toe the line, or you will find you never get to participate in a liquidity event.

There's more info on how SpaceX uses a scheme like this[0] to force compliance, and seeing as Musk had a hand in creating both orgs, they're bound to be similar.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/15/spacex-employee-stock-sale...

Whoa. That article says that SpaceX does tender offers twice a year?! That's so much better than 99% of private companies, it makes it almost as liquid for employees as a public company.

Which in a real way makes the threat of being left out of liquidity rounds that much more powerful a tool for keeping people looking forward to an actual windfall in their lane.

> What's the consideration for this contract?

Consideration is almost meaningless as an obstacle here. They can give the other party a peppercorn, and that would be enough to count as consideration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law)

There might be other legal challenges here, but 'consideration' is unlikely to be one of them. Unless OpenAI has idiots for lawyers.

Right, but the employee would be able to refuse the consideration, and thus the contract, and the state of affairs wouldn't change. They would be free to say whatever they wanted.

If they refuse the contract then they lose out on their options vesting. Basically, OpenAI's contracts work like this:

Employment Contract the First:

We are paying you (WAGE) for your labor. In addition you also will be paid (OPTIONS) that, after a vesting period, will pay you a lot of money. If you terminate this employment your options are null and void unless you sign Employment Contract the Second.

Employment Contract the Second:

You agree to shut the fuck up about everything you saw at OpenAI until the end of time and we agree to pay out your options.

Both of these have consideration and as far as I'm aware there's nothing in contract law that requires contracts to be completely self-contained and immutable. If two parties agree to change the deal, then the deal can change. The problem is that OpenAI's agreements are specifically designed to put one counterparty at a disadvantage so that they have to sign the second agreement later.

There is an escape valve in contract law for "nobody would sign this" kinds of clauses, but I'm not sure how you'd use it. The legal term of art that you would allege is that the second contract is "unconscionable". But the standard of what counts as unconscionable in contract law is extremely high, because otherwise people would wriggle out of contracts the moment that what seemed like favorable terms turned unfavorable. Contract law doesn't care if the deal is fair (that's the FTC's job), it cares about whether or not the deal was agreed to.

If say that you were working at Reddit for quite a number of years and all your original options had vested and you had exercised them, then since Reddit went public you would now easily be able to sell your stocks, or keep them if you want. So then you wouldn’t need to sign the second contract. Unless of course you had gotten new options that hadn’t vested yet.

My understanding is as soon as you exercise your options you own them, and the company can’t take them from you.

Can anyone confirm this?

With private stocks, they can put further restrictions on what you can do with your stocks.

Sure, but in the event of liquidity, can they refuse to pay me the value of my shares? For any reason?

If they have even moderately clever lawyers and accountants, yes.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_rights_plan also known as a 'Poison Pill' to give you inspiration for one example.

> There is an escape valve in contract law for "nobody would sign this" kinds of clauses

Who would sign a contract to willfully give away their options?

The same sort of person who would sign a contract agreeing that in order to take advantage of their options, they need to sign a contract with unclear terms at some point in the future if they leave the company.

Bear in mind there are actually three options, one is signing the second contract, one is not signing, and the other is remaining an employee.

Btw, do you have any idea whey they even bother with the second contract? Couldn't they just write the same stuff into the first contract in the first place?

Because people might actually object to it if it was in the first contract.

is it even a valid contract clause to tie the value of something to a future completely unknown agreement? (or yes, it's valid, and it means that savvy folks should treat it as zero.)

(though most likely the NDA and everything is there from day 1 and there's no second contract, no?)

> is it even a valid contract clause to tie the value of something to a future completely unknown agreement?

I don't know about this specific case, but many contracts have these kinds of provisions. Eg it's standard in an employment contract to say that you'll follow the directions of your bosses, even though you don't know those directions, yet.

Maybe. But whether the employee can refuse the gag has nothing to do at all with the legal doctrine that requires consideration.

Ok but peppercorn or not, what’s the consideration?

Getting a certain amount (according to their vesting schedule) of stock options, which are worth a substantial amount of money and thus clearly is "good and valuable consideration".

The original stock and vesting agreement that was part of their original compensation probably says that you have to be currently employed by OpenAI for the vesting schedule to apply. So in that case the consideration of this new agreement is that they get to keep their vesting schedule running even though they are no longer employees.

That's the case in many common/similar agreements, but the OpenAI agreement is different because it's specifically clawing back already vested equity. In this case, I think the consideration would be the company allowing transfer of the shares / allowing participation in buyback events. Otherwise until the company goes public there's no way for the employees to cash out without consent of the company.

but can they simply leave with the already vested options/stock? are there clawback provisions in the initial contract?

"I'll pay you a dollar to shut up"

"Deal"

In the past a lot of options would expire if you didn’t exercise them within eg. 90 days of leaving. And exercising could be really expensive.

Speculation: maybe the options they earn when they work there have some provision like this. In return for the NDA the options get extended.

Options aren't vested equity though.

... They definitely can be. When I worked for a small biotech company all of my options had a tiered vesting schedule.

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 up front where no options vest until you've been with the company for say 6 or 12 months.

Until an option vests you don't own anything. Once it vests, you still have to buy the shares by exercising the option at the $5 per share price. When you leave, most companies have a deadline on the scale of a few months where you have to either buy all vested shares or forfeit them and lose the stock options.

> buy all vested shares

The last time I did this I didn't have to buy all of the shares.

I think they mean that you had to buy all the ones you wanted to keep.

That is tautological... You buy what you want to own???

There can be an advantage to not exercising: it causes a taxable event the IRS will want a cut of the difference between your exercise value and the current valuation, it requires you to commit real money to buy shares that may never be worth anything ....

And there are advantages to exercising: many (most?) companies take back unexercised shares a few weeks/months after you leave, it kicks in a CGT start date, so you can end up paying a lower CGT tax when you eventually sell

You need to understand all this stuff before you make a choice that's right for you

The point being made is that it isn’t all or nothing, you can buy half the vested options and forfeit the rest, should you want to.

Wait, wait. Who is on first?

We’d usually point people here to get a better overview of how options work:

https://carta.com/learn/equity/stock-options/

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.

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

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

Real question: Why do you care so much about this topic? Are you distrustful of the setup?

You are the beneficial owner, but the broker is the titled owner, acting as custodian on your behalf

If I'm not mistaken, at least in the US most brokers also aren't the titled owner. That falls to Cede & Co which acts as a securities depository.

This is where the waters get murky and really risk conspiracy theory. My understanding, though, is that the legal rights fall to the titled owner and financial institutions, with the legal benefactor having very little recourse should anything actually go wrong.

The Great Taking [1] goes into more detail, though importantly I'm only including it here as a related resource if anyone is interested to read more. The ideas are really interesting and, at least in isolation, do make logical sense to me but I haven't had time to do my own digging deep enough to really feel confident enough to stand behind everything The Great Taking argues.

[1] https://thegreattaking.com/

I would bet my left leg that the US gov't would never allow Cede & Co. to fail. Same for Options Clearing Corp. They are too important to a highly functioning financial system.

> They hold them on your behalf.

Possession is 90% of ownership

Banks and trading houses are kind of the exception in that regard. I pay my bank monthly for my mortgage, and thus I live in a house that the bank could repossess if they so choose.

The phrase really should be about force rather than possession. Possession only really makes a difference when there's no power imbalance.

Banks have the legal authority to take the home I possess if I don't meet the terms of our contract. Hell, I may own my property outright but the government can still claim eminent domain and take it from me anyway.

Among equals, possession may matter. When one side can force you to comply, possession really is only a sign that the one with power is currently letting you keep it.

    > the bank could repossess if they so choose

What is about HN that makes so many commenters incredibly distrustful of our modern finance system? It is tiring, and they rarely (never?) offer any sound evidence to the matter. Post GFC, it is working very well.

Re-read the post you’re replying to. They said options are not vested equity, which they aren’t. You still need to exercise an option that has vested to purchase the equity shares.

They did not say “options cannot get granted on a tiered vesting schedule”, probably because that isn’t true, as options can be granted with a tiered vesting schedule.

They aren't equity no matter what though?

They can be vested, I realize that.

My unreliable memory is Altman was ( once? ) in favor of extending the period for exercising options. I could be wrong of course but it is consistent with my impression that making other people rich is among his motivations. Not the only one of course. But again I could be wrong.

Wouldn't be too surprised if he changed his mind since then. He is in a very different position now!

Unless a PTEP (Post Termination Exercise Period) beyond the ordinary three months was on offer, there probably wouldn't be a story because the kind of people OpenAI hires would tend to be adverse to working at a place with a PTEP less than three months.

Or not, I could be wrong.

I guess there are indeed countries where this is illegal. Funny that it seems to be legal in the land of the free (speech).

Unfortunately this is how most startup equity agreements are structured. They include terms that let the company cancel options that haven’t been exercised for [various reasons]. Those reasons are very open ended, and maybe they could be challenged in a court, but how can a low level employee afford to do that?

I don’t know of any other such agreements that allow vested equity to be revoked, as the other person said. That doesn’t sound very vested to me. But we already knew there are a lot of weird aspects to OpenAI’s semi-nonprofit/semi-for-profit approximation of equity.

As far as I know it’s part of the stock plan for most startups. There’s usually a standard clause that covers this, usually with phrasing that sounds reasonable (like triggering if company policy is violated or is found to have been violated in the past). But it gives the company a lot of power in deciding if that’s the case.

I'm guessing unvested equity is being treated separately from other forms of compensation. Normally, leaving a company loses the individual all rights to unvested options. Here the considetation is that options are retained in exchange for silence.

They earned wages and paid taxes on them. Anything on top is just the price they're willing to accept in exchange for their principles.

How do you figure that they should pay an additional price (their principle/silence) for this equity when they've supposedly earned it during their employment (assuming this was not planned when they got hired, since they make them sign new terms at the time of their departure)?

I think we should have the exit agreement (if any) included and agreed to as part of the signing the employment contract.

I assume it’s agreed to at time of employment? Otherwise you’re right that it doesn't make sense

Why do you assume this if it is said here and in the article that they had to sign something at the time of the departure from the company?

I would guess it’s a bonus and part of their bonus structure and they agreed to the terms of any exit/departure, when they sign their initial contract.

I’m not saying it’s right or that I agree with it, however.

It's also really weird equity: you don't get an ownership stake in the company but rather profit-sharing units. If OpenAI ever becomes profitable (color me skeptical), you can indeed get rich as an employee. The other trigger is "achieving AGI", as defined by sama (presumably). And while you wait for these dubious events to occur you work insane hours for a mediocre cash salary.

Perhaps they are stock options and leaving without signing would make them evaporate, but signing turns them back into long-lasting options?

In the initial hiring agreement, this would be stated and the employee would have to agree to signing such form if they are to depart

Yeah you don't have to sign anything to quit. Ever. No new terms at that time, sorry.

There is usually a carrot along with the stick.

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.

Could also be that they have a unique definition of vesting when they say specifically “vested equity”