If this really was a mistake the easiest way to deal with it would be to release people from their non disparagement agreements that were only signed by leaving employees under the duress of losing their vested equity.
It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset.
Edit: Looks like they're doing the right thing here:
> Altman’s initial statement was criticized for doing too little to make things right for former employees, but in an emailed statement, OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations” — which goes much further toward fixing their mistake.
This reads like more than standard restrictions. I hate those like everyone, they are just intended to chill complaints in my opinion with enough question to scare average people without legal expertise (like me, like most devs), just like non-competes used to seemingly primarily be used to discourage looking at other jobs, separate from whether it was enforceable - note the recent FTC decision to end non-competes.
About 5 months ago I had a chance to join a company, their company had what looked like an extreme non-compete to me, you couldn't work for any company for the next two years after leaving if they had been a customer of that company.
I pointed out to them that I wouldn't have been able to join their company if my previous job had that non-compete clause, it seemed excessive. Eventually I was in meetings with a lawyer at the company who told me it's probably not enforceable, don't worry about it, and the FTC is about to end non-competes. I said great, strike it from the contract and I'll sign it right now. He said I can't do that, no one off contracts. So then I said I'm not working there.
I have worked for multiple startups (Malwarebytes, Vicarious, Rad AI, Explosion AI, Aptible, Kenna Security). Not once have I seen an exit agreement that stated they would steal back my vested equity if I didn't sign. This is definitely not "standard restrictions".
Yes, I really do this. Have done since I started working.
At one of my first jobs as a student employee they offered me a salary X. In the contract there was some lower number Y. When I pointed this out, they said "X includes the bonus. It's not in the contract but we've never not paid it". OK, if this is really guaranteed, you can make that the salary and put it in writing. They did, my salary was X and that year was the first time they didn't pay the optional bonus. Didn't affect me, because I had my salary X.
IANAL and I don't know how binding this is. I'd think it's crucial for it to be in both copies of the contract, otherwise you could have just crossed it out after the fact, which would of course not be legally binding at all and probably fraud (?)
In practice, it doesn't really come up, because the legal department will produce a modified contract or start negotiating the point. The key is that the ball is now in their court. You've done your part, are ready and rearin' to go, and they are the ones holding things up and being difficult, for something that according to them isn't important.
UPDATE:
I think it's important to note that I am also perfectly fine with a verbal agreement.
A working relationship depends on mutual trust, so a contract is there for putting in a drawer and never looking at it again...and conversely if you are looking at it again after signing, both the trust and the working relationship are most likely over.
But it has to be consistent: if you insist on a binding written agreement, then I will make sure what is written is acceptable to me. You don't get to pick and choose.
For one job I also crossed some stuff out, founder was cool with it because he mostly got it from a template. Having actual paper is great for that. At a later job, they insisted on Docusign, which was basically I get an immutable image in a browser to 'electronically sign' with no modifications. It had a section that amounted to a non-compete agreement that I didn't like, but their lawyers didn't really answer me on whether such a thing could be enforced or not given that the company was headquartered in California even though I'd be working out of Washington. I took that as a sign that they probably wouldn't go Amazon on me, at least.
First you’re offering up a lot of trust to people you might have just started working with.
Or, they could be very trustworthy and just remember things differently. And of course people come and go in companies all the time they just might not be there.
At least if you do a verbal agreement follow it up with an email confirming the details.
Exactly. And just like I have to be fine with not getting the job if my conditions are not acceptable to them, they have to be fine with not getting me if their conditions are not acceptable to me.
Considering the considerable effort that has gone into this by the time you are negotiating a contract, letting it fail over something that "is not important" and "is never enforced" would be very stupid of them.
So if they are unwilling to budge, that either means they were lying all along and the thing that's "never enforced" and is "not important" actually is very important to them and definitely will be enforced, or that they are a company that will enforce arbitrary and pointless rules on employees as long as they think they can.
Neither of which is a great advertisement for the company as an employer.
> So if they are unwilling to budge, that either means they were lying all along and the thing that's "never enforced" and is "not important" actually is very important to them and definitely will be enforced, or that they are a company that will enforce arbitrary and pointless rules on employees as long as they think they can.
Most of the time is basically just FUD, to coerce people into following the rule-that-is-never-enforced
It's always "not enforced" or "just a template" right up until they decide they need to pressure you into something and then they will have no problem referencing those items.
Do not sign a contract unless you are willing to entirely submit to everything in it that is legally binding.
Also be careful with extremely vague contracts. My employment contract was basically "You will do whatever we need you to do" and surprise surprise, unpaid overtime is expected.
I've seen legal departments redlining drafts of a contract repeatedly until an agreement had been reached. The final contract still contained the red lines.
IANAL but I've seen strikes throughout contracts, and then an initial+date from both parties. Weird how in 2024 an initial that's so easily forgeable can be legally binding
I guess like all laws it depends on jurisdiction, and more importantly, if you can convince the judge/magistrate that the contract did or did not happen
Yeah, but the law still sets the default baseline for he judge / jury / whatever. In the Nordic countries (at least Sweden) -- as techno-modern and bureaucratic as they may be -- that still includes verbal agreements.
(The handshake is probably not a legal requirement, though I suppose it could be taken into consideration as evidence -- "You even shook hands on it, so you must have realised that what you had just discussed were atually the terms you were agreeing to.")
By that downplaying the significance of a contract's terms and persuading to sign it without fully understanding the implications. If this were only the beginning of my career, meaning my first serious company, I would sign the contract.
I’ve heard of some pretty aggressive non-competes in finance, but AFAIU (never worked in Connecticut myself), it’s both the carrot and the stick: you get both paid and a stiff contract if you leave with proprietary alpha between the ears.
In tech I’ve never even heard a rumor of something like this.
It’s got a term - “garden leave” and yeah it was prevalent in finance. I say “was” because I think some states are changing laws wrt/ non-competes and this calling this practice into question.
First of all, taking any code with you is theft, and you go to jail, like this poor Goldman Sachs programmer [1]. This will happen even if the code has no alpha.
However, noone can prevent you from taking knowledge (i.e. your memories), so reimplementing alpha elsewhere is fine. Of course, the best alpha is that which cannot simply be replicated, e.g. it depends on proprietary datasets, proprietary hardware (e.g. fast links between exchanges), access to cheap capital, etc.
What hedge funds used to do, is give you lengthy non-competes. 6months for junior staff, 1-2y for traders, 3y+ in case of Renaissance Technologies.
In the US, that's now illegal and un-enforceable. So what hedge funds do now, is lengthy garden(ing) leaves. This means you still work for the company, you still earn a salary, and in some (many? all?) cases also the bonus. But you don't go to the office, you can't access any code, you don't see any trades. The company "moves on" (developes/refines its alpha, including your alpha - alpha you created) and you don't.
These lengthy garden leaves replaced non-competes, so they're now 1y+. AFAIK they are enforceable, just as non-competes while being employed always have been.
I think this still leaves garden leave on the table. The thing that can no longer happen is an employer ending it's relationship with an employee and preventing them from continuing their career after the fact. Garden leave was in fact one of the least bad outcomes of a non-compete as I understand it.
Comp clawbacks are quite common in finance, at least contractually. It's rare for it to go ahead, but it happens. It isn't some especially weird thing.
Comp clawbacks in exit agreements, that weren't part of the employment agreement?
I've seen equity clawbacks in employment agreements. Specifically, some of the contracts I've signed have said that if I'm fired for cause (and were a bit more specific, like financial fraud or something) then I'd lose my vested equity. That isn't uncommon, but its not typically used to silence people and is part of the agreement they review and approve of before becoming an employee. It's not a surprise that they learn about as they try to leave.
It must have been part of the original employment document package, that the equity was cancellable. In the details of the equity grant, or similar, somewhere.
According to the Vox article, it's much more complicated legally. It's not part of each employee's contract that allows this, it's part of the articles of incorporation of the for-profit part of OpenAI.
Do you mean it is generic to do that in contracts? (Been a while since I was offered equity.)
Or do you mean that even OpenAI would not try it without having set it up in the original contract? Because I hate to be the guy with the square brackets ;-)
If it wasn't in the original contracts for the equity, they wouldn't be able to claw back.
Fairly obviously, the mechanism can't be in the exit agreement because you didn't sign that yet.
Normally a company has to give you new "consideration" (which is the legal term for something of value) for you to want to sign an exit agreement - otherwise you can just not bother to sign. Usually this is extra compensation. In this case they are saying that they won't exercise some clause in an existing agreement that allows them to claw back.
Per the Vox article, it's not directly in the contract you sign for the equity, it's basically part of the definition of the equity itself (the articles of incorporation of the for-profit company) that OpenAI remains in full control of the equity in this way.
What is the structure of those compensations, and the mechanism for the clawbacks? Equity is taxed when it becomes the full, unrestricted property of the employee, so depending on the structure these threatened clawbacks could have either (1) been very illegal [essentially theft], or (2) could have had drastic and very bad tax consequences for all employees, current and former.
I'm not surprised that they're rapidly backpedaling.
> taxed when it becomes the full, unrestricted property of the employee
I guess these agreements mean that the property isn't full unrestricted property of the employee... and therefore income tax isn't payable when they vest.
The tax isn't avoided - it would just be paid when you sell the shares instead - which for most people would be a worse deal because you'll probably sell them at a higher price than the vest price.
It's a worse deal in retrospect for a successfull company. But there and then it's not very attractive to pay an up-front tax on something that you can sell at an unknown price in the relatively far future.
Not sure how they deal with the tax. Ping John Stumpf (former Wells CEO) and ask, he probably has time on his hands and scar tissue and can explain it.
Common? Absolutely not. It might be common for a tiny fraction of investment bank staff who are considered (1) material risk takers, (2) revenue generators, or (3) senior management.
Can you find any specific examples? I've only seen that apply to severance agreements where you're being paid some additional sum for that non-disparagement clause.
Never seen anything that says money or equity you've already earned could be clawed back.
Right, but would that have been achieved with a clause open-ended enough to allow this additional paperwork on exit?
Or would that have been an "if you break the law" thing?
Seems unlikely that OpenAI are legally in the clear here with nice clear precedent. Why? Because they are backflipping to deny it's something they'd ever do.
I think they are backpedaling rapidly to avoid major discontent among their workers. By the definition of their stock as laid out in their articles of incorporation, they have the right to reduce any former employee's stock to 0, or to prevent them from ever selling it, which is basically the same thing. This makes their stock offers to employees much less valuable than the appear at face value, so their current and future employees may very well start demanding actual dollars instead.
> The ability to do it was almost certainly already in place
Why? OpenAI is a shitshow. Their legal structure is a mess. Yanking vested equity on the basis of a post-purchase agreement signed under duress sounds closer to securities fraud than anything thought out.
I'm not saying it was thought out, I'm saying it was in place. My understanding is that the shareholders agreement had something which enabled the canceling of the shares (not sure if it was all shares, shares granted to employees, or what). I have not seen the document, so you may be right, but that's my understanding.
> the shareholders agreement had something which enabled the canceling of the shares
OpenAI doesn't have shares per se, since they're not a corporation but some newfangled chimeric entity. Given the man who signed the documents allegedly didn't read them, I'm not sure why one would believe everything else is buttoned up.
If its not negotiated on exit why are they requesting additional documents to be signed when leaving? Clearly nothing like this was agreed at the start of employment.
Would it though? Presumably a finance company's claw back clause is there to protect it from you taking its trade secrets with you to its competitors, not from you tweeting "looks trashy lol" in response to a product launch of theirs, or you mentioning to a friend that your old boss was kind of a dick.
I’ve seen that for a well-known large tech company, and I wasn’t even employed in the US, making those seem stranger. Friends and former colleagues pushed back against that (very publicly and for obvious reasons in one case) and didn’t get to keep their vested options: they had to exercise what they had before leaving.
There was one thing that I cared about (anti-competitive behavior, things could technically be illegal, but what counts is policy so it really depends on what the local authority wants to enforce), so I asked a lawyer, and they said: No way this agreement prevents you from answering that kind of questioning.
Often RSUs in non public companies come with a double trigger: you need both the vest to happen and a liquidity to happen for the actual delivery of those, so no tax implications until a liquidity event (afaik. But don’t take tax advice from randos on the internet).
The closest thing I've heard of is having to sign anti-disparagement clauses as part of severance when laid off; still pretty shitty, but taking back already vested equity would be on another level.
My understanding is that its an explicit condition of the equity grant, not something technically first revealed at exit (which would probably be illegal), but probably under the expectation that no one is carefully studying the terms of the agreement that would be required at exit when they are accepting compensation terms that i nclude equity.
> I have worked for multiple startups (Malwarebytes...
Note the "have worked" and the rather long list of places they've worked. If that list is in chronological order (sure didn't look alphabetical), Malwarebytes doesn't have to be a startup now for it to have been one when GP worked there.
"That's alright, as you said it's not enforceable anyway just remove it from everyone's
contract. It'll just be the new version of the contract for everyone."
Doubt it would have made any difference though, as the lawyer was super likely bullshitting.
> I was in meetings with a lawyer at the company who told me it's probably not enforceable, don't worry about it
Life rule: if the party you're negotiating a contact with says anything like "don't worry about that, it's not enforceable" or "it's just boilerplate, we never enforce that" but refuses to strike it from the contract then run, don't walk, away from table. Whoever you're dealing with is not operating in good faith.
You did well: there is never a rule against one-off contract. I can assure you the CEO has a one-off contract, and that lawyer has a one-off contract, at the very least :D
Those are great points. I didn't think about it at the time. Since they were pushing me hard to sign a contract that for once literally blocked most of the companies in the cs speciality area I mostly have worked in, it gave me enough courage to say no. Barely ;-)
Yeah, totally legit. Don't worry about it, it's not enforceable anyways. What, remove it from the contract? God no! Oh, I mean sorry, no one off contracts.
Well, you can be surprised. It's surprisingly common, in my experience, to believe people who pretend they are on your side. One interesting and typical case that is documented through countless online videos is police interrogations, where the interrogator is usually an expert in making it seem he (or she) is on your side, despite how obvious it should be that they're not. "Can I get you a meal?", friendly tone, various manipulations and before you know it you've said things that can and will be used against you whether you are guilty or not.
> We can also mention the case of psychiatrists running the "Presence francaise" groups who, appointed to examine the prisoner, started off boasting they were great friends with the defense lawyer and claiming both of them (the lawyer and the psychiatrist) would get the prisoner out. All the prisoners
examined by this method were guillotined. These psychiatrists boasted in front
of us of this neat method of overcoming "resistance."
Attorneys are like any other profession. The average attorney is just like the average person, except he passed a difficult test.
Exceptions require sign off and thinking. The optimal answer is go with the flow. In an employment situation, these sorts of terms require regulatory intervention or litigation to make them go away, so it’s a good bet that most employees will take no action.
Probably not enforceable != enforceable. Are you worth suing or does everyone sign? Are your state laws and jurisprudence going to back you up?
If you are ever going to sign an employee agreement that binds you, consult with an employment attorney first. I did this with a past noncompete and it was the best few hundred I ever spent: my attorney talked with me for an hour about the particulars of my noncompete, pointed out areas to negotiate, and sent back redlines to make the contract more equitable.
The single best professional decision I ever made was to get a business degree. The degree itself wasn’t worth a damn, but the network was invaluable. I have very close friends who are the exact kind of attorney who you would expect to have an undergraduate business degree. They’re greedy, combative people who absolutely relish these sorts of opportunities. And as a bonus, they are MY greedy, combative people who relish these sorts of opportunities.
They’re great partners when confronted with this kind of contract. And fundamentally, if my adversary/future employer retains counsel, I should too. Why be at a disadvantage when it’s so easy to pay money and be at even?
There are some areas my ethics don’t mesh with, but at the end of the day this is my work and I do it for pay. And when I look at results, lawyers are the best investment I have ever made.
At most it would just make that part of the contract void. Almost all contracts with stuff like this would have a “severability” clause which states like if one part of the contract is invalid, the rest is still valid.
But even without that, judges have huge amounts of leeway to “create” an ex post facto contract and say “heres the version if that contract you would have agreed to, this is now the contract you signed”. A sort of “fixed” version of the contract.
> At most it would just make that part of the contract void. Almost all contracts with stuff like this would have a “severability” clause which states like if one part of the contract is invalid, the rest is still valid.
Severability clauses themselves are not necessarily valid; whether provisions can be severed and how without voiding the contract is itself a legal question that depends on the specific terms and circumstances.
There is usually a severability clause that basically says if a clause is illegal it voids that clause not the whole contract… this is pretty standard practice.
The article makes it clear that it wasn't a mistake at all. It's a lie. They were playing hardball, and when it became public they switched to PR crisis management to try and save their "image", or what's left of it.
They're not the good guys. I'd say they're more of a caricature of bad guys, since they get caught every time. Something between a classic Bond villain and Wile E. Coyote.
"...But there's a problem with those apologies from company leadership. Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about..."
"...and that our PR firm wasn't good enough to squash the story."
They will follow the standard corporate 'disaster recovery' - say something to make it look like they're addressing it, then do nothing and just wait for it to fall out of the news cycle.
Honestly I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt on that, depending on their actions, because I'm sure they sign so many documents they just rely on their legal teams to ensure they're good.
There's absolutely no way that the officers of the company would be unaware of this.
First of all, it beggars belief that this whole thing could be the work of HR people or lawyers or something, operating under their own initiative. The only way I could believe that is if they deliberately set up a firewall to let people be bad cops while giving the C-suite plausible deniability. Which is no excuse.
But...you don't think they'd have heard about it from at least one departing employee, attempting to appeal the onerous terms of their separation to the highest authority in the company?
Hold up... Do you really think that a C-suite including career venture-capitalists who happen to be leading+owning stock in a private startup which has hit an estimated billion+ valuation are too naive/distracted to be involved in how that stock is used to retain employees?
In other words, I'm pretty sure the Ed Dillingers are already in charge, not Walter Gibbs garage-tinkerers. [0]
"Trust me bro, if it weren't up to me you wouldn't even have to sign that contract. I mean it is up to me, but, like, I won't enforce the thing I made you sign. What? No I won't terminate the contract why don't you trust me bro? I thought we were a family?"
Yeah, agree, but they don't have to cancel the disparagement clause. They could just eat the PR hit. Allowing former employees to talk freely seems risky to me (if I were them). I think we can give them back 5 points for this move but still leave them at -995 overall.
That really is not enough. Now that they have been publicly embarrassed and the clause is common knowledge they really have to undo the mistake. If they didn't, they would look like a horrible employer and employees would start valuing their stock at $0, dropping their effective compensations by a ton and then people will leave. Given the situation, undoing the agreement is an act of basic self-preservation at this point.
The documents show this really was not a mistake and "I didn't know what the legal documents I signed meant, which specifically had a weird clause that standard agreements don't" isn't much of a defence either. The whole thing is just one more point in favor of how duplicitous the whole org is, there are many more.
For whatever it's worth (not much), Sam Altman did say they would do that
> 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.
What Sam is saying is very different than what I'm saying. I'm saying he should be proactive and just do it, he's saying that if people explicitly reach out to him then he'll do it specifically for them.
Importantly if he just said publicly that that he wouldn't enforce the non-disparagement agreements that could be legally binding[1]. But if he just says he'll release people who he's, legally speaking, free to just not do that.
[1] The keywords are promissory estoppel. I'm not a lawyer but this looks at least like a borderline case worth worrying about.
Sure and anyone who has worked in a toxic workplace knows exactly what it means to require a direct path to leadership to resolve an issue instead of just resolving it.
True, they can't renegotiate agreements that don't yet exist.
However the fact that the corporate leadership could even make those threats to not-yet-departed employees indicates that something is already broken or missing in the legal relationship with current ones.
A simple example might for the company to clearly state in their handbook--for all current employees--that vested shares cannot be clawed back.
Given what OpenAI's been in the press for the past few weeks, I can't help but feel this is a trap; even if it isn't, Sam is certainly making it look like it is...
Some people are just so deep into fanboiism they refuse to see the writing on the wall even when it's in ten-foot-high letters of fire on a pitch-black background. Of fucking course it's just a performance for the public.
> ”we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations”
Well, they say they are. But the nondisparagement agreement repeatedly forbids revealing the agreement itself, so if it wasn't cancelled those subject to it would be forbidden to point out that the public claim they were going to release people from it was a lie (or done only for people from whom OpenAI was not particularly concerned about potential disparagement.)
“disparagement" is whatever is defined in the agreement, which reportedly (from one of the people who declined to sign it) includes discussing the existence of the agreement.
This is not normal for being a corporate employee. This was certainly going to come out eventually and cause big problems, but to the extent Sam thinks AGI is around the corner he might not be playing the long game.
"We're hereby making a legally binding commitment that those clauses are void, whether anyone reaches out to us or we manage to reach out to them or not."
Unless and until that's what they say, looks like they’re not doing that.
> We're removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperwork, and we're releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual. We'll communicate this message to former employees.
So the former successfully blackmailed employees, stay blackmailed.
Even if that's true (and I'm not saying it is, or it isn't, I don't think anyone on the outside knows enough to say for sure), is it because they genuinely agree they did something egregiously wrong and they will really change their behavior in the future? Or is it just because they got caught this time so they have to fix this particular mistake, but they'll keep on using similar tactics whenever they think they can get away with it?
The impact of such uncertainty on our confidence in their stewardship of AI is left as an exercise for the reader.
> Edit: Looks like they're doing the right thing here:
> Altman’s initial statement was criticized for doing too little to make things right for former employees, but in an emailed statement, OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations” — which goes much further toward fixing their mistake.
1. Get cash infusion from microsoft
2. Do microsoft playbook of 'oh I didn't mean to be shady we will correct' when caught.
3. In the meantime there are uncaught cases as well as the general hand waving away of repeated bad behavior.
4. What sama did would get him banned from some -fetish- circles, if that says something about how his version of 'EA' deals with consent concerns.
Plenty of legitimate things to criticize EA for, no need to smear them by association with someone who's never claimed to be an EA and hasn't obviously behaved like one either.
It shouldn't take a Vox article to ensure employees basic security over their compensation. The fact that this provision existed at all is exceptionally anti-employee.
You surely don't actually believe Altman when he says they're doing this? Like Elon Musk, Altman is a known liar and should not be trusted. It's truly unbelievable to me that people take statements like this at face value after having been lied to again and again and again. I think I'm starting to understand how crypto scams work.
The amount [and scale] of practices, chaos and controversies caused by OpenAI since ChatGPT was released are "on par" with the powerful products it has built since.. in a negative way!
These are the hottest controversial events so far, in a chronological order:
OpenAI's deviation from its original mission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981).
The Altman's Saga (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611).
The return of Altman (within a week) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38375239).
Musk vs. OpenAI (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39559966).
The departure of high-profile employees (Karpathy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365935 ,Sutskever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361128).
"Why can’t former OpenAI employees talk?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40393121).
The best case business pitch is total replacement of all white collar jobs. It's even more a "take over the world" pitch than regular tech companies. Now, quite a lot of that is unrealistic and will never be delivered, but which bit?
AI raises all sorts of extremely non-tech questions about power, which causes all the drama.
Edit: also, they've selected for people who won't ask ethical questions. Thus running into the classic villain problem of building an organization out of opportunistic traitors.
Thank you for making me laugh. Seriously, I think working for openai already selected for people who are ok with playing in the grey area. They know they ignore copyright and a few other rules. It's not surprising to me that they would also not be very nice to each other internally.
Money. The hype is really strong, the hype might even be justified, insane amounts of money flow in. There is a land grab going on. Blood is in the water, all the sharks are circling.
After all that money, nobody can never even think of saying that it was wasted. To keep the investment value high and justifiable, they all agree and go on with the hype. Until the end.
people are starting to realize they don't have any significant technical advantages over other AI companies. so all they have left is hype or trying to build a boring enterprise business where they sell a bunch of AI services to other large companies, and their lack of experience in that area is showing.
I work for a tech startup doing communication and mkt. I'm sick of engineers sucking Sam's dick and believing every demo they watch. Even after seeing what Altman's is capable of perform in the stage. I'm also sick of the scene trying to sell "AI" (whatever that means) next to everything. We even go out of our way to promise stupid impossible stuff when we talk about multimodal or generative... It doesn't matter, it needs to sell.
Just to give a sickening example, I was approached by the CEO to fix a very bad deepfake video that some "AI" Engineer made with tools available. They requested me to use After Effects and editing to make the lips sync....
On top of that, this industry is driving billions of investment into something that is probably the death sentence for a lot of workers, cultures, and society, and that is not fixing or helping in ANY other way to our current world problems.
The whole media is _clearly_ threatened by AI. Both subjectively just thinking about it, and objectively seeing things like Google already roll out AI summaries of internet content (saving consumers the need scroll through a power points worth of auto-play ads to read a single paragraphs worth of information.)
With the breakneck progress of AI over the last year, there has been a clear trend in the media of "Wow, this is amazing (and a little scary)" to "AI is an illegal dumpster fire and needs to be killed you should stop using it and companies should stop making it"
Great, if these documents are credible, this is exactly what I was implying[1] yesteday. Here, listen to Altman say how he is "genuinely embarrassed":
"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 first thing the above conjures up is the other disgraced Sam (Bankman-Fried) saying "this is on me" when FTX went bust. I bet euros-to-croissants I'm not the only one to notice this.
Some amount of corporate ruthlessness is part of the game, whether we like it or not. But these SV robber-barrons really crank it up to something else.
Looking forward for a document leak about openai using YouTube data for training their models. When asked if they use it, Murali (CTO) told she doesn't know which makes you believe that for 99% they are using it.
Number of videos are less relevant than the total duration of high-quality videos (quality can be approximated on YouTube with metrics such as view and subscriber count). Also, while YouTube videos are not labelled directly, you can extract signal from the title, the captions, and perhaps even the comments. Lastly, many sources online use YouTube to host videos and embed them on their pages, which probably contains more text data that can be used as labels.
To be fair I don’t think Google deserves exclusive rights to contents created by others, just because they own a monopolistic video platform. However I do think it should be the content owner’s right to decide if anyone, including Google, gets to use their content for AI.
So what happened to Daniel Kokotajlo, the ex-OAI employee who made a comment saying that his equity was clawed back? Was it a miscommunication and he was referring to unvested equity, or is Sama just lying?
In the original context, it sounded very much like he was referring to clawed-back equity. I’m trying to find the link.
> ..or agreeing not to criticize the company, with no end date
Oh! free speech is on trade! We used to hear the above statement coming from some political regimes but this is the first time I read it in the tech world. Would we live to witness more variations of this behavior on a larger scale?!
> High-pressure tactics at OpenAI
> That meant the former employees had a week to decide whether to accept OpenAI’s muzzle or risk forfeiting what could be millions of dollars
> When ex-employees asked for more time to seek legal aid and review the documents, they faced significant pushback from OpenAI.
> “We want to make sure you understand that if you don't sign, it could impact your equity. That's true for everyone, and we're just doing things by the book,”
Although they've been able to build the most capable AI models that could replace a lot of human jobs, they struggle to humanely manage the people behind these models!!
Going to be hard to keep claiming you didn’t know something, if your signature is on it. I don’t really think a CEO gets to say he didn’t read what he was signing.
If Sam didn't get hired back after the firing, there was a good chance OpenAI would implode and that would be bad news for employee equity. Plus, the board didn't give out any information that could've convinced anyone to side with them. The drama about exit documents and superalignment research appears to have been contained in relatively small circles and did not circulate company-wide until they became public.
I recall that only some wanted him back, and the split was product/research—the “let’s get rich!” types wanted him back, the “let’s do AI!” types adamantly didn’t.
In my third world country, when they do something unethical they say "everything is in accordance with the law", here it's "this is on me", both are very cynical.
From the time they went private, it was apparent that this company is unethical to say the least. Given what it is building, this can be very dangerous, but I think they are more proficient in creating hype, than actually coming up with something meaningful.
It's funny how finding out about corporate misdoing has almost a common ritual attached to it. First shock and dismay is expressed to the findings, then the company leadership has to say it was a mistake (rather than an obvious strategy they literally signed off on), we then bring up the contradiction. Does this display of ignorance from every side really need to take place? Why bother asking for an explanation, they obviously did the thing they obviously did and will obviously do as much as possible to keep doing as much of things like that they can get away with.
Do OpenAI employees actually get equity in the company (e.g. options or RSUs)? I was under the impression that the company awards "profit units" of some kind, and that many employees aren't sure how they work.
> Although primarily known for ChatGPT, OpenAI has had a long history since its founding in 2015.
No, "since 2015" is by definition not "a long history".
For a long history, try the principality of San Marino, or (if you want a company) Stora Kopparbergs Bergslags AB. Or one of the Japanese temple-builder family companies. 2015 "a long history" -- wasn't that when I last took a dump?
I'm not following this very closely, but agreements that block employees from selling (private) vested equity are a market term, not something uniquely aggressive OpenAI does. The Vox article calls this "just as important" as the clawback terms, but, obviously, no.
> agreements that block employees from selling (private) vested equity are a market term
They threatened to block the employee who pushed back on the non-disparagement from participating in tender offers, while allowing other employees to sell their equity (which is what the tender offers are for). This is not a "market term".
Yeah, my impression is that a lot of non-public startups have "secondary market transactions allowed with board approval" clauses, but many of them just default-deny those requests and never have coordinated tender offers pre-IPO.
I didn't see that comment but I did post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40437018 elsewhere in that thread, which addresses the same concerns. If anyone reads that and still has a concern, I'd be happy to take a crack at answering further.
The short version is that users flagged that one plus it set off the flamewar detector, and we didn't turn the penalties off because the post didn't contain significant new information (SNI), which is the test we apply (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). Current post does contain SNI so it's still high on HN's front page.
And today: a post about Johansson's voice was on the front page with quite a high score, and then disappeared. This is not the place to discuss OpenAI.
They’re definitely doing this on comments too. I’ve had negative towards altman comments at the top dropped to below the negative voted ones in the past
It's standard moderation on HN to downweight subthreads where the root comment is snarky, unsubstantive, or predictable. Most especially when it is unsubstantive + indignant. This is the most important thing we've figured out about improving thread quality in the last 10 years.
But it doesn't vary based on specific persons (not Sam or anyone else). Substantive criticism is fine, but predictable one-liners and that sort of thing are not what we want here—especially since they evoke even worse from others.
The idea of HN is to have an internet forum—to the extent possible—where discussion remains intellectually interesting. The kind of comments we're talking about tend to choke all of that out, so downweighting them is very much in HN's critical path.
Funny though how all these oh-so-objctive algorithms -- your rule of thumb for weighting threads, "the flamewar detector" on posts, "SNI", etc, etc -- seemingly always just so happen to have the outcome they have.
Sorry, you may be (are probably) being perfectly honest and sincere, but... It's still too many coincidences not to give rise to doubts. If about nothing else, then about the weights in your algorithms (the post of a negative-headline article that lasted under two hours on the front page didn't look all that much more flame-war-y to me than the one off a positive-headline one that lasted over twelve) or your definition of "significant" ("Breaking news, OAI says they didn't do it!" Yeah right, how is that significant; which crook doesn't say that wasn't actually his paw in the cookie jar?).
Or maybe it's bigger; maybe it's time for the, uhm, "tone" of the entire site to change? I mean, society at large seems to have come to the insight that wannabe rentier techbros just aren't likely to be good guys. And maybe your intended audience -- "startup hackers", something like that, right? -- are beginning to resemble mainstream society in this respect?
Maybe we "Hackers" are coming to the realisation that on the current trajectory of the tech industry in the late-stage capitalism era, "two guys with their laptops in a garage" are not very likely to become even (paltry!) multi-millionaires, because all the other "two guys with their laptops in a garage" ten-fifteen-twenty years ago (well, the ones of them that made it, anyway) installed such insurmountable moats around their respective fiefdoms ("pulled up the ladder behind them", as we'd say if they were twenty years older) that making it big as an actual "Hacker" is becoming nigh-impossible?
I mean, to try and illustrate by example: The Zuck zucks even in the mind of most HN regulars, right? But if you trawl through early posts (pre-2017? -14? -10?), betcha he's on average much more revered here than he is now. A bit like Musk still seems to be, and up until a year or whatever ago, that other Sam (Frazzled Blinkman?) was, and... The rate and mechanism of change here seems to be "Oops, yet another exception, a wannabe rentier techbro who turned out to be a slimebag. But as a group, wannabe rentier techbros are of course still great!" Maybe it's time to go through the algorithms and prejudices and turn down all the explicit and implicit the "Wannabe Zuck[1] = Must be great!" dials?
Because as it is, these biases -- "just percieved" as you seem to be saying, "implicit and built into the very foundations of HN" as I'd tentatively say; does it even matter which it is? -- seem to be making HN not a forum for the current-day "two guys with their laptops in a garage", but for fanboyism of the (current and) next group of Bezoses, Zuckerbergs and Musks[1]. Sorry, I haven't checked out the mission statement recently (even though you so graciously linked to it), but is that really what HN is supposed to be?
___
[1]: Well, I'm old enough that I almost wrote "Gates and Ellison" there... Add them in if you want.
> seemingly always just so happen to have the outcome they have.
The key word there is "seemingly". You notice what you're biased to notice and generalize based on that. People with diferent views notice different things and make different generalizations.
The things that were said and done to destroy Michael O. Church’s reputation were truly vile but I don’t think that can be pinned on a whole community. As far as I can remember, it was a small number of individuals and YC was never proven to be a linking factor.
That post was, as far as I can tell, basically an opinion piece repeating/summarizing stories that had been on the HN frontpage dozens of times. This post is investigative journalism with significant new information.
It should not be surprising that the outcomes are different.
I really wish there was some simple calculations that could be shown on how posts are ranked. For eg post A has x upvotes, y comments, is z minutes old and therefore rank 2. Post B has these values, while C is here. Hence this post went down the front page quickly.
It's not that I don't trust the mods explicitly, it's just that showing such numbers (if they exist) would be helpful for transparency.
I really don't care about the "algorithm" here. I think this place is distinguished nicely by the fact that I almost never know how much karma a post or user has. If it was in fact a total dictatorship of a few, posing as some democratic reddit thing, who cares? I'm OK as it is, and these things don't last forever anyway.
All you can really do on the internet is ride the waves of synchronicity where the community and moderation is at harmony, and jump ship when it isnt! Any other conceit that some algorithm or innovation or particular transparency will be this cure all to <whatever it is we want> feels like it never pans out, the boring truth is that we are all soft squishy people.
Show me a message board that is ultimately more harmonious and diverse and big as this one!
>I think this place is distinguished nicely by the fact that I almost never know how much karma a post or user has.
Did you know that people who have been involved with Y Combinator who make an account on HN can see everyone else who has been a part of Y Combinator? Their usernames are highlighted a different color.
It's a literal secret club that they rarely acknowledge.
The innovation on detecting patterns would be incredible, and in reality I think would be best to evolve into allowing user-decided algorithms that they personally subscribe to.
Thanks for linking. I suppose my base argument would be why not let each individual decide for themselves - whether HN is a "low trust" or "high trust" source to them? Over enough time with enough data, certain macro patterns may emerge also that otherwise aren't easily observed by any individual - no matter how present they are, as I'm sure you've probably said countless times you're unable to see every link or thread posted to moderate, as there's just far too much activity.
I would also suggest such conversation would need to be corralled into some sort of secondary HN forum branch, discussion on observations, insights, etc. In general it could be useful for people to also learn about observing patterns for their own sites they own or manage.
I do understand it can facilitate a bit of a "weapons" race, in that if there are bad actors seeking to have many human looking bot accounts (or a single person orchestrating many accounts), then they now too would see how their fingerprints look compared to others as well.
Ultimately I think Elon Musk is right though that to help dissuade spam and organizations-ideologues from shaping narratives and controlling what's allowed to be seen and discussed, that an actual $ cost is required.
Perhaps HN could implement a $5/month (or even higher tiers)? For most on HN, if they are in the tech field, even $50/month for arguably a higher curated-"more moderated" forum, isn't much for the individual - and if a filter to only show posts and/or comments by those paying AND/OR better yet, filtering based on including only votes by those at different tiers - then that is affordable compared to say someone who maybe somehow is running 1,000 users; although unfortunately $50,000/month isn't much for organizations or nations with an agenda, if that's all it takes to keep certain truths suppressed as much and as quickly as possible.
People always interested and fascinated by the algorithm whenever it comes up. Dang makes the (correct) assertion that people will much more easily game it if they know the intricacies. PG always churlishly jumps in to say there’s nothing interesting about it and any discussion of it is boring.
Pretty asinine response but I work in Hollywood and each studio lot has public tours giving anyone that wants a glimpse behind the curtain. On my shows, we’ve even allowed those people to get off the studio golf cart to peek inside at our active set. Even answering questions they have about what they see which sometimes explains Hollywood trickery.
I’m sure there’s tons of young programmers that would love to see and understand how such a long-lasting great community like this one persists.
I dunno. This is standard practice for things like SEO algos to try to slow down spammers, or risk algos to slow down scammers.
HN drives a boatload of traffic, so getting on the front page has economic value. That means there are 100% people out there who will abuse a published ranking system to spam us.
wait long enough and the other product will be able to expose the secrets.
future gpt prompt : "Take 200000 random comments and threads from hacker news, look at how they rank over time and make assumptions about how the moderation staff may be affecting what you consume. Precisely consider the threads or comments which have risque topics regarding politics or society or projects that are closely related to Hacker News moderation staff or Y Combinator affiliates."
It's not sacrilege, it's just that people rarely have any basis for saying this beyond just it kind of feels that way based on one or maybe two datapoints, and feeliness really doesn't count. We take real abuse seriously and I've personally put hundreds (feels like thousands) of hours into that problem over many years - but there has to be some sort of data to go on.
PG is Altman's godfather more or less. I am disappoint of these OpenAI news as of late.
5. Sam Altman
I was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be.
Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask "What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask "What would Sama do?"
What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the elect applies to startups. It applies way less than most people think: startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners the way you might in a horse race. But there are a few people with such force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
It's really easy to make people whole for this, so whether that happens or not is the difference between the apologies being real or just them just backpedaling because employees got upset.
Edit: Looks like they're doing the right thing here:
> Altman’s initial statement was criticized for doing too little to make things right for former employees, but in an emailed statement, OpenAI told me that “we are identifying and reaching out to former employees who signed a standard exit agreement to make it clear that OpenAI has not and will not cancel their vested equity and releases them from nondisparagement obligations” — which goes much further toward fixing their mistake.