He&#x27;s on the board of AI safety too. Now I feel protected.

You&#x27;re so right, it&#x27;s utterly distracting to read a statement written in all lower case.It looks like it was written in a sloppy way and nobody actually proofread it.I think Sergey Brin used to do the same thing (or maybe it was Larry Page). I remember reading that in some google court case emails and thinking, the show Silicon Valley wasn&#x27;t even remotely exaggerating.

youre not worth moving my pinky to the shift key, and you think that missed apostrophe was a mistake?im busy running a billion dollar company i dont have time for this

Give it a year, it will become very uncool as people realize only people not using AI to make their writing better would send syntactically or grammatically incorrect wording.

Throw it at an LLM with the simple command &quot;fix&quot;, highlight every character that has a delta and send it back to them.Add a grade in red at the top if you&#x27;re feeling extra cheeky

I don’t think it’s only AI influencers that do this. I’ve noticed people use lowercase as some sort of power move. Like they’re so busy and important they don’t care about conventions.

Following convention and using standard capitalization rules makes things easier on the reader.Going to all-lowercase is harder on the reader, and thus is disrespectful of the reader. I will die on this hill.

Writing in all lowercase is an aesthetic akin to an executive wearing jeans and a T-shirt. It is supposed to impart an air of self-confidence, that you don’t need to signal your seriousness in order to be taken seriously.However such signalling is harder to pull off than it seems, and most who try do it poorly because they don’t realise that the casual aesthetic isn&#x27;t just a lack of care. Steve Jobs famously eschewed the suit for jeans and mock turtleneck. But those weren’t really casual clothes, those mock turtlenecks were bespoke, tailored garments made by a revered Japanese fashion designer. That is a world apart from throwing on whatever brand of T-shirt happens to feel comfortable to the wearer.

If I received a legitimate job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase I would put in the spam folder lol. sam altman typing in all lowercase letters shouldn&#x27;t influence people to do the same in semi-professional environments &amp; situations. I think Altman is trying to appear as casual, friendly, and attract the zoomer market by typing in all lowercase, it&#x27;s just my speculation and perhaps I&#x27;m over-reading into it.

i&#x27;ve been mostly using all lowercase for decades.. am i the asshole?

If I see a job application with spelling or grammar mistakes in it, then it&#x27;s a huge red flag; it tells me that this person does not care about accuracy or they don&#x27;t check their work very well. These are very important attributes to have in engineering.If you see it in a job advert, I&#x27;d assume the same for the people who are doing the hiring.

i read an article about bauhaus typography in high school and mostly dropped capitalization since then (~2005)whether i use them or not is basically a function of how much i think there will be consequences for not using them. if i do use them without coercion, it&#x27;s for Emphasis, or acronyms (like AI), or maybe sPoNgEbOb CaSei&#x27;m not sure where AI CEOs, or younger generations picked it up. but the &quot;only use capitals when coerced&quot; part seems similar

lowercase has been used by propeller heads and hackers since.. idk.. the 80s?  some of us just liked it better that way.

&gt; I recently received an job recruitment emailYet you use &quot;an&quot; for a vowel that&#x27;s miles away, so I don&#x27;t like the way you type either.

Semi off-topic, but the trend of AI influencers adopting the all-lowercase communication style in professional conversation has been very annoying. It makes them appear completely unserious.I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.

it’s the same as the tech lax dresscode, super high salaries, benefits, overall relaxed “we can get away with it because we’re both high status and enlightened” that operates as a signal to their assumed superiority.

It looks especially odd when the text contains other &quot;formalities&quot; like semicolons, or writing the phrase &quot;full stop&quot;.Aside: &quot;full stop&quot; is the Commonwealth English way of saying &quot;period&quot; so it seems like an affectation to see an American using it.

but sam said he was sorry in all lowercase so it must be okay

Another day, another article where Vox is hating on OpenAI.

Right. The big change is bad faith argument developing into unapologetic bad faith developing into weaponised bad faith.It accelerated rapidly with some trends like the Tea Party, Gamergate, Brexit, Andrew Wakefield, covid antivax, and the Ukraine situation, and is in evidence on both sides of the trans rights debate, in doxxing, in almost every single argument on X that goes past ten tweets, etc.It&#x27;s something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.But this is just because it&#x27;s easier to categorise it when it&#x27;s pointing at you. It&#x27;s actually the primary toxicity of all argument in the 21st century.And the reason is that weaponised bad faith is addictive fun for the operator.Basically everyone gets to be Lee Atwater or Roger Stone for a bit, and everyone loves it.

It&#x27;s been stultifying the older I get to see how easy it is for people to lie to themselves and others, everywhere.You have to be really attuned to &quot;is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit &#x27;but we&#x27;re good people, so,&#x27;&quot;

The mob that Vox represents these days is miniscule

This is them fucking over their employees though, not the public, and in a very concrete manner. Threats to rob them of millions - maybe tens of millions - are going to hurt more than losing access to a third-party Reddit client.And the employees also have way more leverage than Reddit users; at this point they should still be OpenAI&#x27;s greatest asset. Even once this is fixed (which they obviously will do, given they got caught), it&#x27;s still going to cause a major loss of trust in the entire leadership.

I stopped browsing Reddit. I imagine the people who posted comments to Reddit saying they’re going to leave Reddit aren’t a representative sample.

They probably care more about the effect on potential hires who are gonna second think by the fact that part of their pay may be cancelled due to some disagreement

It is hard to compete for high-end AI research and AI engineering talent. This definitely matters and they definitely should care. Their equity situation was already a bit of a barrier by being so unusual, now it&#x27;s going to be a harder sell.I know extremely desirable researchers who refuse to work for Elon because of how he has historically treated employees. Repeated issues like this will slowly add OpenAI to that list for more people.

I&#x27;m guessing the ones who actually left Reddit did what I did - they disengaged from the site and then deleted all their content and accounts. It&#x27;s pointless to complain without any actual power.The relevant stakeholders here are the potential future employees, who are seeing in public exactly how OpenAI treats its employees.

I went from very active on multiple subreddits to barely posting once every few months. Instead of answering programming questions or helping people get in shape I&#x27;m on other sites doing other things.Changes like that are hard to measure.

It’s not easy to get out of an abusive relationship

Sam Altman has stated over and over again, publicly: &quot;I don&#x27;t care what other people think.&quot;  And I&#x27;m not paraphrasing.

I actively quit producing content and deleted my account.Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do feel like the quality of discourse has taken a nose dive.

When the changes went through I nuked all my comments and then my account. I don&#x27;t know if many others did the same, but if so it would mean that you wouldn&#x27;t see our &quot;I&#x27;m leaving&quot; comments anymore, i.e. that we wouldn&#x27;t be included in your samples.

My activity on Reddit has gone way down since they stopped supporting .compact view on mobile. I definitely miss it and want to go back but it’s incredibly hard to engage with the content on mobile browsers now.

&gt; I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.I also remember when the internet was talking about the twenty four Reddit accounts that threatened to quit the site. It’s enlightening to see that the protest the size of Jethro Tull didn’t impact the site

Personally I only use Lemmy now. I never made a goodbye&#x2F;fuck spez post, I just stopped using Reddit.I think your sample frame is off, they did themselves unforced damage in the long run.

Honestly, from a moderation perspective, the dropoff has been stark - the quality of work behind the scenes has dropped off a cliff on most larger subreddits, and the quality of the content those subreddits facilitate has reduced in quality in turn.It&#x27;s definitely had a very impact - but since it&#x27;s not one that&#x27;s likely to hit the bottom line in the short term, it&#x27;s not like it matters in any way beyond the user experience.

&gt; A few days ago I was re-reading some of those threads about reddit API changes from ten months back where so many users claimed it was their last message and they were leaving for good. Almost none of them did. I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.Lots of people have pointed out problems with your determination, but here&#x27;s another one: can you really tell none of those people are posting to subvert reddit? I&#x27;m not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but I&#x27;ve &quot;quit&quot; websites in protest while continuing to post subversive content afterwards. Even after I &quot;quit,&quot; I&#x27;m sure my activity looked good in the site&#x27;s internal metrics, even though it was 100% focused on discouraging other users.

The risk is not users boycotting them. The risk is OpenAI having trouble recruiting and retaining top talent, which will cause them to eventually fall behind the competition, leading users to naturally leave.

I haven&#x27;t stopped using it immediately, but it definitely added to the growing list of problems. I don&#x27;t use that site anymore, except when a search result directs me there. Even then it&#x27;s a second choice of mine, because I need to disable my VPN to access it, and I won&#x27;t login.

I actually find myself to be using reddit much less. It’s not that I protesting, but it feels like the community changed into something more like Facebook folks. It doesn’t feel cutting edge anymore, it’s much more tamed stale. The fresh stuff isn’t on Reddit anymore.

Do they care? The mob will shout for a week or two and then turn their attention somewhere else. spez (the reddit chief) said something like that about their users, and he was absolutely right. A few days ago I was re-reading some of those threads about reddit API changes from ten months back where so many users claimed it was their last message and they were leaving for good. Almost none of them did. I checked two dozen profiles and all but one of them had fresh comments posted within that same day.

People are so gullible. Sam Altman deserves zero benefit of doubt. His words should be ignored, his words do not prove anything whatsoever.

Yes, I&#x27;ve definitely seen people believe that in various discussions. Combine &quot;Altman said they&#x27;d totally never done this&quot; with &quot;the ex-employee who first wrote about this didn&#x27;t write with absolute 100% clarity that this applied to vested equity&quot;, and there&#x27;s enough cover to continue believing what one wants to believe. And if the news cycle dies down before the lie is exposed, then that&#x27;s a win.Obviously that should not be possible any more with these leaked documents, given they prove both the existence of the scheme and Altman and other senior leadership knowing about it. Maybe they thought that since they&#x27;d already gagged the ex-employees, nobody would dare leak the evidence?

The public statements would suggest either that Sam Altman is lying or he signs anything that is put in front of him without reading it. I&#x27;m inclined to believe that whatever is said is PR (aka BS). In a court of law it is the written and signed contracts that are upheld.

Every legal clause that affects company ownership is accepted by the CEO and the board. It&#x27;s not something VP or general counsel can put there. Lo and behold, signatures from Altman and Kwon are there.&gt;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.&gt;OpenAI contains multiple passages with language that gives the company near-arbitrary authority to claw back equity from former employees or — just as importantly — block them from selling it.&gt;Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI.

&gt; I&#x27;d expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company.That sounds like a really bad idea for many many reasons. Lawyers are cheap compared to losing control, or even your stake, to legal shenanigans.

Not trying to play the devil&#x27;s advocate here, but I am thinking how this would play out if I ever opened a spinoff...Let&#x27;s say I find a profitable niche while working for a project and we decide to open a separate spin off startup to handle that idea. I&#x27;d expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company.Now let&#x27;s also say the company turns out to be disproportionately successful. I&#x27;d say I would have a lot on my plate to worry about, the least of which the legal part that the company inherited.In this scenario it is probable that hostile clauses in contracts would be dug up. I surely would be legally responsible for them, but how much would I be to blame for them, truly?And if the company handles the incident well, how important should that blame putting be?

They’re only apologetic because they got caught in a PR shitstorm. They would not otherwise. Being an sh*bag company that claws back equity is a huge red flag and can drive away the critical people who make up the company. They started an arms race, but with companies with much deeper pockets. Meta will be more than happy to gobble up any and every OpenAI employee who no longer wants to work there.

&gt; Do they expect anybody to believe they didn’t know about clawback clauses?Why wouldn’t they? I’m sure you can think of a couple of politicians and CEOs who in recent years have clearly demonstrated that no matter what they do or say, they will have a strong core of rabid fans eating their every word and defending them.

OpenAI is deeply sorry.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4</a>

&gt;People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhereThe percentage of HN users defending Altman has dropped massively since the board scandal ~6 months ago.&gt;consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it upCustomers will use the best model. If OpenAI loses investors and talent, their models may not be in the lead.IMO the best approach is to build your app so it&#x27;s agnostic to the choice of model, and take corporate ethics into consideration when choosing a model, in addition to performance.

I mean it&#x27;s not like anything is going to happen to them anyway.People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhere, consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it up and rivers of cash will flow per status quo to his pockets like no tomorrow.If one thoroughly wants to to make a change, one should support alternative open source models to remove our dependency on Altman and co; I fear for a day where such powerful technology is tightly controlled by OpenAI. We have already given up so much our computing freedom away to handful of companies, let&#x27;s make sure AI doesn&#x27;t follow. Honestly,I wonder if we would ever have access to Linux, if it were to be invented today?

Yep, it&#x27;s more like he reviewed and&#x2F;or requested those clauses to be there than anything else.

It has become a hallmark of Western civilization to first of all Cover Your Ass, and where it gets exposed, to Pretend It&#x27;s Covered, but when its photos get published, to Sincerely Apologize, and when pressed even more, to come out afresh with a Bold Pro-Coverage Vision and Commitment.But maybe there&#x27;s a further step that someone like OpenAI seems uniquely capable of evolving.

What surprises me about these stories surrounding openAI is how they apologize while lying and downplaying  any blame. Do they expect anybody to believe they didn’t know about clawback clauses?

Assuming that’s the only clause that they can use to cause people trouble. The article indicates it’s not.

Well, they say they are. But the nondisparagement agreement repeatedly forbids revealing the agreement itself, so if it wasn&#x27;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.)

Note that statement says nothing about whether they will be allowed to participate in liquidity events

&quot;We&#x27;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.&quot;Unless and until that&#x27;s what they say, looks like they’re not doing that.

&gt; ”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”Looks like they’re doing that.

Given what OpenAI&#x27;s been in the press for the past few weeks, I can&#x27;t help but feel this is a trap; even if it isn&#x27;t, Sam is certainly making it look like it is...

What Sam is saying is very different than what I&#x27;m saying. I&#x27;m saying he should be proactive and just do it, he&#x27;s saying that if people explicitly reach out to him then he&#x27;ll do it specifically for them.

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.

This looks like proper accountability and righting your wrongs to me. Much respect to Sam. I hope this isn’t just a performance for the public.

don&#x27;t go publicdon&#x27;t contact OpenAI legal, which leaves an unsavory paper trailcontact me directly, so we can talk privately on the phone and I can give you a little $$$ to shut you up

For whatever it&#x27;s worth (not much), Sam Altman did say they would do that&gt; if any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we&#x27;ll fix that too. very sorry about this.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1791936857594581428" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;sama&#x2F;status&#x2F;1791936857594581428</a>

Mistake? The clawback provisions were the executives&#x27; idea!

Honestly I&#x27;m willing to give the benefit of the doubt on that, depending on their actions, because I&#x27;m sure they sign so many documents they just rely on their legal teams to ensure they&#x27;re good.

Not a mistake...&quot;...But there&#x27;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...&quot;

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&#x27;t sign. This is definitely not &quot;standard restrictions&quot;.

No one off contracts. lol. What nonsense. Then why did bother to have a meeting? You handled that one like a boss.

Yeah, totally legit. Don&#x27;t worry about it, it&#x27;s not enforceable anyways. What, remove it from the contract? God no! Oh, I mean sorry, no one off contracts.

&gt; This reads like more than standard restrictions.It reads like omertà.I wonder if I&#x27;ll still get downvoted for saying this. A lot can change in 24 hours.Edit: haha :-P

If it&#x27;s non-enforceable, but you signed it, wouldn&#x27;t that make the contract void?I suppose there&#x27;s probably a bunch of legalese to prevent that though...

That lawyer was probably lying, bro, since he could not keep his money where his mouth was.

&gt; He said I can&#x27;t do that, no one off contracts.There was still potential to engage there:<pre><code> &quot;That&#x27;s alright, as you said it&#x27;s not enforceable anyway just remove it from everyone&#x27;s
 contract. It&#x27;ll just be the new version of the contract for everyone.&quot;
</code></pre>
Doubt it would have made any difference though, as the lawyer was super likely bullshitting.

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

Non-competes like this are often not enforceable, but it depends on the jurisdiction.

Not standard where I come from.And standard doesn&#x27;t mean shit... Every regime in the history of mankind had standards!

You did the right thing here.&gt; I was in meetings with a lawyer at the company who told me it&#x27;s probably not enforceable, don&#x27;t worry about itLife rule: if the party you&#x27;re negotiating a contact with says anything like &quot;don&#x27;t worry about that, it&#x27;s not enforceable&quot; or &quot;it&#x27;s just boilerplate, we never enforce that&quot; but refuses to strike it from the contract then run, don&#x27;t walk, away from table. Whoever you&#x27;re dealing with is not operating in good faith.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s probably not enforceable, don&#x27;t worry about it, and the FTC is about to end non-competes. I said great, strike it from the contract and I&#x27;ll sign it right now. He said I can&#x27;t do that, no one off contracts. So then I said I&#x27;m not working there.

Yeah, agree, but they don&#x27;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.

&gt;Edit: Looks like they&#x27;re doing the right thing hereThat&#x27;s like P.Diddy saying I&#x27;m sorry.That&#x27;s damage control for being caught doing something bad ... again.

Form follows function, art imitates life, dog owners grow to look like their dogs...

LLM cares not whether something is said or whether the action is described.No doubt, openai is as vacuous as their product is effect. GIGO.

Plenty of legitimate things to criticize EA for, no need to smear them by association with someone who&#x27;s never claimed to be an EA and hasn&#x27;t obviously behaved like one either.

&gt; Edit: Looks like they&#x27;re doing the right thing here:&gt; 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 microsoft2. Do microsoft playbook of &#x27;oh I didn&#x27;t mean to be shady we will correct&#x27; 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 &#x27;EA&#x27; deals with consent concerns.

&gt; Looks like they&#x27;re doing the right thing hereEven if that&#x27;s true (and I&#x27;m not saying it is, or it isn&#x27;t, I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

You surely don&#x27;t actually believe Altman when he says they&#x27;re doing this? Like Elon Musk, Altman is a known liar and should not be trusted. It&#x27;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&#x27;m starting to understand how crypto scams work.

Meant to write the same thing. Agree but at least it is known now

The right thing would be to not try to put that clause in there to begin with, not release employees from it when they get caught.

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&#x27;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 &quot;I didn&#x27;t know what the legal documents I signed meant, which specifically had a weird clause that standard agreements don&#x27;t&quot; isn&#x27;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.

&gt; Looks like they&#x27;re doing the right thing here:Well, no:&gt; We&#x27;re removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperwork, and we&#x27;re releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual. We&#x27;ll communicate this message to former employees.So the former successfully blackmailed employees, stay blackmailed.

It shouldn&#x27;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.

&gt; If this really was a mistakeThe article makes it clear that it wasn&#x27;t a mistake at all. It&#x27;s a lie. They were playing hardball, and when it became public they switched to PR crisis management to try and save their &quot;image&quot;, or what&#x27;s left of it.They&#x27;re not the good guys. I&#x27;d say they&#x27;re more of a caricature of bad guys, since they get caught every time. Something between a classic Bond villain and Wile E. Coyote.

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&#x27;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&#x27;re doing the right thing here:&gt; 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.

&gt; I wonder what they were thinking with that?&quot;Fuck you, poors.&quot;

Nothing quite like a contract’s consideration consisting solely of a pre-existing obligation. I wonder what they were thinking with that?

It sure means a lot more after liquidity, but big successful companies like spacex do have a market selling pre-ipo options or shares or whatever.

They don&#x27;t need clawback. They can just dilute the f out of you. Which is what happens most of the time anyways

I have never seen it in quite a few equity agreements I&#x27;ve looked at. What is common is a very short post-termination exercise window that in practice acts as a clawback unless you are financially able and willing to pay the cost&#x2F;taxes of exercising within (often) 90 days.And a bunch of not-well-informed employees who didn&#x27;t understand the consequences of this clause when they originally signed

I bet similar claw-back clauses are waaay more common than many on this thread would imagine at private co&#x27;s. I&#x27;ve always been under the impression that &#x27;vested equity&#x27; doesn&#x27;t mean ~anything until you actually see liquidity. The company can generally fuck you before that point if they choose to. Hope I&#x27;m being overly cynical with this take.

Did it hate the market dynamics. i.e. Peter theils thesis that competition is for losers because it drives up prices... therefore the shortage of talent was creating competition which should be hated?

It always hated its workers, it just didn&#x27;t think it had other options for a long time.

Then notion here is that the ownership class hates that it cannot own the creators of work. And now a new class if intelligence exists that can be fully owned.This is dark.

Since the beginning:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Traitorous_eight#Frictions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Traitorous_eight#Frictions</a>

Yea this has always been a market dynamics issue that it tried to manipulate... but it didn&#x27;t have a flavor of hatred to it.

Seems to pre-date semi-intelligent AI agents: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...</a>

Why had the advent of semi-intelligent agents suddenly turned Silicon Valley into a place that now hates its own workers. Why is it that a place that once believed the mutual benefit of an intelligent worker and a company has turned into a time to brutalize or even hate the very creators of this technologyWhere is all this hatred coming from?

It&#x27;s funny to me to read now about employees of OpenAI being coerced or tricked or whatever. Didn&#x27;t they threaten to resign en masse a few months ago, in total unquestioned support of Sam Altman? They pretty much walked into it, in my opinion.That&#x27;s not saying anything OpenAI or Altman do is excusable, no way. I just feel like there&#x27;s almost no good guys in this story.

The majority of employees didn’t care about a lying CEO or alignment research: they wanted the stock payoffs and Sam was the person offering it - end of the day that’s what happened with the coup.Now Sam is seen as fucking with said stock, so maybe that isn’t panning out. Amazing surprise.

Well appropriately enough it was an AI movie that taught as a valuable lesson, namely that sometimes the only correct move is not to play.It&#x27;s such an insidious idea that we ought to accept that you can just give up your promises you explicitly made once those rules get into your way of doing exactly what they were supposed to prevent. That&#x27;s not anyone else&#x27;s problem, that was the point! The people that can&#x27;t do that are supposed to align AI? They can&#x27;t align themselves

I wish more people didn&#x27;t expect an alternative before getting rid if a bad situation. Sometimes subtraction, rather than replacement, is still the right answer.

I&#x27;ll bet Emmett Shear would&#x27;ve been a fine CEO.

While true, it doesn&#x27;t mean they were offering a better alternative.

Doesn&#x27;t really matter at this point because they gave literally zero info to the public or most of the company employees when they fired Altman. Almost no one sided with them because they never attempted to explain anything.

It&#x27;s really maddening just how right the board was.

I don’t believe in the AGI claims, or in X-Risk. But I do think it’s apparent that AI will only become more powerful and ubiquitous. Very concerning that someone like Sam, with a history of dishonesty and narcissism that is only becoming more obvious time, may stand to control a large chunk of this technology.He can’t be trusted, and as a result OpenAI cannot be trusted.

It&#x27;s for the good of humanity... that part of humanity that may not want bad PR.

There is another very famous leader on trial for exactly that right now.

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.

This really is OpenAI&#x27;s Downing Street Christmas Party week isn&#x27;t it.

Instead of taking 15 years to drop the &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; act like Google, the new AI companies did it in two! e&#x2F;acc, baby!

The sad thing is that this isn&#x27;t even MBAs. The Bay area has gotten so infested with the hustlers and win-at-all-costs, winner-takes-all YC mantra tech bros that it seems even a high minded company like OpenAI isn&#x27;t immune

It’s not just the MBAs that saw dollar signs.  A lot of the engineers and researchers did, too.

Who are the MBAs that did this? Altman is not an MBA.

As much as I love blaming things on MBAs, the culture of OpenAI looks at least as much like what happens when you make a room full of real-life Big Bang Theory nerds very rich by rewarding their fantasies of a world free of balanced human interactions.We have to look at the reality that the worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture aren’t stemming from the adults sent to run the ship anymore, and they aren’t stemming from the nerds those adults co-opt anymore either.The worst excesses of the new Silicon Valley culture are coming from nerds who are empowered and rewarded for their superpower of being unable to empathise.And I say that as someone who is back to being almost a hermit. We got here by paying people like us and not insisting we try to stop saying what we think without pausing first to think about how it will be received by people not like us.It’s not a them-vs-us thing now. It’s us-vs-us.

They could have been cool. They could have been 2001 Google. They could have been the number one place any new PhD wanted to work.But no. The MBAs saw dollar signs, and everything went out the window. They fumbled the early mover advantage, and will be hollowed out by the competition and commodified by the PaaS giants. What a shame.

&gt;OpenAI will in the coming years turn out just as ruthless and socially damaging as Facebook did.They wish. Napster is a more apt analogy.

Less of a prediction and more of a descriptor of its current state

I know shitting on FB is de rigueur. But honestly Facebook at its peak was really very useful in many ways that OpenAI hasn&#x27;t ever been.

Don&#x27;t forget about Reddit and Twitter.  Although they like to call themselves social networks, they are really corporate psyop networks for hire.

In the coming years?  It pretty much already is

I&#x27;ll make a prediction here: OpenAI will in the coming years turn out just as ruthless and socially damaging as Facebook did.

While I agree that there&#x27;s probably a varying degree of attention paid...I think that this clause is so non-standard for tech that it almost certainly got flagged or was explicitly discussed before being added that claiming that he didn&#x27;t know it was there strains credulity badly.

&gt; Presumably Sam Altman has 20 IQ points on me.I&#x27;ve read your posts for years on HN, don&#x27;t undersell yourself.Many CEOs don&#x27;t know what is their company&#x27;s contracts, nor do they think about it. While it is laudable that you paid such close attention, the fact is I&#x27;ve met many leaders who have no clue what is in their company&#x27;s employment paperwork.

I think someone mentioned possible mental health conditions that she might have. But in either case it is pure speculation and we&#x27;re random people on the internet, not legal investigators, for better or worse.

&gt; He lies. And if he doesn&#x27;t... then he is being libeled right and left by his sister.&gt;&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anniealtman108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anniealtman108</a>You know, it’s always heartbreaking to me seeing family issues spill out in public, especially on the internet. If the things Sam’s sister says about him are all true, then he’s, at the very minimum, an awful brother, but honestly, a lot of it comes across as a bitter or jealous sibling…really sad though.

Maybe he was to busy being kicked out of the company...
&#x2F;s

From Sam Altman:&gt; this is on me and one of the few times i&#x27;ve been genuinely embarrassed running openai; i did not know this was happening and i should have.Bullshit. Presumably Sam Altman has 20 IQ points on me. He obviously knows better. I was a CEO for 25 years and no contract was issued without my knowing every element in it. In fact, I had them all written by lawyers in plain English, resorting to all caps and legal boilerplate only when it was deemed necessary.For every house, business, or other major asset I sold if there were 1 or more legal documents associated with the transaction I read them all, every time. When I go to the doctor and they have a privacy or HIPAA form, I read those too. Everything the kids&#x27; schools sent to me for signing--read those as well.He lies. And if he doesn&#x27;t... then he is being libeled right and left by his sister.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anniealtman108" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anniealtman108</a>

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.

IMHO HN data should be transparent.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.

I really don&#x27;t care about the &quot;algorithm&quot; 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&#x27;m OK as it is, and these things don&#x27;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 &lt;whatever it is we want&gt; 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!

The main component of the HN ranking algorithm is sentiment divided by YC holdings in the company in question. We&#x27;ve all seen it.

This post and discussion from 2013 might interest you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6799854">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=6799854</a>

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&#x27;s not that I don&#x27;t trust the mods explicitly, it&#x27;s just that showing such numbers (if they exist) would be helpful for transparency.

Wait til you hear what happened to Michael O’Church.

It&#x27;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&#x27;ve figured out about improving thread quality in the last 10 years.But it doesn&#x27;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&#x27;re talking about tend to choke all of that out, so downweighting them is very much in HN&#x27;s critical path.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment&amp;query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;sor...</a>

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

That post was, as far as I can tell, basically an opinion piece repeating&#x2F;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.

PG is Altman&#x27;s godfather more or less. I am disappoint of these OpenAI news as of late.5. Sam AltmanI was told I shouldn&#x27;t mention founders of YC-funded companies in this list. But Sam Altman can&#x27;t be stopped by such flimsy rules. If he wants to be on this list, he&#x27;s going to be.Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I&#x27;m advising startups. On questions of design, I ask &quot;What would Steve do?&quot; but on questions of strategy or ambition I ask &quot;What would Sama do?&quot;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&#x27;re going to get whatever they want.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;5founders.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;5founders.html</a>

I didn&#x27;t see that comment but I did post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40437018">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40437018</a> elsewhere in that thread, which addresses the same concerns. If anyone reads that and still has a concern, I&#x27;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&#x27;t turn the penalties off because the post didn&#x27;t contain significant new information (SNI), which is the test we apply (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment&amp;query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;so...</a>). Current post does contain SNI so it&#x27;s still high on HN&#x27;s front page.Why do we do it this way? Not to protect any organization (including YC itself, and certainly including OpenAI or any other BigCo), but simply to avoid repetition. Repetition is the opposite of intellectual curiosity (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment&amp;query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;so...</a>), which is what we&#x27;re hoping to optimize for (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment&amp;query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;sor...</a>).I hesitate to say &quot;it&#x27;s as simple as that&quot; because HN is a complicated beast and there are always other factors, but...it&#x27;s kind of as simple as that.

And today: a post about Johansson&#x27;s voice was on the front page with quite a high score, and then disappeared. This is not the place to discuss OpenAI.

I wonder if this HN post will get torpedoed as fast as the one from yesterday[0].0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40435440">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40435440</a>

You absolutely can, you just better have the leverage necessary

Protip: you can’t negotiate terms after you agree to them.

PDF:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;24679729&#x2F;aestas_reduced.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;s3.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;24679729&#x2F;aestas_reduc...</a>

So disappointing of OpenAI. I hope they&#x27;ll make things right with all their former employees.

Founders&#x2F;CEOs don&#x27;t lose track of equity or contracts around it.  Every 1&#x2F;10 of a percent is tracked and debated with investors.

He was obviously lying, and he probably also knew people would not believe it. I just don&#x27;t know why he still chose to do it.

I find it hard to believe that Sam didn’t know about something that draconian in something so sensitive as NDAs that affects to equity.He’s not exactly new to this whole startup thing and getting equity right is not a small part of that

But their product isn’t really differentiated anymore and has really low switching costs: Opus is better at almost anything than the 4-series (training on MMLU isn’t a capability increase), Mistral is competitive and vastly more operator-aligned, both are cheaper and non-scandal plagued.Mistral even has Azure distribution.FAIR is flat open-sourcing competitive models and has a more persuasive high-level representation learning agenda.What cards? Brand recognition?

already cancelled my OpenAI account and installed llama3 on my local machine, and have a paid Copilot membership

It doesn&#x27;t matter because they hold all of the cards. It&#x27;s the nature of power: you can get away with things that you normally couldn&#x27;t. If you really want OpenAI to behave, you&#x27;ll support their competitors and&#x2F;or open source initiatives.

Seems this Altman fella isn&#x27;t being consistently candid with us.

Yeah, not radiating &quot;consistent candidness&quot; is he?

Well, in this case, you have the CEO saying basically they didn’t know about it until about a month ago and then Vox brings receipts with docs signed by Altman and Friends showing he and others signed off on the policy originally (or at least as of the date of the doc, which is about a year ago for one of them). And we have several layers of evidence from several different directions accumulating and indicating that Altman is (and this is a considered choice of words) a malicious shitbag. That seems to qualify as a pretty solid exception to the general rule that you cite of not attributing to malice etc.

Maybe I&#x27;m misunderstanding, but this seems straightforward: the first link goes to an email that went out announcing a change, which seems pretty deliberate; nobody writes an announcement that they&#x27;re introducing a bug. The second change doesn&#x27;t seem to have been announced, which leaves open the possibility that it&#x27;s accidental.Although I suppose someone could claim the email was sent by mistake, and some deliberate changes aren&#x27;t announced.

&gt; you shouldn&#x27;t attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidityIt&#x27;s worth noting that Hanlon’s razor was not originally intended to be interpreted as a philosophical aphorism in the same way as Occam’s:&gt; The term ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ and its accompanying phrase originally came from an individual named Robert. J. Hanlon from Scranton, Pennsylvania as a submission for a book of jokes and aphorisms, published in 1980 by Arthur Bloch.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedecisionlab.com&#x2F;reference-guide&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;hanlons-razor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedecisionlab.com&#x2F;reference-guide&#x2F;philosophy&#x2F;hanlon...</a>Hopefully we can collectively begin to put this notion to rest.

It&#x27;s the correct counter-strategy to people who believe that you shouldn&#x27;t attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity (and who don&#x27;t update that prior for their history with a particular actor).And it works in part because things often are accidents - enough to give plausible deniability and room to interpret things favorably if you want to. I&#x27;ve seen this from the inside. Here are two HN threads about times my previous company was exposing (or was planning to expose) data users didn&#x27;t want us to: [1] [2]Without reading our responses in the comments, can you tell which one was deliberate and which one wasn&#x27;t? It&#x27;s not easy to tell with the information you have available from the outside. The comments and eventual resolutions might tell you, but the initial apparent act won&#x27;t. (For the record, [1] was deliberate and [2] was not.)[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23279837">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23279837</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31769601">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31769601</a>

This is what “Better to ask forgiveness than for permission” looks like when people start catching on.It’s one of the startup catchphrases that brings people a lot of success when they’re small and people aren’t paying attention, but starts catching up when the company is big and under the microscope.

&gt; There’s a recurring pattern here of OpenAI getting caught red handed doing bad things and then being all like “Oh it was just a misunderstandingThis is a very standard psychopathic behavior.They (psychopaths) typically milk the willingness of their victims to accept the apology and move on to the very last drop.Altman is a high-iq manipulative psychopath, there is a trail of breadcrumb evidence 10 miles long at this point.Google &quot;what does paul graham think of Sam Altman&quot; if you want additional evidence.

There’s a recurring pattern here of OpenAI getting caught red handed doing bad things and then being all like “Oh it was just a misunderstanding, nothing more, we’ll get on to fixing that ASAP… nothing to see here…”It’s becoming too much to just be honest oversights.

They want to get rich. They believe it will lead them to it.

I recall that only some wanted him back, and the split was product&#x2F;research—the “let’s get rich!” types wanted him back, the “let’s do AI!” types adamantly didn’t.

If Sam didn&#x27;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&#x27;t give out any information that could&#x27;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.

Does someone know why the employees wanted him back so badly? Must be very few employees actually upset with him and his way of doing things.

Plus there&#x27;s a million ways you can get screwed out of your equity

Everyone is out for Sam Altman, and there are reasons to scrutinize him. But on this issue - it is common for a company&#x27;s Legal and HR teams to make decisions on language in docs like these (exit docs) entirely on their own. So it is plausible that Sam Altman had no idea that this aggressive language existed. One reason to think the same thing is true here, is I recall Sam spoke up for employee friendly equity plans when he was running YC.

Imagine if these people, obviously narrow-minded and greedy, gain access to AGI. It really would be a thread to mankind.

It&#x27;s better to check whether it&#x27;s true

A company that was honest wouldn&#x27;t lobby the government to lock out others.

The company that fails in even a simple good faith gesture in their employee aggreement, claims it is the only one who can handle AGI while government creating regulation to lock out open source.

Sure. Selectively preventing sales isn&#x27;t. But it&#x27;s not uncommon to have blanket prohibitions. You&#x27;re right, though.

&gt; agreements that block employees from selling (private) vested equity are a market termThey 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 &quot;market term&quot;.

I&#x27;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 &quot;just as important&quot; as the clawback terms, but, obviously, no.

&gt; We&#x27;re removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperwork&quot;We&#x27;re replacing them with even more draconian terms that are not technically nondisparagement clauses&quot;&gt; and we&#x27;re releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual.&quot;We offered some employees $1 in exchange for signing up to the nondisparagement clause, which technically makes it a binding contract because there was an exchange of value.&quot;

&gt; We&#x27;re removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperworkHow would you interpret this part?&gt; and we&#x27;re releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual.This is interesting - was it mutual for most people?

I&#x27;ve learned to interpret anything Sam Altman says as-if an Aes Sedai said it. That is: every word is true, but leads the listener to making false assumptions.Even if in this specific instance he means well, it&#x27;s still quite entertaining to interpret his statements this way:&quot;we have never clawed back anyone&#x27;s vested equity&quot;=&gt; But we can and will, if we decide to.&quot;nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement&quot;=&gt; But we made everyone sign the separation agreement.&quot;vested equity is vested equity, full stop.&quot;=&gt; Our employees don&#x27;t have vested equity, they have something else we tricked them into.&quot;there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs;&quot;=&gt; And also in our current docs.&quot;although we never clawed anything back&quot;=&gt; Not yet, anyway.&quot;the team was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so.&quot;=&gt; By &quot;fixing&quot;, I don&#x27;t mean removing the non-disparagement clause, I mean make it ironclad while making the language less controversial and harder to argue with.&quot;if any former employee who signed one of those old agreements is worried about it, they can contact me and we&#x27;ll fix that too.&quot;=&gt; We&#x27;ll fix the employee, not the problem.&quot;very sorry about this.&quot;=&gt; Very sorry we got caught.

Those are shocking allegations, real question is why Sam, as a wealthy man, isn&#x27;t able to support his family?

Not gonna lie, I think its shady as fuck that a new account registers to post this one comment...

Well, it is wrong to disparage someone that is innocent until proven otherwise. Even if you disagree with them and think they are a snake-oil salesman.That does not mean you should not hear someone out. As far as I am aware Annie said Sam and their brother molested her as a kid. He claims otherwise, and deflects with “she is a drug addict” (heavily paraphrasing here). Lots of talk of how her trust was broken, and it is impossible to get justice against someone so rich and powerful, etc. where sama’s camp claim it is a money grab and there is zero proof. A sticky wicket.Now, whether all these “new” revelations (honestly never thought Sam was honest) help support her claims is up to you. Just wanted to add some context for those unaware. Not accusing anyone.

What is up with the allegations of Annie Altman?Something doesn&#x27;t smell right

AI-native companies seem to bring a new form of working culture. It could be different from tech industries environment.

Because this isn’t something instituted by the head of HR alone.

I don&#x27;t understand whenever you read about something like this, why the head of HR at a company like this (just google (head of people|hr|&quot;human resources&quot; openai linkedin) and see the first result) doesn&#x27;t end up on a public blacklist of bad actors who are knowingly aggressive toward employees!

The thing is, he didn&#x27;t ask you. He put himself into a position where anyone not giving him money would feel they&#x27;re missing out. It&#x27;s very unfortunate that he managed to pull it off.

I&#x27;ve reached the point where I wouldn&#x27;t trust Altman with anything more consequential than a lemonade stand.

Well that&#x27;s the problem, isn&#x27;t it? The incentives align with trusting Altman to make a return on your investment, nothing more.Investors don&#x27;t really care about consequences that don&#x27;t hit the bottom line prior to an exit. Consumers are largely driven by hype. Throw a shiny object out there and induce FOMO, you&#x27;ll get customers.What we don&#x27;t have are incentives for companies to give a damn. While that can easily lead to a call for even more government powers and regulation, in my opinion we won&#x27;t get anywhere until we have an educated populous. If the average person either (a) understood the potential risks of actual AI or (b) knew that they didn&#x27;t understand the risks we wouldn&#x27;t have nearly as much money being pumped into the industry.

Sam is in a tough position.OpenAI is worth 100B. At this level, a founder would have been worth $20B at least.But Sam aren&#x27;t getting any of that net worth but he gets all the bad reps that comes with running a 100B company.

It&#x27;s neither consequential nor AI which we won&#x27;t see, our children won&#x27;t see, their children won&#x27;t see, etc., so seems fine to trust Altman with chatbots.

Why anyone trusts Altman or OpenAI with something as societally consequential as AI is beyond me.

Leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former employees