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.
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.
There was still potential to engage 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."
> 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.
I suppose there's probably a bunch of legalese to prevent that though...
And standard doesn't mean shit... Every regime in the history of mankind had standards!
It reads like omertà.
I wonder if I'll still get downvoted for saying this. A lot can change in 24 hours.
Edit: haha :-P
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..."
That's like P.Diddy saying I'm sorry.
That's damage control for being caught doing something bad ... again.
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.
> 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.
don't contact OpenAI legal, which leaves an unsavory paper trail
contact me directly, so we can talk privately on the phone and I can give you a little $$$ to shut you up
Looks like they’re doing that.
Unless and until that's what they say, looks like they’re not doing that.
Well, no:
> 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.
> 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.
No doubt, openai is as vacuous as their product is effect. GIGO.
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).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.
They think they are about to change the entire world. And a very large but of the world agrees. (I personally think it's a great tool but exaggerated)
But that created an very big power play where people don't act normal anymore and the most powerhungry people come out to play.
It's all just drama to draw attention and investor money, that's it.
When the inventors leave there is nothing left to do but sell more.
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.
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
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"
"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.
In the intro, Patrick goes off-script to make a joke about how last year he'd interviewed SBF, which was "clearly the wrong Sam".
I'm eagerly waiting for 2025, when he interviews some new Sam and is able to recycle the joke. :)
"i've been genuinely embarrassed" --> "yep, totally not my fault actually"
"I should have known" --> "other people fucked this up, and they didn't even inform me"
I was trying to be a bit restrained in my criticism; otherwise, it gets too repetitive.
Nobody has to use youtube either.
If you want change in the video platform space, either be willing to pay a subscription or watch ads.
Consumers don't want to do either, and hence no one wants to enter the space.
He’s not exactly new to this whole startup thing and getting equity right is not a small part of that
In the original context, it sounded very much like he was referring to clawed-back equity. I’m trying to find the link.
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!!
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?
Why aren't they simply asking their product?
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".
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.
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 (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), which is what we're hoping to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
I hesitate to say "it's as simple as that" because HN is a complicated beast and there are always other factors, but...it's kind of as simple as that.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It should not be surprising that the outcomes are different.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
"Fuck you, poors."
Were they really stupid enough to think that the amount of money being offered would bend some of the most principled people in the world?
Whoever allowed those clauses to be added and let them remain has done more damage to the public face of OpenAI than any aggravated ex-employee ever could.
Edit - sry why is this the top comment
This statement seems to suggest that feeling embarrassed by one's actions is a normal part of running a company. In reality, the expectation is that a CEO should strive to lead with integrity and foresight to avoid situations that lead to embarrassment.
It suggests humans makes mistakes and sometimes own up to them - which is a good thing.
> CEO should strive to lead with integrity and foresight to avoid situations that lead to embarrassment.
There is no human who does this , or are you saying turn the CEO role over to AI? :)
Now that LLM alternatives are getting better and better, as well as having well funded competitors. They don't yet have seem to developed a new, more advanced technology. What's their long term moat?
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.
https://p@ulgraham.com/5founders.html *edited link due to first post getting deleted
One is a well meaning but very naive older person who desperately wants to be liked by the cool kids, the other is a pretentious young conman who soars to the top by selling his “vision”. Michael is a huge simp for Ryan and thinks of himself as Ryan’s mentor, but is ultimately backstabbed by him just like everyone else.
He can’t be trusted, and as a result OpenAI cannot be trusted.
ps "responsibility" means "zero consequences"
> “We're incredibly sorry that we're only changing this language now; it doesn't reflect our values or the company we want to be.”
Yeah, right. Words don't necessarily reflect one's true values, but actions do.
And to the extent that they really are "incredibly sorry", it's not because of what they did, but that they got caught doing it.
Changes like that are hard to measure.
Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I do feel like the quality of discourse has taken a nose dive.
The relevant stakeholders here are the potential future employees, who are seeing in public exactly how OpenAI treats its employees.
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
And the employees also have way more leverage than Reddit users; at this point they should still be OpenAI's greatest asset. Even once this is fixed (which they obviously will do, given they got caught), it's still going to cause a major loss of trust in the entire leadership.
Lots of people have pointed out problems with your determination, but here's another one: can you really tell none of those people are posting to subvert reddit? I'm not going to go into details for privacy reasons, but I've "quit" websites in protest while continuing to post subversive content afterwards. Even after I "quit," I'm sure my activity looked good in the site's internal metrics, even though it was 100% focused on discouraging other users.
It's definitely had a very impact - but since it's not one that's likely to hit the bottom line in the short term, it's not like it matters in any way beyond the user experience.
I think your sample frame is off, they did themselves unforced damage in the long run.
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.
>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.
>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.
>Those incorporation documents were signed on April 10, 2023, by Sam Altman in his capacity as CEO of OpenAI.
You have to be really attuned to "is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit 'but we're good people, so,'"
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's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right.
But this is just because it's easier to categorise it when it's pointing at you. It'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.
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.
Let'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'd expect legality to be handled for me, inherited from the parent company.
Now let's also say the company turns out to be disproportionately successful. I'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?
But maybe there's a further step that someone like OpenAI seems uniquely capable of evolving.
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's make sure AI doesn't follow. Honestly,
I wonder if we would ever have access to Linux, if it were to be invented today?
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'd already gagged the ex-employees, nobody would dare leak the evidence?
It's pretty established now that they had some exceptionally anti-employee provisions in their exit policies to protect their fragile reputation. Sam Altman is bluntly a liar, and his credibility is gone.
Their stance as a pro-artist platform is a joke after the ScarJo fiasco, that clearly illustrates that creative consent was an afterthought. Litigation is assumed, and ScarJo is directly advocating for legislation to prevent this sort of fiasco in the future. Sam Altman's involvement is again evident from his trite "her" tweet.
And then they fired their "superalignment" safety team for good measure. As if to shred any last measure of doubt that this company is somehow more ethical than any other big tech company in their pursuit of AI.
Frankly, at this point, the board should fire Sam Altman again, this time for good. This is not the company that can, or should, usher humanity into the artificial intelligence era.
> 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.
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' schools sent to me for signing--read those as well.
He lies. And if he doesn't... then he is being libeled right and left by his sister.
I've read your posts for years on HN, don't undersell yourself.
Many CEOs don't know what is their company's contracts, nor do they think about it. While it is laudable that you paid such close attention, the fact is I've met many leaders who have no clue what is in their company's employment paperwork.
>
> https://twitter.com/anniealtman108
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.
Even if in this specific instance he means well, it's still quite entertaining to interpret his statements this way:
"we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity"
=> But we can and will, if we decide to.
"nor will we do that if people do not sign a separation agreement"
=> But we made everyone sign the separation agreement.
"vested equity is vested equity, full stop."
=> Our employees don't have vested equity, they have something else we tricked them into.
"there was a provision about potential equity cancellation in our previous exit docs;"
=> And also in our current docs.
"although we never clawed anything back"
=> Not yet, anyway.
"the team was already in the process of fixing the standard exit paperwork over the past month or so."
=> By "fixing", I don't mean removing the non-disparagement clause, I mean make it ironclad while making the language less controversial and harder to argue with.
"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."
=> We'll fix the employee, not the problem.
"very sorry about this."
=> Very sorry we got caught.
How would you interpret this part?
> and we're releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual.
This is interesting - was it mutual for most people?
But I guess anyone could be silenced with enough economic incentive?
I love this bullshit sentence formulation that claims to both have known this already--as in, don't worry we're ALREADY on the case--and they're simultaneously embarrassed that they "just" caught it--a.k.a. "wow, we JUST heard about this, how outRAGEOUS".
It’s becoming too much to just be honest oversights.
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'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't want us to: [1] [2]
Without reading our responses in the comments, can you tell which one was deliberate and which one wasn't? It'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't. (For the record, [1] was deliberate and [2] was not.)
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.
This 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 "what does paul graham think of Sam Altman" if you want additional evidence.
Where is all this hatred coming from?
Now Sam is seen as fucking with said stock, so maybe that isn’t panning out. Amazing surprise.
They wish. Napster is a more apt analogy.
Investors don't really care about consequences that don'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'll get customers.
What we don'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'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't understand the risks we wouldn't have nearly as much money being pumped into the industry.
OpenAI is worth 100B. At this level, a founder would have been worth $20B at least.
But Sam aren't getting any of that net worth but he gets all the bad reps that comes with running a 100B company.
I recently received an job recruitment email for an AI role in all-lowercase and I was baffled how to interpret it.
Aside: "full stop" is the Commonwealth English way of saying "period" so it seems like an affectation to see an American using it.
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.
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.
Something doesn't smell right
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.
So think about that. They offer you an average to low base salary but sweeten the deal with some 'equity' saying that it gives you a stake in the company. Neglecting to mention of course, how many different ways equity can be invalidated; How a year in tech is basically a life time; And how the whole thing is kind of structured to prevent autonomy as an employee. Often founders will use these kind of offers to gauge 'interest' because surely the people who are willing to take an offer that's backed more by magic bean equity money (over real money) are truly the ones most dedicated to the companies mission. So not being grateful for such amazing offers would be taken as a sign of offence by most founders (who would prefer to pay in hopes and dreams if they could.)
Now... with a shitcoin... even though the price may tank to zero you'll at least end up with a goofy item you own at the end of the day. Equity... not so much.
And a bunch of not-well-informed employees who didn't understand the consequences of this clause when they originally signed
It's not really the tech that is negative it is the humans manipulating it for profit and power, and behaving obnoxiously. The tech is very useful.