I've already wasted a lot of my own time and energy on this, but I'm starting to get a bit confused on this whole thing. People seem pretty comfortable jumping to a profit-driven motivation for employees potentially leaving OpenAI in pursuit of some kind of loyalty to Altman.
But I'm just thinking of the rancor that has been heaped on Terraform, for example, for changing its license. The argument always seems to be that Hashicorp mislead contributors by claiming to release their contributions as open source and now they've reneged on that deal.
My understanding of OpenAI's mission was that there was a fear that AI being developed inside of big tech companies would provide undue advantage to the very few companies that were able to afford the teams and hardware necessary. Meanwhile the rest of us would be unaware of those advancement being made behind closed doors while those behemoths created an insurmountable gap.
Yet now, for some reason, everyone is literally cheerleading the gutting of OpenAI and gleefully pushing the employees into one of the biggest and most notorious tech giants there ever was.
You almost have to wonder, is this the greatest psychological twist in recent memory? People aren't just OK with them turning into a profit-seeking venture, they are seemingly begging for it. There is almost no opposition to it. And for what? Because of some guy none of us actually knows, who we've only seen on TV? And big tech guys like Paul Graham, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella - a literal who's-who of the tech giant oligarchy - are all fawning over this young man, along with visits to the white house, meeting foreign presidents, etc.
We went from "big corps are bad" to "big corps are saviours" in less than a week. And I'm not even sure what we think they are saving us from.
“Open”AI already was an unaccountable big corp. They’ve already refused not only to open their weights but to publish most of their research, to create an insurmountable gap with the rest of the world, and to legislate it in with lobbying. “Openness” merely meant “the API is open to your money”, with opaque “content policies” we had no say in. They had the same unaccountable and opaque power and the same commercial drive, but “for our own good” as they define it unilaterally.
Moving to MSFT merely means they’ll do the same thing, but with a bit more reliability, a bit more fear of liability, and a bit less of the doomerist sanctimony of the original leadership. Better to at least have a bigco with coherent and stable values like money. The bigco “nonprofit” led by the current board has made erratic decisions, has insane longtermist and EA values, and refused to give any meaningful statement about why they did what they did. Inasmuch as they resist commercialization, it’s to have more opacity and more control not less. How can we trust these people with control over AGI? Better to junk the board and deal with straightforward greed rather than hubris.
I don't understand why you putting the blame on the board, instead of the CEO, who:
1. is way more responsible for the direction the company deviated to
2. was in fight against the board, who did not like his direction
3. will be in the new company leading everything.
So all the bad that you criticize OpenAI for would leave to MS, and yet people are still cheering for it.
Yes, the EAs and longtermists on the board probably disliked the commercial focus of “Open”AI or its rapid scaling; I’m not blaming them for Laundry Buddy. But make no mistake: the nonprofit board had even less interest in opening up their research or sharing their code. They and the “superalignment” team believe AGI can end the world and needs to be in safe hands (i.e. their own hands). The EA movement which they are embedded in is one of the leading forces advocating shutting down open AI development through regulation.
The board has strong EA and doomerist ties. Within OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever is on record as saying that the world will realize open-sourcing weights is foolish by 2025, and the Atlantic reported he literally burned an effigy of “unaligned” AI at the company retreat. Helen Toner is similarly involved in “AI governance” and not coincidentally took funding early in her career from OpenPhil, one of the key EA slush funds. The new CEO, their appointee, is quite literally a character written into Eliezer Yudkowsky’s rationalist fanfic in a cameo, and believes the probability of AGI killing humanity is 50%.
These people have absolutely no interest in decentralization and accountability, and were more than happy to let OpenAI accumulate power to “protect humanity”—until they pulled the plug for reasons they still refuse to disclose. Let me be clear: this is unacceptable. Not coincidentally, their so-called utilitarianism and altruism merely justifies accumulating all power in their hands, and taking any action (like the backstabbing we saw last week) to make it happen. For all MSFT’s faults, they play by traditional and predictable corporate rules of greed and can be reasoned with. The safety faction are true believers and implacably opposed to openness anywhere, and moreover happily gave the veneer of altruism to the regulatory capture of the commercial faction anyway before they realized they couldn’t control it. I know which one I’d pick.
Is Laundry Buddy actually a controversy? If the mission is to aid humanity, I can think of nothing more helpful. Nobody know what any of that shit on the tags means.
Is this a sheepskin comment or a genuinely naïve one? I can't tell.
Moving to MSFT means they cannot do anything that goes against MSFT's interests.
Everything they ever did, they ever will do belongs to MSFT.
MSFT brings with it all the bloat and risk aversion it needs as a big org, killing the "cutting egde" move-fast, make-it-work nature of OAI that got it to this point in the first place.
Only thing you can be sure of is this thing will now be "closed" forever, with no hope of others benefiting off the hard work of the real people who make it happen.
Elon has Twitter. Zuck has Facebook. Jeff has WaPo. Sam has HN. Everyone has their media platform that ultimately serves them. I’m not suggesting HN is being directly trolled or manipulated, but I think there is such a tight link between HN and Sam that many of the most active people on this platform in particular either personally know, look up to, benefit from, or are sympathetic to him. The overall effect of this is that he gets overwhelming benefit of the doubt in the absence of much information at all.
People are more loyal to their networks than their principles.
Bingo. OpenAI was specifically founded as a non-profit to prevent profit>all from turning this into an uncontrolled arms race. Before founding OpenAI Sam Altman wrote "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence."[0]
Last week he said, "I believe that this will be the most important and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented. And I also believe that if we’re not careful about it, it can be quite disastrous. And so we have to navigate it carefully."
If you run to Microsoft with the entire team, whose entire mission is an amorphous "stock price go up" (I mean, look at how much people are talking about them figuring out a story before stock market opens on Monday), then you have failed OpenAI's charter and founding purpose.
I think the “big tech is evil“ and “SV start-ups will save us” groups both still exist but remain distinct and haven’t coordinated the triggers that make each group become vocal. I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap in their membership, so it’s not like hypocrisy, it’s more like different people believing different things for different reasons.
However there are many other sentiments held reasonably by various subgroups, like, “this board overstepped and hasn’t explained itself to our satisfaction” or “we love our boss, he makes us wealthy,” or “if they take my chatGPT away, I’ll be pissed” or “man , I just invested $13B into this ridiculously governed venture and if I don’t fix this my wealth will never approach Balmer’s”
Yes, I agree the pendulum does swing. Just jarring to see it swing so quickly. Remember, this change began on Friday!
I guess the old saying: "If you can't beat them, join them" is the new mantra. And I suppose if you're going to do it, might as well do it with some enthusiasm.
I certainly agree. It is absolutely silly, but time and time again it is shown that money moves people. However, I also believe that once a majority of them get 5-10 years in and continue maturing through that, as we all do, they return to OpenAI (or whatever is around in the future) to contribute back in a way that helps all our children's future, not just their own.
The things I stand for now would not have held in the face of millions in comp 10 years ago, so I don't expect the same of others. I only hope they earn whatever it takes to get them to the next level sooner than later. AI does appear to be worth a good fight for humanity.
It is pretty rich that Microsoft of all companies is now coming in to be seen as the savior and not many people are batting an eye. It's a face turn 20 years in the making. If Facebook, Apple or Google were doing the same I suspect we'd hear more opprobrium.
I would guess non-profit or not is not the key. The key, at least to an engineer like me, is whether I can do meaningful work with a reasonable package. The employees in OpenAI are creating history and building amazing career after all, which outweighs the structure of a company or monetary incentives.
The impact that corporate shills have on public perception is quite powerful. It's peculiar how the general public acknowledges it in other fields such as entertainment, such as with Hollywood movie stars or prominent musicians. However, people often become frustrated when someone points it out within their own field. Kudos to you for noticing it.
The premise of founding OpenAI as a nonprofit with "nobler" goals than making money was that it would be a strong magnet to the right talent. Going to work for Microsoft (or any other tech company for that matter), from that point of view, is like crossing over to the dark side of the force. It will be interesting to see how many of OpenAI's employees were there because of its nonprofit status, and how many were there in spite of it.
I suspect very little people joined OpenAI for their noble non-profit mission after they introduced their for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI compensation was and still is top notch. Compare it to Signal, which is a true non-profit (and salaries are a lot lower).
Nonprofit status relates to the absence of investor payouts, and doesn't fundamentally have much to do with pay levels. Some employees can be on occasion willing to accept lower pay when the motives are altruistic, but most employees at nonprofits are paid (have to be paid) market rate.
There comes a point where if an organization has something unique there is no point in selling it, they'd just use it for their own gain and watch the AI multiply their initial investment.
It has happened already, the best hedge funds are not open to investors but ran as a pension scheme for employees and founders.
Interesting, but deceptive. Those are, as noted, "Key Employees and Officers." I just assume most employees with the title "Software Developer" aren't making over five times what Moxie is making.
Your number seems to be coming from a very small sample size (single digit N?), and GP's link is only about "key" employees like CxOs, VPs and top-ranking engineers.
I wonder what a median rank-and-file employee at these companies make.
Remember all those Apple and Amazon employees who signed a letter that they're not going back to the office? Last I heard Apple was at 100% compliance
Make no mistake, if Microsoft is matching $10M PPU's with $10M Microsoft RSUs vesting over 4 years, every single employee will join. But I kind of doubt that this is their plan
It's at least the denominator and likely both. I personally know a non-zero number of people formerly there who found a different job or retired when Apple insisted on everyone returning to the office.
Do you have a source for this? At other tech companies I'm aware of, the numbers are still much lower than 100%, even after threats of performance impact.
There was no significant uptake on any letter at Apple.
One reason is that retaliation is very possible. The opacity of the executive team was not a feature of Steve Jobs’s Apple, but the Time Cook-era opaqueness combines poorly withthe silo’d, top down nature of Apple’s management which _was_ inherited from Steve Jobs.
The opaqueness, I think, is a result of Tim Cook integrating the retail and corporate sides of the company; retail salespeople are treated better, but software engineers are treated a little more like retail salespeople.
Since the pandemic, Apple execs have seemed to be isolated in a bubble and are not listening to the rank and file anymore. The people they do listen to seem to be out of touch.
Oh yes, it's going to create waves. People who've had compensation stagnation at Microsoft, reduced bonuses, "belt tightening" now see that "well, we're willing to throw stupid amounts of money at those people over there, just not you".
Yeah but in these kinds of big companies there are supposedly compensation "bands" by technical level. When salaries within each band are very different, it can be an impediment to talent mobility within the company.
The CTO of Microsoft tweeted this morning that they would hire any OpenAI employees who wanted to join MS with commensurate pay. For whatever that’s worth.
As others have pointed out, it's easier to sign a letter than actually go through with it. Besides that, wasn't there some employees who said something similar on Friday when this happened?
This is simply a matter of momentum. If enough of the signatories follow through more will cross the bridge until there are too few people left to keep it going and then there will be an avalanche. It all depends on the size of the initial wave and the kind of follow on. If that stops at 200 people leaving it will probably stay like that, if that number is 300 or even 400 out of the 700 then OpenAI will be dead because the remainder will move as well.
I have no idea what the process was for gathering the signatures, but one way to solve this problem is a mutual confidentiality pact that goes away with enough momentum. Ask people if they're willing to sign, but if you can't get 50% of the people to sign the document and all the signatures go away.
Similar things are done when doing anonymous 360 surveys in the workplace. If not enough people in a certain pool respond, the feedback doesn't get shared.
Unless they promised to withhold the letter until 50% signed.
Also I have enough savings and my skills are in demand enough that I wouldn’t consider signing such a letter much of a risk. The researchers at openAI are likely a good deal more in demand than I am.
While the financial future is significantly less certain than it was a week ago, many of those employees have RSU-equivalents potentially worth FU money. Even if you are going to land on your feet, it is still making a statement to walk away from that payday.
If you believe that your profit share is going to be worth much much more with the current board gone, then threatening to walk away to force them to resign isn’t really walking away from much.
I agree that it is surprising that the first big whiff of collective bargaining that we see in Big Tech is “let’s save this asshole CEO (who would probably try to bust any formal unionization),”[1] rather than trying to safeguard the workers in the industry as a whole. But I just attribute that to Silicon Valley being this weird hero-worship-libertarian-fantasy cosplay rather than outright conspiracy.
[1] Just to clarify, I don't know Sam and I am taking the usual labor viewpoint that most CEOs, in order to become CEOs, had to be a certain sort of asshole who would be likely to do other such asshole things. There are some indications that this sort of assholery is what he was fired for but it's kinda hard to read between the lines here.
Everything about this post is spot-on. The CEO got ousted because he lied to the board and went against the company's mission to make safe AGI. He tried to milk OpenAI for money and personal gain, and the board actually did something to stop it.
The downvotes here are pretty irrational. But that's the defining feature of class warfare: we're all closer to homelessness than a billion dollars, but we've been conditioned to believe the opposite.
They didn't say they were going to Microsoft, as far as I can tell. I presume many can get golden offers anywhere including academia and other institutions with stronger nonprofit governance track record.
>We , the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI
and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg
Brockman Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl
employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.
It does suggest more than their willingness to leave.
Very few people in tech are in it for noble reasons. Although, a nice pair of golden handcuffs can let you delude yourself into thinking what you are doing is noble. I can't imagine people working on shadow profiles at Facebook think what they are doing is noble.
You join OpenAI because if there is an open spot you’d take it. Plus it’s a famous company doing cutting edge AI, sure you can read the statement, but everyone wants to eat and get a better resume. It’s a bonus thing to feel.
>your desire potentially to join Sam Altman at Microsoft’s new AI Research Lab. Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation and advances our collective mission.
The podcast This Week In Startups brought up an interesting point that many OpenAI employees are on corporate sponsored work visas and they really can't jump ship to Microsoft. Those visas are tied to OpenAI.
Not sure how many employees it affects and of those, how many are "key people".
(No doubt that Microsoft already understand the logistics of all this and still want to signal their open arms regardless.)
Microsoft is a juggernaut from every angle that has direct ties to all arms of the U.S. government -- they can petition whatever backdoor deals they need to keep the knowledge and talent inside the U.S. rather than exporting it back overseas. They can angle it as a matter of national security without so much as a hint of difficulty.
Any visa issues will be resolved within a matter of days, not even weeks or months.
> Any visa issues will be resolved within a matter of days, not even weeks or months.
Agree. Further I'd add forget Microsoft, even at typical F500 company these visa concerns will be rather small so as not to brought at level of executive attention. Any large company has immigration/visa related department dealing with such things every day with separate piles for critical vs normal employees.
Yes, very much this. The rules are different when you are a >$1T company. You have Congresspeople on speed dial. Also, the Biden administration know what is at stake with their AI Executive Order. It will get done.
As someone actually on a green card, working at one large tech company and previously at another where I got the card (both in the same range of importance as Microsoft), and having seen various colleagues go through various issues: no, it really does not work that way. For instance, my card was delayed for something like 2 years, because anything immigration related was extremely slow in 2002...
The main benefit you get is good quality lawyers who make sure you do the process the right way.
Nope this makes no sense and I say this as someone on a corporate sponsored visa. There are primarily 2 visas. The first most common is H1b, H1b transfers are some of the easiest things to do. I have moved from a trillion dollar company to a 3 person company on a H1b transfer. The company just needs a lawyer to do the paperwork and prove they are a company.
The next visa is O1. O1 visa allows transfer only if you work in the same field/ goal as your original visa. In this case it is straightforward, since they are doing literally the same job in a different company. Microsoft applied for thousands of visas a year, there really is no issue here regarding visas except immigrant employee anxiety.
H-1B Visas are transferable with an application; and you can legally join a new company before the application is approved (but it’s, of course, just a little risky).
I don’t think employees would expect Microsoft to drop the ball though.
At this level, MS could go to the White House and insist that keeping these people within the US is a matter of urgent national security, for the same reason there are Nvidia export restrictions to China.
I love how people in the comments are just diregarding that simple fact. If you are "just" doing run-of-the-mill software engineering for a non-FAANG then sure look before you leap.
As an employee of OpenAI, that went before congress for AI safety, jumping to Microsoft? I wouldn't be surprised if their internal immigration division already has documents stamped by high-level officials to keep those people in the country as a matter of national security. These people are not leaving the US unless they want to.
Kicking these people out now would be like kicking out Jewish physicists (like Einstein) fleeing Germany in 1942. The race for AGI is just as critical as now as the race for the nuclear bomb was then.
>>These are not your average groups of H1B workers.
Its strange this has to be even said.
I knew doctors who got their Green cards fairly easily. Replacing these doctors is next to impossible. For starters, its just these are rarest of the rare talents. Even making such doctors is very hard because it takes decades of academic training, and practice. These are things with close to 100% drop out rate, and other requirements- which means you just have to make exceptions to have these people in.
>My honest assessment is that before 2016, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend changing jobs upon the filing of the H-1B. USCIS approved almost 100% of legitimate, well-constructed transfer petitions “back then”.
>Now, it’s kind of a mess. H-1B denials have increased by 27%. Requests for Evidence (often feared as a potential denial indicator) are now issued at a 60% clip (a 40% increase).
>So, I’ve changed my tune and so have many others. Many companies are now encouraging employees not to give notice until the H-1B is approved, assuming premium processing is alive. We no longer feel 100% certain that your transfer petition will be approved, and we, therefore, do not want you to bear the suddenly real risks outlined above.
The before and after statistics are apples and oranges. Hard to say that says anything significant at all. And a request for evidence that OpenAI employees are top of the game and that we don't want them leaving the country is trivial. MSFT and Altman team write one response and affix it to all applications.
Transfering? Yes, it's possible. But it's not trivial and, post trump immigration bs, there is a real possibility transfer will not go through. Also usually this takes a few weeks/months.
I read something a few days on another unrelated thread from the AMA [0] with an immigration lawyer who works with YC companies that the administration prioritizing AI-related visas. Based on that, I could see folks making exceptions/expediting the process to stop brain-drain.
H-1B transfer is not trivial, takes time to be approved, and while you can start working at the new position when the application is filed, if its then not approved you can't legally work at the new job anymore and are out of status.
If it wasn't such a PITA to prep for interviews I think companies would have to give out better raises to current employees to avoid mass attrition.
My conspiracy theory is that companies keep using leetcode style interviews because they know people don't want to study for them which makes them less likely to change jobs for more money.
Not when the company told the existing engineers they can’t afford raises and have to lower bonuses. Then they openly offer much larger payouts to all the new folks.
Might or might not be worth it, but there’s no way that doesn’t create massive resentment.
I doubt all of those 700+ employees are ML Researchers. For the majority of that employee base there would be an equivalent role already in MS. That wouldn't go well with them.
Eg. There would be atleast 1 web-developer in OpenAI who would have written the ChatGPT UI. That person for all we know might be better payed that the web-developer folks working on Bing UI.
Hmm, As some body who has watched the Visa thing from quite close quarters and lost, but saw others win. Let me tell you something. Getting a Green card is something your company can make it happen if they wanted to. Its just how much money they can spend to cook up documentation to justify your case.
A competent immigration attorney, can get you GC in a year if the company was ready to pay for it.
OTOH if you go in the normal EB1 lane it could take an eternity to get one, because now the pleb rules apply to you. Or worse if your bosses won't support you, you likely will not even complete the Visa time. So its really what the top people say will happen in these cases.
If you are important enough that you have to be there, for a company like Microsoft, these are some what like the cash they spend on food stocked in the floor pantry/kitchen areas.
Commenters raising visa issues, but saying that these will be not a problem due to national security. It's certainly very favorable, but I don't know I'd say it's 100%, given bitter divisions in government and recent trouble with filling military positions due to Tuberville. Presumably the administration would have to spend some political capital to do this. Would they? I think so, but would not bet at 100%.
Yeah, if they are employees of the non-profit it could be an issue, because they could be on visas that cannot transfer to a for-profit entity. If they are on something like H1b, then that should not be an issue AFAIK.
In the Netherlands, if you're here on a highly-skilled migrant visa and leave your job, you get 90 days to get a new one. The only requirement is that the company you work for is also recognised as an employer of highly-skilled migrants.
Not in Canada. My Post Graduate Work Visa allowed me to work wherever. Or not work at all. The US has so many variations of slavery-lite it is genuinely disturbing.
The US has something called OPT, which is essentially the same thing - you can work for any employer or for no employer, anywhere in the US. OPT lasts for a year, which is longer than the shortest time you could be authorized for under Canada’s program (8 months) but shorter than the longest time (three years).
It's completely inappropriate to repurposes the word "slavery" for H1B visa holders.
Sure, being tied to your current employer in a way that makes it hard leave is a terrible position to be in, but these folks are also well-compensated workers living comfortably in the richest nation on earth. They're free to travel anywhere in the US and are free to leave their job at any time.
Actual slaves don't spend weekends wine-tasting in Napa or cutting work early to catch a Giants game.
I wouldn't like it either, but that doesn't make it "slavery". Presumably you have the option to work in your country of citizenship. A slave does not.
"The partnership remains strong" (As we hire all of your employees).
This is going to be fascinating to watch. You have to think all of the usual players are going to offer everyone at OpenAI crazy salaries to break from Microsoft, if for nothing else to disrupt them from taking over OpenAI for free and to sow chaos and "deal doubt" amongst the remaining. It is what I would do if I were Facebook or Google at least.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they had no raises this year because of "economic situations" or some such BS. So watching a bunch of folks get 2x raises doesn't sound like it is going to go down well. Not hard to imagine a lot of discontent with this from that angle as well.
Microsoft hit all time highs just on the possibility that they hire Altman. It almost certainly didn’t go even higher because it’s still not a sure thing. If it actually happens I think the market will value Microsoft even higher.
Yes. I was responding to the question about how the employees feel, and they feel great, precisely because all time highs (let’s ignore openai’s impact for now). Wrt openai, why should msft employees feel bad to have openai colleagues who can help further increase share price?
Wrt whether it’s just the market itself or openai, note that news of sama’s firing caused ms shares a steep drop. Then news of sama’s employment with msft help set the share price at least back to where it was before.
Presumably, this violates MSFT's investment agreement with OpenAI. Any reasonably competent counsel would add "no-poach" protection for a strategic investor investing in a startup, and this is as clear a case of poaching as there is.
Negotiation is always a two way street. I’m a startup founder. Your investors, when they invest, will send you some documents on key provisions (e.g. pro rata rights) and you and they will go back and forth on what is acceptable. You, as a founder, will not have the ability to unilaterally turn down all requests. Especially in early funding rounds.
Not this sort, as far as I'm aware. The variety where you collude with competitors can be under some legal systems.
The point is to discourage market distortion. Some jurisdictions also make employee contract conditions of a similar nature illegal too, as they interfere with personal freedoms.
A lot of business deals though specifically include clauses to prevent one partner from poaching the other's staff, as otherwise one side could do what appears to be happening here: Unilaterally taking over the entire business.
The current situation probably falls under Force Majeure, though. If most of these people go to Google or Amazon, Microsoft may not be able to deliver the products they depend(ed) on OpenAI for.
Also, in most jurisdictions, no poaching agreements are unenforcable if the employees themselves initiate the transfer. Signing that letter about leaving if Sam is not coming back probably qualifies as a resignation notice.
On top of this, most other AI leaders have already stated that they want OpenAI employees to come to them.
This is quite literally the CTO of Microsoft saying: "Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation and advances our collective mission." I don't think there is a reasonable argument where this is not poaching.
I have all the sympathy with OpenAI employees signing the letter and looking for new jobs.
However, MSFT is basically doing a cheap de-facto acquisition of OpenAI, a company they have invested in. This sets a terrible precedent for companies taking investment from strategic investors where they may stage an opportunistic de-facto acquisition at the sign of any trouble.
Employees are jumping ship. If not Microsoft, they'll go somewhere else. In a normal situation, if Microsoft said they would match the previous employer's compensation, they wouldn't have gotten many takers.
Federally, there is precedent that collaborative projects can be an exception to the general federal prohibition of no poach agreements. Whether that would work on California law (IIRC, the federal prohibition is an application of antitrust law, the California one is a labor protection), and whether the other aspects of the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement would fit in the exception, I don't know.
Yeah, and the California code applies to employees in California, which at least most OAI employees are, so it should be irrelevant that MSFT is in Washington.
Given the relationship between the two, and the context of the matter, I don't expect no-poach agreements to hold much weight here.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, maybe because they aren't illegal in California, but in California, afaict, according to California Business and Professions Code Section 16600, the same code that prevents non-competes, such contracts would be considered void.
Most contracts also have a clause that a breach of one part does not invalidate the remainder. There are elements that typically out live the end of a contract as well, often the poaching and non-compete clause
One could argue that firing the Loopt founder guy who was an at-will employee isn't a material event invalidating a contract unless the contract specifies exactly that.
Really? I'm a lawyer, and I can't even see an argument of how firing a CEO would affect investment agreements at all unless Microsoft specifically conditioned their investment on Altman remaining CEO forever.
If the last three days didn't happen and Microsoft announced today that they are buying OpenAI there would have been massive uproar in the tech community against that, like when they bought GitHub.
But now they are seen as saviors of humanity against the evil people who don't want to commercialize AI for maximum profit.
Going to be honest, I still hate them and all I feel is sadness that it feels like the employees of OpenAI are going to end up building microsoft products... I didn't love a lot about OpenAI but honestly I'd rather ChatGPT shut down than become a microsoft product. Though obviously it's naive to wish for that since that's obviously not how it'd go.
Imagine how that feels for the tens of thousands of MS employees laid off recently. "Had to be done", according to 2.7T$ company.
Followed by: "Hey guys, we don't know exactly what you do but do join us by the several hundreds and don't you worry about compensation, we pretty much have unlimited money to throw at this."
Companies the size of Microsoft of which have 200,000+ employees can reshuffle and sack 5% of their workforce in order to provide capacity for future areas or allow them to be ready to make large investments in different areas.
It is likely that Microsoft had staff working in areas that no longer required the attention they once did.
I want people in jobs too and I am currently going through an unseen reshuffle that is through no fault of my own. But layoffs occur for all sorts of reasons, many of which are not to reduce further acquisitions or hires.
If I was an employee who was laid off, I might justify it given that AI and those employees from OpenAI have become an acquirable gold mine all of a sudden.
This seems to me like it's another nail in the coffin for Google. With Microsoft and its resources (essentially) fully in control of OpenAI tech without the non-profit chains, it can really turn everything upside down, kind of like what Google did to them in the 2000's. When was the last time you used Bard?
So far, every time I use bard it gives me an incorrect answer. But I am happy with how fast it returns it, at least. I haven't had that problem with Bing chat (at least in the past few months), which has pretty much changed the way I search.
That being said, I hope Bard improves drastically. It would be nice to have more competition from them in this space.
I find that Bard does a pretty good job when I query it against my GMail (using @gmail, what is on my schedule?) and Google Docs. Too bad it is not integrated with Google Calendar.
Funny enough, they seem to have adopted googles old playbook: Embrace, extend, and extinguish. On a sidenote, Pichai has been a terrible CEO, during his reign Google went from my favourite of the big tech to my least favourite.
Few people are going to want to move unless most people are moving. So there is a coordination and timing issue here.
I really wonder if there's going to be a new letter from OpenAI employees about demanding the board reinstate Sam and Greg and then resign -- but this time with an actual deadline that the undersigned declare their mass resignation if not met. A genuine letter of conditional resignation. No more "may choose to resign" -- this time, "do resign if".
Then everybody knows to move to Microsoft literally the next day, all at once.
Given the holiday, it seems like midnight the end of this Sunday would be suitable.
It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Another thing to chew on: Imagine if Googlers demanded that the board resign (which are the terms of Sam's reinstatement) or they all walk... I don't think they'd meet with nearly as much positive sentiment.
> It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Interesting, though sadly not very complex. The sentiment around this is so positive because they're backing up Altman, and he's garnered quite a cult lately.
I don't think collective bargaining is that frowned upon.
I guess what you are noticing is that there is a huge overlap between person cultists (fans of Altman, Musk, whatever) and disdain for that they are temporary being part of the lowly wage worker collective.
Excellent point. This is what I find so aggravating about the board's decision. Even if you buy everything that has been reported/speculated, that they were concerned about OpenAI being "too commercial" and Altman leading this commercial charge and being duplicitous in the process, all they've done is completely obliterated whatever part of the nonprofit's charter that still had influence.
"AGI for the benefit of all humanity" will become yet another SV "how do we make the most money" ploy.
I don't see how the board did that. It would just be the employees leaving because they want more monetization and thence pay that spells doom for non-profit AI development.
My read was that they weren't worried about it being too commercial necessarily, but that it would be closely held with only governments and huge companies getting access.
It was created as a response to Google having exclusive access to the best models. If Microsoft lets anyone with an Azure account pay by the query to SOTA models then that would at least be an improvement
Salesforce CEO did the same yesterday. We know twitter can run with a skelton-crew but I’m not sure OpenAI can survive a mass exodus of top AI talent. This is a very interesting sort of collective action but non-adversarial. Management is clamoring for labor and making public offers to people they haven’t met to pay top dollar.
My point is that Twitter is not spiraling out of control into irrelevance, as demonstrated by you and me discussing a twit. And twitter is running relatively fine, as demonstrated by our ability to open pages on that website.
I wonder how Microsoft employees feel like now, after being paid the worst of all FAANG, no merit increases, tens of thousands of layoffs over the last year, they'll now be matching the outrageous comp packages for incoming OpenAI hires...
Not sure why they'd want to. If they can direct-hire the core talent they really don't need OpenAI at all, and if OpenAI totally goes under they don't have to make good on the billions in Azure credits they promised. win-win
Tidbit: Kevin Scott has a podcast ("Behind the Tech") and he had Mira Murati as a guest in July. The podcast interview itself isn't very interesting though.
it will be hard to match up though, before ousting Sam, those OpenAI-ers are expecting tens of millions or more from shares, once they join microsoft, that's pretty much unlikely, which is one reason people go to startups in silicon valley instead of big companies.
There’s an interesting dynamic here. What value of OpenAI to use for conversion calculation? 86b round is pretty much dead if they move to MS, yet 29b is too low (even 86b is low in terms of future potential). And what kind of upward room there will be?
I have no doubt that MS can spend billions in cash or RSU to compensate all of them, but I do believe there’s some gotcha if exodus actually happens and MS might not be so generous in throwing millions of dollar cash for a general backend engineer recently joining OpenAI.
They don't even need all 700+ or even 500 or even 100 employees to join.
If they can get the 4 technical members of the executive team not counting Ilya - Mira, Woj, Bob, and Peter, plus a few other key people like Karpathy then they have what they need and OpenAI is effectively dead.
I would rather wait until Ilja is gone, and then everything will be back to normal. This is much more likely than most joining MS; and I'd rather join Anthropic over MS.
I don't think so. These people are at a company that may not exist anymore next week. It's right around the holidays. It's a horrible time to have uncertainty about employment. I would assume most of them would find it reassuring that there's an opportunity for a seamless transition. Just because there's an open offer doesn't mean they have to go.
But I'm just thinking of the rancor that has been heaped on Terraform, for example, for changing its license. The argument always seems to be that Hashicorp mislead contributors by claiming to release their contributions as open source and now they've reneged on that deal.
My understanding of OpenAI's mission was that there was a fear that AI being developed inside of big tech companies would provide undue advantage to the very few companies that were able to afford the teams and hardware necessary. Meanwhile the rest of us would be unaware of those advancement being made behind closed doors while those behemoths created an insurmountable gap.
Yet now, for some reason, everyone is literally cheerleading the gutting of OpenAI and gleefully pushing the employees into one of the biggest and most notorious tech giants there ever was.
You almost have to wonder, is this the greatest psychological twist in recent memory? People aren't just OK with them turning into a profit-seeking venture, they are seemingly begging for it. There is almost no opposition to it. And for what? Because of some guy none of us actually knows, who we've only seen on TV? And big tech guys like Paul Graham, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella - a literal who's-who of the tech giant oligarchy - are all fawning over this young man, along with visits to the white house, meeting foreign presidents, etc.
We went from "big corps are bad" to "big corps are saviours" in less than a week. And I'm not even sure what we think they are saving us from.