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> A scheduled tender offer, which was about to let employees sell their existing vested equity to outside investors, would have been canceled. All that equity w

by neilv 3y ago

> A scheduled tender offer, which was about to let employees sell their existing vested equity to outside investors, would have been canceled. All that equity would have been worth "nothing," this employee said. > The former OpenAI employee estimated that, of the hundreds of people who signed the letter saying they would leave, "probably 70% of the folks on that list were like, 'Hey, can we, you know, have this tender go through?'" If that one person's speculation is true, does the non-profit have an alignment problem, with employees who are doing the technical work -- that the employees are motivated more by individual financial situations, than by the non-profit's mission? (Is it possible to structure things such that the people doing the work don't have to think about their individual financial situations, and can focus 100% on the actual mission? Can they hire enough of the best people for their mission that way? And maybe also keep key technical talent away from competitors that way?)

CaveTech 3y ago
I think it's relatively easy to prove that the main motivation for the majority of employees is not mission alignment, simply by the fact that salaries within OpenAI are in the top few percentile of the field. I don't believe this is necessarily in conflict with the mission though. Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. But surely, the primary tool that leadership has to do that is by selecting employees who are on the same page as them. A purely mercenary workforce is very undesirable unless the company is also mercenary.
- neilv 3y ago
  > Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important. I think that might be the norm, but it's sounds like an awful dynamic. It's also unfortunate if you want to do something better. We have many mercenaries companies that have appropriated some of the language we might use to characterize something better. So, say you're trying to found a company with grand ideals, made up of people who care about the mission, you actively want a diversity of ideas, etc., and almost every sentence you can think of to communicated that a bunch of candidates nodding, "Yeah, yeah, whatever, we've heard this a hundred times, just tell me what the TC is, for the 18 months I'll stay here".
dragonwriter 3y ago
> If that one person's speculation is true, does the non-profit have an alignment problem, with employees who are doing the technical work -- that the employees are motivated more by individual financial situations, than by the non-profit's mission? Yes, and moreover they've created a compensation structure which actively creates incentives that are contrary to the charity's mission. This was probably the easiest way to attract talent that had high paying alternatives and weren't particularly interested in the charity's mission, but that was always a fundamental problem with choosing a for-profit entity with that kind of needs as the primary funding vehicle for the charity and also the primary means by which it would achieve research, etc., directed at its charitable purpose. The problem -- taking OpenAI's stated charitable mission at face value [0] -- is that there was nowhere close to enough money available from people concerned with that mission to pay for it, and OpenAI's response was to go all-in on the most straightforward path of raising sufficient funds given what resources it had and what the market looked like without sufficiently considering the alignment of its fundraising mechanism with the purpose for which it was raising funds. [0] which I should emphasize that I do for the sake of argument, not because I necessarily believe that it represents the genuine purposes of the people involved even initially.
ghaff 3y ago
>Is it possible to structure things such that the people doing the work don't have to think about their individual financial situations, and can focus 100% on the actual mission? Mostly no. People may not only care about money. But money is pretty important--at least until you get into pretty large numbers. And then it's still a pretty important keeping score metric.

by neilv 3y ago

CaveTech 3y ago

I think it's relatively easy to prove that the main motivation for the majority of employees is not mission alignment, simply by the fact that salaries within OpenAI are in the top few percentile of the field. I don't believe this is necessarily in conflict with the mission though. Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important.

JohnFen 3y ago
> it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. But surely, the primary tool that leadership has to do that is by selecting employees who are on the same page as them. A purely mercenary workforce is very undesirable unless the company is also mercenary.
neilv 3y ago
> Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important. I think that might be the norm, but it's sounds like an awful dynamic. It's also unfortunate if you want to do something better. We have many mercenaries companies that have appropriated some of the language we might use to characterize something better. So, say you're trying to found a company with grand ideals, made up of people who care about the mission, you actively want a diversity of ideas, etc., and almost every sentence you can think of to communicated that a bunch of candidates nodding, "Yeah, yeah, whatever, we've heard this a hundred times, just tell me what the TC is, for the 18 months I'll stay here".

dragonwriter 3y ago

> If that one person's speculation is true, does the non-profit have an alignment problem, with employees who are doing the technical work -- that the employees are motivated more by individual financial situations, than by the non-profit's mission? Yes, and moreover they've created a compensation structure which actively creates incentives that are contrary to the charity's mission. This was probably the easiest way to attract talent that had high paying alternatives and weren't particularly interested in the charity's mission, but that was always a fundamental problem with choosing a for-profit entity with that kind of needs as the primary funding vehicle for the charity and also the primary means by which it would achieve research, etc., directed at its charitable purpose. The problem -- taking OpenAI's stated charitable mission at face value [0] -- is that there was nowhere close to enough money available from people concerned with that mission to pay for it, and OpenAI's response was to go all-in on the most straightforward path of raising sufficient funds given what resources it had and what the market looked like without sufficiently considering the alignment of its fundraising mechanism with the purpose for which it was raising funds. [0] which I should emphasize that I do for the sake of argument, not because I necessarily believe that it represents the genuine purposes of the people involved even initially.

ghaff 3y ago

>Is it possible to structure things such that the people doing the work don't have to think about their individual financial situations, and can focus 100% on the actual mission? Mostly no. People may not only care about money. But money is pretty important--at least until you get into pretty large numbers. And then it's still a pretty important keeping score metric.