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Is this the kind of thing employees had in mind when they backed Altman?
by neilv 3y ago
Is this the kind of thing employees had in mind when they backed Altman?
- lord_zero_cool 3y agoOpenAI is nothing without its people
- dmitrygr 3y agoThis is why they did.
- dmix 3y agoOr they trusted Sam’s ability to run an AI company better than the 2 other e/acc advocates who wanted to pause AI development and brought in a temporary CEO who was on a podcast that same year calling for a multi yr pause on AI development. Everyone points to money but they are also working on the most exciting technology in recent history. Crippling both that and likely their long term job prospects vs Sam, whom they never got a straight story for why he was being taken out. People love to over simplify and reduce things while glossing over all the nuance.
- farrarstan 3y ago[dead]
- reducesuffering 3y agoYou mean EA, not e/acc?
- camillomiller 3y agoThe only reason they didn't want the decels to do their shtick is because that would mean, indeed, loosing heaps of potential money. But you can believe in the fable about the most exciting technology yada yada yada
- smackeyacky 3y agoIn the last round of over-hyped pump and dump companies the usual thing was to list the company so the shares could be openly traded. This seems very much like a "get out now" signal to everybody involved. Greater fool farming on an accelerated timeline.
- mlazos 3y agolol what you’re describing is literally the free market. We just don’t know who the greater fool is until OpenAI booms more or busts.
- mnky9800n 3y agoDon't do it! They are about to raise 7 trillion dollars to build new ai chips! Now with more flavour but same great crunch!
- JeremyNT 3y agoI mean, watching from the outside, it's hard to guess why OpenAI would be so valuable. They were the first to market with their LLM chatbot, but zooming out that forced Google's hand in releasing their own, and there aren't any moats here other than "how much copyrighted data you're willing to train on." Eventually, OpenAI/MS will be the Bing to Google's, well, Google. It's one thing for early adopters to go and seek out ChatGPT, but Google has so many products already, there's no reason to think that anybody would switch to ChatGPT just for a chatbot if they're already using a Google app for something else.
- dilyevsky 3y agoRelax, this is likely just their retention strategy to keep employees that otherwise may jump ship and go work for meta/apple/google (who are publicly traded)
- azemetre 3y agoYou're making it seem like OpenAI is a dumpster fire and not literally the only company that is MILES ahead of its competition. Not too mention they're supposedly a billion in yearly revenue. Not even Google can compete. It could also be a signal that the company recognizes that they would not be where they currently are without their workers. Maybe they're giving a reason for their workers to stay (become multi-millionaires overnight) and not go to their competitors.
- m3kw9 3y agoFirst, it was bs panic by board members and everyone knows this and that in turn ruined everyone’s bag, and for no good reason. Think about it, they wanted to disband the entire company because the world was about to end was the reason
- dorkwood 3y agoYep, now with the release of Sora we see that they're actually making the world a better and more creative place. People love to spout doom and gloom for no reason.
- drcode 3y agothat's what I keep saying nightmare fuel puppies playing in the snow is what will make the world a better place
- _heimdall 3y agoPeople definitely like to spout doom and gloom, but that doesn't avoid the fact that OpenAI is actually trying to develop artificial intelligence. Ignore the fear mongering or political/military concerns for a moment. There are very real questions that have to be answered, from logistical questions like how we'll recognize when we develop an intelligence or the moral questions like does an AI have rights similar to humans. Diamond nanobots ripping us apart to repurpose our atoms isn't a terribly useful conversation. But whether anyone can own an AI, whether turning one off is murder, or whether AIs deserve all the same rights and humans absolutely are. IMO those should have been prerequisites before we even considered questions like how to align an AI or risks of their existence, we shouldn't be going down that road at all if we're setting ourselves up to get caught with our pants down.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ori_b 3y agoYes, at least if they joined in 2020 or later. I interviewed and got an offer around that time, post for-profit conversion, and the pitch was that the "shares" (actually, profit sharing rights) would be bought by investors every few years. (FWIW, I ended up not taking the position, mainly because I would not have enjoyed the specific work they wanted to hire me for.)
- smy20011 3y agoIt must be a big offer
- samspenc 3y agoI was going to say, question for GP, do you regret not taking the offer? Do you know how much the shares would have been worth today if you had accepted the offer?
- ori_b 3y agoNo. There are plenty of well paying jobs that actually match my skills. I probably would have made a bit more at OpenAI, but at the cost of not enjoying my work, and probably not excelling at it.
- FreakLegion 3y agoDo you regret not plowing all of your money into DOGE in 2020? In the scheme of the things you could do to make money with hindsight, accepting a job offer barely ranks.
- OJFord 3y agoUnless you were weighing DOGE vs FTC or something though and went with the latter, it's different? It's not just Oh if I knew then what I know now I could've made so much money; it's I almost made this decision, or could have, but explicitly decided against it. I had a badly timed offer of something (I don't really remember might just have been an interview, or contracting work, on the back of some OSS contribution) at Cloudflare pre-IPO, and I do occasionally regret/wonder what-if, because it's not just a random hypothetical, it was an actual opportunity I made a decision against. (Doesn't help that it's still a company on my interested-in list, much like the trap in investing of liking a stock but wishing you'd bought it lower when you first thought of it, and so continuing to not buy as it climbs (or not even investing necessarily but just being a consumer in an inflationary environment).)
- chihuahua 3y agoWow, people working for a company with the goal of profiting financially from it? That's really sad.
- tgv 3y agoDon't you think it changes their goals? They now only care about the implications of their work as long as it is financial. Society? Fuck them, we've got big money to make!
- madsbuch 3y agoThe problem is when speculation is a (large) part of you compensation. You might not do what's right in your work. The same is true for the real-estate market: When a corner of the market (eg. apartments in the city) outperforms the rest of the market, you might stop doing what's right for you and start speculating (being in the process of looking for a place to live, I can see several people who lost significant amounts after having bought in 06/07 and sole 10 years later - hopefully for them, they bought the right place to live and did not care about the losses).
- speedylight 3y agoWell I mean they are supposed to be non profit. Not that I’m complaining, OpenAI does great stuff.
- 3y ago