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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 di

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?

refulgentis 2y ago
It'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 "is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit 'but we're good people, so,'"
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  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'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.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    > It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right. It depends a bit by what you mean by left and right, but if you take something like Marxism that was always 100% a propaganda effort created by people who owned newspapers and the pervasiveness of propaganda has been a through line e.g. in the Soviet Union, agitprop etc. A big part of the Marxist theory is that there is no reality, that social experience completely determines everything, and that sort of ideology naturally lends itself to the belief that blankets of bad faith arguments for "good causes" are a positive good. This sort of thinking was unpopular on the left for many years, but it's become more hip no doubt thanks to countries like Russia and China trying to re-popularize communism in the West.
    - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
      Propaganda at a national level, it's always been that, and I take your point for sure. I think perhaps I didn't really make it totally clear that what I'm mostly talking about is a bit closer to the personal level -- the way people fight their corners, the way twitter level debate works, the way local politicians behave. The individual, ghastly shamelessness of it, more than the organised wall of lies. Everyone getting to play Roger Stone. Not so much broadcast bad faith as narrowcast. I get the impression Stalinism was more like this -- you know, you have your petty level of power and you _lie_ to your superiors to maintain it, but you use weaponised bad faith to those you have power over. It's a kind of emotional cruelty, to lie to people in ways they know are lies, that make them do things they know are wrong, and to make it obvious you don't care. And we see this everywhere now.
      - ants_everywhere 2y ago
        Well, I was referring to Marx and Engels. That's sort of how the whole movement got started. The post-Hegelians who turned away from logic-based philosophical debate to a sort of anti-logical emotional debate where facts mattered less than the arc of history. That got nationalized and industrialized with Lenin and Stalin etc, but that trend precedes them and was more personal. It was hashed out in coffee houses and drinking clubs. You see the same pattern with social media accounts who claim to be on the Maxist-influenced left. Their tactics are very frequently emotionally abusive or manipulative. It's basically indistinguishable in style from how people on the fringe right behave. Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are.
        ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
        > Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are. Oh I agree. I wasn't making it a right-vs-left thing, but rather neutering the idea that people perceive it to be. I would not place myself on the political right at all -- even in the UK -- but I see this idea that bad-faith is an alt.right thing and I'm inclined to push back, because it's an oversimplification.
5e92cb50239222b 2y ago
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.
- kyleblarson 2y ago
  The mob that Vox represents these days is miniscule
  - hashtag-til 2y ago
    It’s remarkable to see the hoi polloi to stand by CEOs and big corporations, rather than defending the few parts of the media that stand for regular workers.
    - parineum 2y ago
      It's not about taking sides, it's about not caring. Everyone is tired of getting worked up over super rich CEOs being "aggressive" to their very rich employees and your,"if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude.
      - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
        First they came for the Sheldon Coopers, and I did not speak out
      - optimalsolver 2y ago
        How do you think those same CEOs would treat their not-so-rich employees?
    - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
      This is how anything political (big or small P) works. Aspirations keep people voting against their interests. I personally worry that the way fans of OpenAI and Stability AI are lining up to criticise artists for demanding to be compensated, or accusing them of “gatekeeping” could be folded into a wider populism, the way 4chan shitposting became a political position. When populism turns on artists it’s usually a bad sign.
jsnell 2y ago
Yes, I've definitely seen people believe that in various discussions. Combine "Altman said they'd totally never done this" with "the ex-employee who first wrote about this didn't write with absolute 100% clarity that this applied to vested equity", and there'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'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'd already gagged the ex-employees, nobody would dare leak the evidence?
- sanxiyn 2y ago
  People are so gullible. Sam Altman deserves zero benefit of doubt. His words should be ignored, his words do not prove anything whatsoever.
nabla9 2y ago
Every legal clause that affects company ownership is accepted by the CEO and the board. It's not something VP or general counsel can put there. Lo and behold, signatures from Altman and Kwon are there. >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.
- danielmarkbruce 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nabla9 2y ago
    Imagine if someone not representing ownership directly could just put clauses that alter the ownership and alter shareholder agreements.
    - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
      Employment letters, with equity grants, are practically never signed by anyone on the board, and for companies of any size, practically never signed by the CEO. There are a bunch of people who can bind a company legally, and it's one of the things they figure as part of their governing docs, board process etc.
      - nabla9 2y ago
        That's not what I said. The text in the letter must be approved.
        danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        Again, wrong. It's just not how the world works. It's legally not required, and in practice not done. If the board and CEO had to sit around approving every contract change in every country, my goodness they'd have no time left for anything else.
gchamonlive 2y ago
Not trying to play the devil's advocate here, but I am thinking how this would play out if I ever opened a spinoff... 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?
- jprete 2y ago
  > I'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.
darth_avocado 2y ago
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.
latexr 2y ago
> 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.
chilling 2y ago
OpenAI is deeply sorry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4
swat535 2y ago
I mean it'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'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?
- 0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
  >People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhere The percentage of HN users defending Altman has dropped massively since the board scandal ~6 months ago. >consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it up Customers 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's agnostic to the choice of model, and take corporate ethics into consideration when choosing a model, in addition to performance.
mirekrusin 2y ago
Yep, it's more like he reviewed and/or requested those clauses to be there than anything else.
achrono 2y ago
It has become a hallmark of Western civilization to first of all Cover Your Ass, and where it gets exposed, to Pretend It'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'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?

refulgentis 2y ago

It'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 "is this actually rational or sound right, or am I adding in an implicit 'but we're good people, so,'"

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
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'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.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  > It's something many on the left have generally identified as worse from the right wing or alt.right. It depends a bit by what you mean by left and right, but if you take something like Marxism that was always 100% a propaganda effort created by people who owned newspapers and the pervasiveness of propaganda has been a through line e.g. in the Soviet Union, agitprop etc. A big part of the Marxist theory is that there is no reality, that social experience completely determines everything, and that sort of ideology naturally lends itself to the belief that blankets of bad faith arguments for "good causes" are a positive good. This sort of thinking was unpopular on the left for many years, but it's become more hip no doubt thanks to countries like Russia and China trying to re-popularize communism in the West.
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    Propaganda at a national level, it's always been that, and I take your point for sure. I think perhaps I didn't really make it totally clear that what I'm mostly talking about is a bit closer to the personal level -- the way people fight their corners, the way twitter level debate works, the way local politicians behave. The individual, ghastly shamelessness of it, more than the organised wall of lies. Everyone getting to play Roger Stone. Not so much broadcast bad faith as narrowcast. I get the impression Stalinism was more like this -- you know, you have your petty level of power and you _lie_ to your superiors to maintain it, but you use weaponised bad faith to those you have power over. It's a kind of emotional cruelty, to lie to people in ways they know are lies, that make them do things they know are wrong, and to make it obvious you don't care. And we see this everywhere now.
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      Well, I was referring to Marx and Engels. That's sort of how the whole movement got started. The post-Hegelians who turned away from logic-based philosophical debate to a sort of anti-logical emotional debate where facts mattered less than the arc of history. That got nationalized and industrialized with Lenin and Stalin etc, but that trend precedes them and was more personal. It was hashed out in coffee houses and drinking clubs. You see the same pattern with social media accounts who claim to be on the Maxist-influenced left. Their tactics are very frequently emotionally abusive or manipulative. It's basically indistinguishable in style from how people on the fringe right behave. Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are.
      - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
        > Personally I don't think it's a right vs left thing. It's more about authoritarianism and the desire to crush the people you feel are violating the rules, especially if it seems like they're getting away with violating the rules. There are just some differences about what people think the rules are. Oh I agree. I wasn't making it a right-vs-left thing, but rather neutering the idea that people perceive it to be. I would not place myself on the political right at all -- even in the UK -- but I see this idea that bad-faith is an alt.right thing and I'm inclined to push back, because it's an oversimplification.

5e92cb50239222b 2y ago

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.

kyleblarson 2y ago
The mob that Vox represents these days is miniscule
- hashtag-til 2y ago
  It’s remarkable to see the hoi polloi to stand by CEOs and big corporations, rather than defending the few parts of the media that stand for regular workers.
  - parineum 2y ago
    It's not about taking sides, it's about not caring. Everyone is tired of getting worked up over super rich CEOs being "aggressive" to their very rich employees and your,"if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude.
    - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
      First they came for the Sheldon Coopers, and I did not speak out
    - optimalsolver 2y ago
      How do you think those same CEOs would treat their not-so-rich employees?
  - ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
    This is how anything political (big or small P) works. Aspirations keep people voting against their interests. I personally worry that the way fans of OpenAI and Stability AI are lining up to criticise artists for demanding to be compensated, or accusing them of “gatekeeping” could be folded into a wider populism, the way 4chan shitposting became a political position. When populism turns on artists it’s usually a bad sign.

jsnell 2y ago

Yes, I've definitely seen people believe that in various discussions. Combine "Altman said they'd totally never done this" with "the ex-employee who first wrote about this didn't write with absolute 100% clarity that this applied to vested equity", and there'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'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'd already gagged the ex-employees, nobody would dare leak the evidence?

sanxiyn 2y ago
People are so gullible. Sam Altman deserves zero benefit of doubt. His words should be ignored, his words do not prove anything whatsoever.

nabla9 2y ago

Every legal clause that affects company ownership is accepted by the CEO and the board. It's not something VP or general counsel can put there. Lo and behold, signatures from Altman and Kwon are there. >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.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago
[flagged]
- nabla9 2y ago
  Imagine if someone not representing ownership directly could just put clauses that alter the ownership and alter shareholder agreements.
  - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
    Employment letters, with equity grants, are practically never signed by anyone on the board, and for companies of any size, practically never signed by the CEO. There are a bunch of people who can bind a company legally, and it's one of the things they figure as part of their governing docs, board process etc.
    - nabla9 2y ago
      That's not what I said. The text in the letter must be approved.
      - danielmarkbruce 2y ago
        Again, wrong. It's just not how the world works. It's legally not required, and in practice not done. If the board and CEO had to sit around approving every contract change in every country, my goodness they'd have no time left for anything else.

gchamonlive 2y ago

Not trying to play the devil's advocate here, but I am thinking how this would play out if I ever opened a spinoff... 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?

jprete 2y ago
> I'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.

darth_avocado 2y ago

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.

latexr 2y ago

> 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.

chilling 2y ago

OpenAI is deeply sorry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

swat535 2y ago

I mean it'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'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?

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
>People will continue to defend and worship Altman until their last drop of blood on HN and elsewhere The percentage of HN users defending Altman has dropped massively since the board scandal ~6 months ago. >consumers will continue using GPT, businesses will keep hyping it up Customers 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's agnostic to the choice of model, and take corporate ethics into consideration when choosing a model, in addition to performance.

mirekrusin 2y ago

Yep, it's more like he reviewed and/or requested those clauses to be there than anything else.

achrono 2y ago

It has become a hallmark of Western civilization to first of all Cover Your Ass, and where it gets exposed, to Pretend It'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's a further step that someone like OpenAI seems uniquely capable of evolving.