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Why I'm leaving OpenAI and what I'm doing next
- majestik 2y agoTLDR - after 6 years his stock has vested and he doesn’t want to deal with the lack of safety investment anymore.
- imkevinxu 2y agohuman still wins here, better than any AI-generated TLDR for this article
- willsmith72 2y agoI never get it when people say something like "they're leaving because their stock vested". Every big tech employee I know gets refresher stocks every year. Except for the first 2 years at some companies (looking at you Amazon), every year you are vesting significant stock, and whenever you leave, you're walking away from at least 3 years unvested. 4 years is like 5 which is like 6
- dboreham 2y agoEarly employees of a unicorn are a bit different.
- CaveTech 2y agoThe early grants are worth far more, especially so here.
- xmprt 2y agoTypically it's said for companies that experienced massive growth in valuation. For example, if you got $400k in NVDA 4 years ago it would be worth $4M today. In order for your compensation to stay the same, you'd need to get a $1M refresh every year which is unlikely unless you got promoted to a VP position.
- adastra22 2y agoAt my last startup, as an early employee I got something like ~250,000 shares of restricted stock. 3 years in I got renewal options for an additional 10,000 shares. With the renewal being 4% of the shares I was previously granted, it is not much of an incentive.
- danpalmer 2y agoIf a stock sees explosive growth, the stock you were granted before the growth that has now vested might be worth far more than the stock you were granted after the growth. Except at the very beginning of a company when the valuation is entirely meaningless, companies figure out the dollar amount they're going to grant, and convert that into a number of shares. This means post-growth you're getting much less. That leads to the balance shifting. Would you stick around for next year's $200k if you've already got $10m in the bank, probably not.
- singron 2y agoIf the stock is liquid, then this makes sense. However, if it's not, then you might not want to hold that much stock (or especially options) in a single company. It's also common for the refresher grants to be much smaller, especially if you were an early employee.
- kortilla 2y agoRefreshers never make up for the monster gains those early grants get at startup growth rates. If you joined Tesla in 2019 and got a 5 year grant worth 1 million dollars, that is roughly 48000 shares over 5 years. Even assuming a flat refresher, on that 5th year you would get another $200k worth of stock at the now 10x share price, coming in at like 850 shares. Compare that to the 9600 shares you have coming in from that initial grant. It’s a huge dive in total comp after that initial grant runs out even with a good refresher program. The only companies where this isn’t a problem are big ones with mediocre growth (Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix-ish, etc). Nvidia is another example of a company that effectively has employees pulling in multiple millions a year in stock that will fizzle out 4 years after their huge surge last year. When you go from a TC of $3mil/year down to $300k/year, you definitely reevaluate if it’s time to retire or go do something new.
- bigfatkitten 2y agoSome companies are notoriously cheap about refreshers, Salesforce being one famous example.
- deisteve 2y ago[dead]
- az226 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jalapenos 2y agoYep, their pent up desire to say how morally or otherwise superior they are to the whole company no longer needs to be surpressed once they've left.
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoHave you been on LinkedIn recently? Everyone now writes a long sob story to the public about why they're leaving as if everyone else cares or believe what you're saying. These guy think they're a lot more important anf have more clout so they're making it a blog post instead.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoLinkedIn is cringe of such epic proportion that it is shameful.
- tpkee 2y agoLeaving or joining. I hate LinkedIn
- readthenotes1 2y agoNot necessarily, I don't feel, but close. There was a recent blog about an epidemic of Neotoddlerism that explained that four attributes that we have as children and should grow out of contribute to cluster B personality disorders: - Attention seeking - Entitlement - Grandiosity - Impulsivity This seems like just attention seeking, possibly with grandiosity but I don't know the author so I don't know.
- qrios 2y agoThis one? https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-outrageous-rise-of-neotoddlerism https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-outrageous-rise-of-neotoddl...
- baoha 2y ago[flagged]
- adastra22 2y agoOne less AI safetyist police at OpenAI. Good!
- atdt 2y agoI am starting to understand why these luminaries warn us about a future that is dominated by a solitary superintelligence, self-obsessed and uninterested in humanity.
- adastra22 2y agoSelf-projection?
- knighthack 2y agoHow is someone so young and general in skill (he doesn't seem to be a technical person or coder) have the ability to be "...advising OpenAI executives and the OpenAI board on AGI readiness"? And why the need for such a long blog post, in a company which he doesn't play a significant role?
- dartos 2y agoCareer marketing
- adastra22 2y agoHave you seen LessWrong? Long, boring, navel-gazing blog posts is all they know how to do, yet they think they're the main character of the story.
- stogot 2y agoYou were downvoted but you’re not wrong. They are navel gazing. However, they are the main character of their own story so to speak. they just fail to see the plot and other characters around them. Lesswrong is self-indulgent narcisssim purporting to be rationalism
- createaccount99 2y agoI believe this field is so new that anyone with just a year or two of experience can be considered an expert.
- glimshe 2y ago"Why I'm leaving Google" 2024 edition. Tldr: loaded with money and see no reason to do real work anymore.
- renegade-otter 2y agoThere is a joke in The Big Bang Theory where Sheldon goes "I know! I am going to write a blog post conducting an interview with myself!" This is literally that. "Who are you/what did you do at OpenAI?" The hubris....