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It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that t

It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I don't think this makes OpenAI special. It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. Look at it this way: the flip side of "incredibly bottoms-up" from this article is that there are people who feel rudderless because there is no roadmap or a thing carved out for them to own. Similarly, the flip side of "strong bias to action" and "changes direction on a dime" is that everything is chaotic and there's no consistent vision from the executives. This cracked me up a bit, though: "As often as OpenAI is maligned in the press, everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead!

harmonic18374 1y ago
I would never post any criticism of an employer in public. It can only harm my own career (just as being positive can only help it). Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media! Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the best possible light. I think it all makes him look like a mark, which is desirable for employers, so I guess it is working.
- m00x 1y ago
  Calvin cofounded Segment that had a $3.2B acquisition. He's not your typical employee.
  - harmonic18374 1y ago
    He is still manipulatable and driven by incentive like anyone else.
    - m00x 1y ago
      What incentives? It's not a very intellectual opinion to give wild hypotheticals with nothing to go on other than "it's possible".
      - harmonic18374 1y ago
        I am not trying to advance wild hypotheticals, but something about his behavior does not quite feel right to me. Someone who has enough money for multiple lifetimes, working like he's possessed, to launch a product minimally different than those at dozens of other companies, and leaving his wife with all the childcare, then leaving after 14 months and insisting he was not burnt out but without a clear next step, not even, "I want to enjoy raising my child". His experience at OpenAI feels overly positive and saccharine, with a few shockingly naive comments that others have noted. I think there is obvious incentive. One reason for this is, he may be in burnout, but does not want to admit it. Another is, he is looking to the future: to keep options open for funding and connections if (when) he chooses to found again. He might be lonely and just want others in his life. Or to feel like he's working on something that "matters" in some way that his other company didn't. I don't know at all what he's actually thinking. But the idea that he is resistant to incentives just because he has had a successful exit seems untrue. I know people who are as rich as he is, and they are not much different than me.
        m00x 1y ago
        Calvin just worked like this when I was at Segment. He picked what he worked on and worked really intensely at it. People most often burn out because of the lack of agency, not hours worked. Also, keep in mind that people aren't the same. What seems hard to you might be easy to others, vice versa.
- deleted 1y ago
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- 44520297 1y ago
  >This guy even says they scour social media! Every, and I mean every, technology company scours social media. Amazon has a team that monitors social media posts to make sure employees, their spouses, their friends don’t leak info, for example.
Bratmon 1y ago
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience Much more common for OpenAI, because you lose all your vested equity if you talk negatively about OpenAI after leaving.
- rvz 1y ago
  Absolutely correct. There is a reason why there was a cult-like behaviour on X amongst the employees in supporting to bringing back Sam as CEO when he was kicked out by the OpenAI board of directors at the time. "OpenAI is nothing without it's people" All of "AGI" (which actually was the lamborghinis, penthouses, villas and mansions for the employees) was all on the line and on hold if that equity went to 0 or would be denied selling their equity if they openly criticized OpenAI after they left.
  - tptacek 1y ago
    Yes, and the reason for that is that employees at OpenAI believed (reasonably) that they were cruising for Google-scale windfall payouts from their equity over a relatively short time horizon, and that Altman and Brockman leaving OpenAI and landing at a well-funded competitor, coupled with OpenAI corporate management that publicly opposed commercialization of their technology, would torpedo those payouts. I'd have sounded cult-like too under those conditions (but I also don't believe AGI is a thing, so would not have a countervailing cult belief system to weigh against that behavior).
    - kaashif 1y ago
      > I also don't believe AGI is a thing Why not? I don't think we're anywhere close, but there are no physical limitations I can see that prevent AGI. It's not impossible in the same way our current understanding indicates FTL travel or time travel is.
      - smikhanov 1y ago
        If we were to believe the embodiment theory of intelligence (it’s by far not the only one out there, but very influential and convincing), this means that building an AGI is an equivalent problem to building an artificial human. Not a puppet, not a mock, not “sorta human”, but real, fully embodied human, down to gut bacterial biome, because according to the embodiment theory, this affects intelligence too. In this formulation, it’s pretty much as impossible as time travel, really.
deleted 1y ago
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tptacek 1y ago
Most posts of the form "Reflections on [Former Employer]" on HN are positive.
ben_w 1y ago
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. FWIW, I have positive experiences about many of my former employers. Not all of them, but many of them.
- yen223 1y ago
  Same here. If I wrote an honest piece about my last employer, it would sound very similar in tone to what was written in this article
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
> There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.
- lucianbr 1y ago
  > We are all very good and kind and not at all evil, trust us if we do say so ourselves Do these people have even minimal self-awareness?
- darkmarmot 1y ago
  VGT?
- stickfigure 1y ago
  Interesting. A year ago I joined one of the larger online sportsbook/casinos. In terms of talent, employees are all over the map (both good and bad). But I have yet to meet a villain. Everyone here is doing the best they can.
  - shermantanktop 1y ago
    Every villain wants to be the best villain they can be! More seriously, everyone is the hero of their own story, no matter how obvious their failings are from the outside. I’ve been burned by empathetically adopting someone’s worldview and only realizing later how messed up and self-serving it was.
  - yoyohello13 1y ago
    I’m sure people working for cigarette companies are doing the best they can too. People can be good individuals and also work toward evil ends.
    - stickfigure 1y ago
      I am of the opinion that the greatest evils come from the most self-righteous.
torginus 1y ago
Here's what I think - while Altman was busy trying to convince the public the AGI was coming in the next two weeks, with vague tales that were equaly ominous and utopistic, he (and his fellow leaders) have been extremely busy at trying hard to turn OpenAI into a product company with some killer offerings, and from the article, it seems they were rather good and successful in that. Considering the high stakes, money, and undoubtedly the ego involved, the writer might have acquired a few bruises along the way, or might have lost out on some political in fights (remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own). Another possible explanation is that the writer's just had enough - enough money to last a lifetime, just started a family, made his mark on the world, and was no longer compelled (or have been able to) keep up with methed-up fresh college grads.
- matco11 1y ago
  > remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own Well it depends on people’s mindset. It’s like doing a hackathon and not winning. Most people still leave inspired by what they have seen other people building, and can’t wait to do it again. …but of course not everybody likes to go to hackathons
  - pyman 1y ago
    > OpenAI is perhaps the most frighteningly ambitious org I've ever seen. That kind of ambition feels like the result of Bill Gates pushing Altman to the limit and Altman rising to the challenge. The famous "Gates demo" during the GPT‑2 days comes to mind. Having said that, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection.
curious_cat_163 1y ago
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I liked my jobs and bosses!
Spooky23 1y ago
I’m not saying this about OpenAI, because I just don’t know. But Bond villains exist. Usually the level 1 people are just motivated by power and money to an unhealthy degree. The worst are true believers in something. Even something seemingly mild.
bigiain 1y ago
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. Sure, but this bit really makes me wonder if I'd like to see what the writer is prepared to do to other people to get to his payday: "Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI"
Aurornis 1y ago
> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time. I was at a company that turned into the most toxic place I had ever worked due to a CEO who decided to randomly get involved with projects, yell at people, and even fire some people on the spot. Yet a lot of people wrote glowing stories about their time at the company on blogs or LinkedIn because it was beneficial for their future job search. > It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. For the posts that make HN I rarely see it that way. The recent trend is for passionate employees who really wanted to make a company work to lament how sad it was that the company or department was failing.
- eddythompson80 1y ago
  > The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time. Yeah I had to re-read the sentence. The positive "Farewell" post is indeed the norm. Especially so from well known, top level people in a company.
vlovich123 1y ago
> That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things I mean, that's a leap. There could be a bond villain that sets up incentives such that people who rationalize the way they want is who gets promoted / their voice amplified. Just because individual workers generally seem like they're trying to do the best thing doesn't mean the organization is set up specifically and intentionally to make certain kinds of "shady" decisions.
energy123 1y ago
> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. It's also a performance art to acquire attention
Wilder7977 1y ago
Allow me to propose a different rationalization: "yes I know X might damage some people/society, but it was not me who decided, and I get lots of money to do it, which someone else would do if not me." I don't think people who work on products that spy on people, create addiction or worse are as naïve as you portrayed them.
iLoveOncall 1y ago
Well, as a reminder OpenAI has a non disparagement clause in their contracts, so the only thing you'll ever see from former employees is positive feedback.
saghm 1y ago
We already have bad guys doing X right now (literally, not the placeholders variable)
Timwi 1y ago
> everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! The operative word is “trying”. You can “try” to do the right thing but find yourself restricted by various constraints. If an employee actually did the right thing (e.g. publish the weights of all their models, or shed light on how they were trained and on what), they get fired. If the CEO or similarly high-ranking exec actually did the right thing, the company would lose out on profits. So, rationalization is all they can do. “I'm trying to do the right thing, but.” “People don't see the big picture because they're not CEOs and don't understand the constraints.”
TeMPOraL 1y ago
I agree with your points here, but I feel the need to address the final bit. This is not aimed personally at you, but at the pattern you described - specifically, at how it's all too often abused: > Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead! Those are the easy cases, and correspondingly, you don't see much of those - or at least few are paying attention to companies talking like that. This is distinct from saying "X is going to directly benefit the society, and we're merely charging for it as fair compensation of our efforts, much like a baker charges you for the bread" or variants of it. This is much closer to what most tech companies try to argue, and the distinction seems to escape a lot of otherwise seemingly sharp people. In threads like this, I surprisingly often end up defending tech companies against such strawmen - because come on, if we want positive change, then making up a simpler but baseless problem, calling it out, and declaring victory, isn't helping to improve anything (but it sure does drive engagement on-line, making advertisers happy; a big part of why press does this too on a routine basis). And yes, this applies to this specific case of OpenAI as well. They're not claiming "LLMs are going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to get rich off them, and then use that money to fund lots of nice things". They're just saying, "here, look at ChatGPT, we believe you'll find it useful, and we want to keep doing R&D in this direction, because we think it'll directly benefit society". They may be wrong about it, or they may even knowingly lie about those benefits - but this is not trickle-down economics v2.0, SaaS edition.
teiferer 1y ago
There is lots of rationalizing going on in his article. > I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. 10 years from now, the significance of having participated in that launch will be ridiculously small (unless you tell yourself that it was a pivotal moment of your life, even if it objectively wasn't) versus those first weeks with your newborn will never come back. Kudos to your partner though.
- baggachipz 1y ago
  The very fact that he did this exemplifies everything that is wrong about the tech industry and our current society. He's praising himself for this instead of showing remorse for his failure as a parent.
  - ml-anon 1y ago
    Failure as a parent and a partner. Pregnancy and childbirth is traumatic both physically and emotionally. Basically abandoning your partner to deal with that alone is diabolical.
- usaar333 1y ago
  Odd take. Openai gives 5 months of paternity leave and author is independently wealthy. What difference does it make between spending more time with a 4 month old vs a 4 year old? Or is your prescription that people should just be retiring once they have children?
sensanaty 1y ago
> There's no Bond villain at the helm We're talking about Sam Altman here, right, the dude behind Worldcoin? A literal bond-villainesque biological data harvesting scheme?
- ben_w 1y ago
  It might be one of the cover stories for a Bond villain, but they have lots of mundane cover stories. Which isn't to say you're wrong, I've learned not to trust my gut in the category (rich business leaders) to which he belongs. I'd be more worried about the guy who tweeted “If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.” and more recently wore a custom T-shirt that implies he's like Vito Corleone.
  - hnbad 1y ago
    > I'd be more worried about the guy Or you could realize what those guys all have in common and be worried about the systems that enable them because the problem isn't a guy but a system enabling those guys to become everyone's problem. I don't mind "Vito Corleone" joking about a volcano lair. I mind him interfering in my country's elections and politics. I shouldn't have to worry about the antics of a guy building rockets that explode and cars that can chop off your fingers because I live in a country that can protect me from those things becoming my problem, but because we have the same underlying systems I do have to worry about him because his political power is easily transferrable to any other country including mine. This would still be true if it were a different guy. Heck, Thiel is landing contracts with his surveillance tech in my country despite the foreign politics of the US making it an obvious national and economic security risk and don't get me started on Bezos - there's plenty of "guys" already.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Sure, but "the systems" were built by such people and are mere evolutions of the previous "I have a bigger stick" of power politics from prior to the industrial revolution. Not that you're wrong about the systems, just that if it was as easy as changing these systems because we can tell they're bad and allow corruption, the Enlightenment wouldn't have managed to mess up with both Smith and Marx.
newswasboring 1y ago
> It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead! This is a great insight. But if we think a bit deeper about why that happens, I land on because there is nobody forcing anyone to do the right thing. Our governments and laws are geared more towards preventing people from doing the wrong thing, which of course can only be identified once someone has done the wrong thing and we can see the consequences and prove that it was indeed the wrong thing. Sometimes we fail to even do that.

harmonic18374 1y ago

I would never post any criticism of an employer in public. It can only harm my own career (just as being positive can only help it). Given how vengeful Altman can reportedly be, this goes double for OpenAI. This guy even says they scour social media! Whether subconsciously or not, one purpose of this post is probably to help this guy’s own personal network along; to try and put his weirdly short 14-month stint in the best possible light. I think it all makes him look like a mark, which is desirable for employers, so I guess it is working.

m00x 1y ago
Calvin cofounded Segment that had a $3.2B acquisition. He's not your typical employee.
- harmonic18374 1y ago
  He is still manipulatable and driven by incentive like anyone else.
  - m00x 1y ago
    What incentives? It's not a very intellectual opinion to give wild hypotheticals with nothing to go on other than "it's possible".
    - harmonic18374 1y ago
      I am not trying to advance wild hypotheticals, but something about his behavior does not quite feel right to me. Someone who has enough money for multiple lifetimes, working like he's possessed, to launch a product minimally different than those at dozens of other companies, and leaving his wife with all the childcare, then leaving after 14 months and insisting he was not burnt out but without a clear next step, not even, "I want to enjoy raising my child". His experience at OpenAI feels overly positive and saccharine, with a few shockingly naive comments that others have noted. I think there is obvious incentive. One reason for this is, he may be in burnout, but does not want to admit it. Another is, he is looking to the future: to keep options open for funding and connections if (when) he chooses to found again. He might be lonely and just want others in his life. Or to feel like he's working on something that "matters" in some way that his other company didn't. I don't know at all what he's actually thinking. But the idea that he is resistant to incentives just because he has had a successful exit seems untrue. I know people who are as rich as he is, and they are not much different than me.
      - m00x 1y ago
        Calvin just worked like this when I was at Segment. He picked what he worked on and worked really intensely at it. People most often burn out because of the lack of agency, not hours worked. Also, keep in mind that people aren't the same. What seems hard to you might be easy to others, vice versa.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
44520297 1y ago
>This guy even says they scour social media! Every, and I mean every, technology company scours social media. Amazon has a team that monitors social media posts to make sure employees, their spouses, their friends don’t leak info, for example.

Bratmon 1y ago

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience Much more common for OpenAI, because you lose all your vested equity if you talk negatively about OpenAI after leaving.

rvz 1y ago
Absolutely correct. There is a reason why there was a cult-like behaviour on X amongst the employees in supporting to bringing back Sam as CEO when he was kicked out by the OpenAI board of directors at the time. "OpenAI is nothing without it's people" All of "AGI" (which actually was the lamborghinis, penthouses, villas and mansions for the employees) was all on the line and on hold if that equity went to 0 or would be denied selling their equity if they openly criticized OpenAI after they left.
- tptacek 1y ago
  Yes, and the reason for that is that employees at OpenAI believed (reasonably) that they were cruising for Google-scale windfall payouts from their equity over a relatively short time horizon, and that Altman and Brockman leaving OpenAI and landing at a well-funded competitor, coupled with OpenAI corporate management that publicly opposed commercialization of their technology, would torpedo those payouts. I'd have sounded cult-like too under those conditions (but I also don't believe AGI is a thing, so would not have a countervailing cult belief system to weigh against that behavior).
  - kaashif 1y ago
    > I also don't believe AGI is a thing Why not? I don't think we're anywhere close, but there are no physical limitations I can see that prevent AGI. It's not impossible in the same way our current understanding indicates FTL travel or time travel is.
    - smikhanov 1y ago
      If we were to believe the embodiment theory of intelligence (it’s by far not the only one out there, but very influential and convincing), this means that building an AGI is an equivalent problem to building an artificial human. Not a puppet, not a mock, not “sorta human”, but real, fully embodied human, down to gut bacterial biome, because according to the embodiment theory, this affects intelligence too. In this formulation, it’s pretty much as impossible as time travel, really.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tptacek 1y ago

Most posts of the form "Reflections on [Former Employer]" on HN are positive.

ben_w 1y ago

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. FWIW, I have positive experiences about many of my former employers. Not all of them, but many of them.

yen223 1y ago
Same here. If I wrote an honest piece about my last employer, it would sound very similar in tone to what was written in this article

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago

> There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things. I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.

lucianbr 1y ago
> We are all very good and kind and not at all evil, trust us if we do say so ourselves Do these people have even minimal self-awareness?
darkmarmot 1y ago
VGT?
stickfigure 1y ago
Interesting. A year ago I joined one of the larger online sportsbook/casinos. In terms of talent, employees are all over the map (both good and bad). But I have yet to meet a villain. Everyone here is doing the best they can.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  Every villain wants to be the best villain they can be! More seriously, everyone is the hero of their own story, no matter how obvious their failings are from the outside. I’ve been burned by empathetically adopting someone’s worldview and only realizing later how messed up and self-serving it was.
- yoyohello13 1y ago
  I’m sure people working for cigarette companies are doing the best they can too. People can be good individuals and also work toward evil ends.
  - stickfigure 1y ago
    I am of the opinion that the greatest evils come from the most self-righteous.

torginus 1y ago

Here's what I think - while Altman was busy trying to convince the public the AGI was coming in the next two weeks, with vague tales that were equaly ominous and utopistic, he (and his fellow leaders) have been extremely busy at trying hard to turn OpenAI into a product company with some killer offerings, and from the article, it seems they were rather good and successful in that. Considering the high stakes, money, and undoubtedly the ego involved, the writer might have acquired a few bruises along the way, or might have lost out on some political in fights (remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own). Another possible explanation is that the writer's just had enough - enough money to last a lifetime, just started a family, made his mark on the world, and was no longer compelled (or have been able to) keep up with methed-up fresh college grads.

matco11 1y ago
> remember how they mentioned they built multiple Codex prototypes, it must've sucked to see some other people's version chosen instead of your own Well it depends on people’s mindset. It’s like doing a hackathon and not winning. Most people still leave inspired by what they have seen other people building, and can’t wait to do it again. …but of course not everybody likes to go to hackathons
- pyman 1y ago
  > OpenAI is perhaps the most frighteningly ambitious org I've ever seen. That kind of ambition feels like the result of Bill Gates pushing Altman to the limit and Altman rising to the challenge. The famous "Gates demo" during the GPT‑2 days comes to mind. Having said that, the entire article reads more like a puff piece than an honest reflection.

curious_cat_163 1y ago

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. I liked my jobs and bosses!

Spooky23 1y ago

I’m not saying this about OpenAI, because I just don’t know. But Bond villains exist. Usually the level 1 people are just motivated by power and money to an unhealthy degree. The worst are true believers in something. Even something seemingly mild.

bigiain 1y ago

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. Sure, but this bit really makes me wonder if I'd like to see what the writer is prepared to do to other people to get to his payday: "Nabeel Quereshi has an amazing post called Reflections on Palantir, where he ruminates on what made Palantir special. I wanted to do the same for OpenAI"

Aurornis 1y ago

> It is fairly rare to see an ex-employee put a positive spin on their work experience. The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time. I was at a company that turned into the most toxic place I had ever worked due to a CEO who decided to randomly get involved with projects, yell at people, and even fire some people on the spot. Yet a lot of people wrote glowing stories about their time at the company on blogs or LinkedIn because it was beneficial for their future job search. > It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. For the posts that make HN I rarely see it that way. The recent trend is for passionate employees who really wanted to make a company work to lament how sad it was that the company or department was failing.

eddythompson80 1y ago
> The opposite is true: Most ex-employee stories are overly positive and avoid anything negative. They’re just not shared widely because they’re not interesting most of the time. Yeah I had to re-read the sentence. The positive "Farewell" post is indeed the norm. Especially so from well known, top level people in a company.

vlovich123 1y ago

> That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! There's no Bond villain at the helm. It's good people rationalizing things I mean, that's a leap. There could be a bond villain that sets up incentives such that people who rationalize the way they want is who gets promoted / their voice amplified. Just because individual workers generally seem like they're trying to do the best thing doesn't mean the organization is set up specifically and intentionally to make certain kinds of "shady" decisions.

energy123 1y ago

> It's just a good reminder that the overwhelming majority of "why I left" posts are basically trying to justify why a person wasn't a good fit for an organization by blaming it squarely on the organization. It's also a performance art to acquire attention

Wilder7977 1y ago

Allow me to propose a different rationalization: "yes I know X might damage some people/society, but it was not me who decided, and I get lots of money to do it, which someone else would do if not me." I don't think people who work on products that spy on people, create addiction or worse are as naïve as you portrayed them.

iLoveOncall 1y ago

Well, as a reminder OpenAI has a non disparagement clause in their contracts, so the only thing you'll ever see from former employees is positive feedback.

saghm 1y ago

We already have bad guys doing X right now (literally, not the placeholders variable)

Timwi 1y ago

> everyone I met there is actually trying to do the right thing" - yes! That's true at almost every company that ends up making morally questionable decisions! The operative word is “trying”. You can “try” to do the right thing but find yourself restricted by various constraints. If an employee actually did the right thing (e.g. publish the weights of all their models, or shed light on how they were trained and on what), they get fired. If the CEO or similarly high-ranking exec actually did the right thing, the company would lose out on profits. So, rationalization is all they can do. “I'm trying to do the right thing, but.” “People don't see the big picture because they're not CEOs and don't understand the constraints.”

TeMPOraL 1y ago

I agree with your points here, but I feel the need to address the final bit. This is not aimed personally at you, but at the pattern you described - specifically, at how it's all too often abused: > Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead! Those are the easy cases, and correspondingly, you don't see much of those - or at least few are paying attention to companies talking like that. This is distinct from saying "X is going to directly benefit the society, and we're merely charging for it as fair compensation of our efforts, much like a baker charges you for the bread" or variants of it. This is much closer to what most tech companies try to argue, and the distinction seems to escape a lot of otherwise seemingly sharp people. In threads like this, I surprisingly often end up defending tech companies against such strawmen - because come on, if we want positive change, then making up a simpler but baseless problem, calling it out, and declaring victory, isn't helping to improve anything (but it sure does drive engagement on-line, making advertisers happy; a big part of why press does this too on a routine basis). And yes, this applies to this specific case of OpenAI as well. They're not claiming "LLMs are going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to get rich off them, and then use that money to fund lots of nice things". They're just saying, "here, look at ChatGPT, we believe you'll find it useful, and we want to keep doing R&D in this direction, because we think it'll directly benefit society". They may be wrong about it, or they may even knowingly lie about those benefits - but this is not trickle-down economics v2.0, SaaS edition.

teiferer 1y ago

There is lots of rationalizing going on in his article. > I returned early from my paternity leave to help participate in the Codex launch. 10 years from now, the significance of having participated in that launch will be ridiculously small (unless you tell yourself that it was a pivotal moment of your life, even if it objectively wasn't) versus those first weeks with your newborn will never come back. Kudos to your partner though.

baggachipz 1y ago
The very fact that he did this exemplifies everything that is wrong about the tech industry and our current society. He's praising himself for this instead of showing remorse for his failure as a parent.
- ml-anon 1y ago
  Failure as a parent and a partner. Pregnancy and childbirth is traumatic both physically and emotionally. Basically abandoning your partner to deal with that alone is diabolical.
usaar333 1y ago
Odd take. Openai gives 5 months of paternity leave and author is independently wealthy. What difference does it make between spending more time with a 4 month old vs a 4 year old? Or is your prescription that people should just be retiring once they have children?

sensanaty 1y ago

> There's no Bond villain at the helm We're talking about Sam Altman here, right, the dude behind Worldcoin? A literal bond-villainesque biological data harvesting scheme?

ben_w 1y ago
It might be one of the cover stories for a Bond villain, but they have lots of mundane cover stories. Which isn't to say you're wrong, I've learned not to trust my gut in the category (rich business leaders) to which he belongs. I'd be more worried about the guy who tweeted “If this works, I’m treating myself to a volcano lair. It’s time.” and more recently wore a custom T-shirt that implies he's like Vito Corleone.
- hnbad 1y ago
  > I'd be more worried about the guy Or you could realize what those guys all have in common and be worried about the systems that enable them because the problem isn't a guy but a system enabling those guys to become everyone's problem. I don't mind "Vito Corleone" joking about a volcano lair. I mind him interfering in my country's elections and politics. I shouldn't have to worry about the antics of a guy building rockets that explode and cars that can chop off your fingers because I live in a country that can protect me from those things becoming my problem, but because we have the same underlying systems I do have to worry about him because his political power is easily transferrable to any other country including mine. This would still be true if it were a different guy. Heck, Thiel is landing contracts with his surveillance tech in my country despite the foreign politics of the US making it an obvious national and economic security risk and don't get me started on Bezos - there's plenty of "guys" already.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Sure, but "the systems" were built by such people and are mere evolutions of the previous "I have a bigger stick" of power politics from prior to the industrial revolution. Not that you're wrong about the systems, just that if it was as easy as changing these systems because we can tell they're bad and allow corruption, the Enlightenment wouldn't have managed to mess up with both Smith and Marx.

newswasboring 1y ago

> It goes like this: we're the good guys. If we were evil, we could be doing things so much worse than X! Sure, some might object to X, but they miss the big picture: X is going to indirectly benefit the society because we're going to put the resulting money and power to good use. Without us, you could have the bad guys doing X instead! This is a great insight. But if we think a bit deeper about why that happens, I land on because there is nobody forcing anyone to do the right thing. Our governments and laws are geared more towards preventing people from doing the wrong thing, which of course can only be identified once someone has done the wrong thing and we can see the consequences and prove that it was indeed the wrong thing. Sometimes we fail to even do that.