I've already wasted a lot of my own time and energy on this, but I'm starting to get a bit confused on this whole thing. People seem pretty comfortable jumping to a profit-driven motivation for employees potentially leaving OpenAI in pursuit of some kind of loyalty to Altman.
But I'm just thinking of the rancor that has been heaped on Terraform, for example, for changing its license. The argument always seems to be that Hashicorp mislead contributors by claiming to release their contributions as open source and now they've reneged on that deal.
My understanding of OpenAI's mission was that there was a fear that AI being developed inside of big tech companies would provide undue advantage to the very few companies that were able to afford the teams and hardware necessary. Meanwhile the rest of us would be unaware of those advancement being made behind closed doors while those behemoths created an insurmountable gap.
Yet now, for some reason, everyone is literally cheerleading the gutting of OpenAI and gleefully pushing the employees into one of the biggest and most notorious tech giants there ever was.
You almost have to wonder, is this the greatest psychological twist in recent memory? People aren't just OK with them turning into a profit-seeking venture, they are seemingly begging for it. There is almost no opposition to it. And for what? Because of some guy none of us actually knows, who we've only seen on TV? And big tech guys like Paul Graham, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella - a literal who's-who of the tech giant oligarchy - are all fawning over this young man, along with visits to the white house, meeting foreign presidents, etc.
We went from "big corps are bad" to "big corps are saviours" in less than a week. And I'm not even sure what we think they are saving us from.
“Open”AI already was an unaccountable big corp. They’ve already refused not only to open their weights but to publish most of their research, to create an insurmountable gap with the rest of the world, and to legislate it in with lobbying. “Openness” merely meant “the API is open to your money”, with opaque “content policies” we had no say in. They had the same unaccountable and opaque power and the same commercial drive, but “for our own good” as they define it unilaterally.
Moving to MSFT merely means they’ll do the same thing, but with a bit more reliability, a bit more fear of liability, and a bit less of the doomerist sanctimony of the original leadership. Better to at least have a bigco with coherent and stable values like money. The bigco “nonprofit” led by the current board has made erratic decisions, has insane longtermist and EA values, and refused to give any meaningful statement about why they did what they did. Inasmuch as they resist commercialization, it’s to have more opacity and more control not less. How can we trust these people with control over AGI? Better to junk the board and deal with straightforward greed rather than hubris.
I don't understand why you putting the blame on the board, instead of the CEO, who:
1. is way more responsible for the direction the company deviated to
2. was in fight against the board, who did not like his direction
3. will be in the new company leading everything.
So all the bad that you criticize OpenAI for would leave to MS, and yet people are still cheering for it.
Is this a sheepskin comment or a genuinely naïve one? I can't tell.
Moving to MSFT means they cannot do anything that goes against MSFT's interests.
Everything they ever did, they ever will do belongs to MSFT.
MSFT brings with it all the bloat and risk aversion it needs as a big org, killing the "cutting egde" move-fast, make-it-work nature of OAI that got it to this point in the first place.
Only thing you can be sure of is this thing will now be "closed" forever, with no hope of others benefiting off the hard work of the real people who make it happen.
Elon has Twitter. Zuck has Facebook. Jeff has WaPo. Sam has HN. Everyone has their media platform that ultimately serves them. I’m not suggesting HN is being directly trolled or manipulated, but I think there is such a tight link between HN and Sam that many of the most active people on this platform in particular either personally know, look up to, benefit from, or are sympathetic to him. The overall effect of this is that he gets overwhelming benefit of the doubt in the absence of much information at all.
People are more loyal to their networks than their principles.
Bingo. OpenAI was specifically founded as a non-profit to prevent profit>all from turning this into an uncontrolled arms race. Before founding OpenAI Sam Altman wrote "Why You Should Fear Machine Intelligence."[0]
Last week he said, "I believe that this will be the most important and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented. And I also believe that if we’re not careful about it, it can be quite disastrous. And so we have to navigate it carefully."
If you run to Microsoft with the entire team, whose entire mission is an amorphous "stock price go up" (I mean, look at how much people are talking about them figuring out a story before stock market opens on Monday), then you have failed OpenAI's charter and founding purpose.
I think the “big tech is evil“ and “SV start-ups will save us” groups both still exist but remain distinct and haven’t coordinated the triggers that make each group become vocal. I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap in their membership, so it’s not like hypocrisy, it’s more like different people believing different things for different reasons.
However there are many other sentiments held reasonably by various subgroups, like, “this board overstepped and hasn’t explained itself to our satisfaction” or “we love our boss, he makes us wealthy,” or “if they take my chatGPT away, I’ll be pissed” or “man , I just invested $13B into this ridiculously governed venture and if I don’t fix this my wealth will never approach Balmer’s”
Yes, I agree the pendulum does swing. Just jarring to see it swing so quickly. Remember, this change began on Friday!
I guess the old saying: "If you can't beat them, join them" is the new mantra. And I suppose if you're going to do it, might as well do it with some enthusiasm.
I certainly agree. It is absolutely silly, but time and time again it is shown that money moves people. However, I also believe that once a majority of them get 5-10 years in and continue maturing through that, as we all do, they return to OpenAI (or whatever is around in the future) to contribute back in a way that helps all our children's future, not just their own.
The things I stand for now would not have held in the face of millions in comp 10 years ago, so I don't expect the same of others. I only hope they earn whatever it takes to get them to the next level sooner than later. AI does appear to be worth a good fight for humanity.
It is pretty rich that Microsoft of all companies is now coming in to be seen as the savior and not many people are batting an eye. It's a face turn 20 years in the making. If Facebook, Apple or Google were doing the same I suspect we'd hear more opprobrium.
I would guess non-profit or not is not the key. The key, at least to an engineer like me, is whether I can do meaningful work with a reasonable package. The employees in OpenAI are creating history and building amazing career after all, which outweighs the structure of a company or monetary incentives.
The impact that corporate shills have on public perception is quite powerful. It's peculiar how the general public acknowledges it in other fields such as entertainment, such as with Hollywood movie stars or prominent musicians. However, people often become frustrated when someone points it out within their own field. Kudos to you for noticing it.
The premise of founding OpenAI as a nonprofit with "nobler" goals than making money was that it would be a strong magnet to the right talent. Going to work for Microsoft (or any other tech company for that matter), from that point of view, is like crossing over to the dark side of the force. It will be interesting to see how many of OpenAI's employees were there because of its nonprofit status, and how many were there in spite of it.
I suspect very little people joined OpenAI for their noble non-profit mission after they introduced their for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI compensation was and still is top notch. Compare it to Signal, which is a true non-profit (and salaries are a lot lower).
Nonprofit status relates to the absence of investor payouts, and doesn't fundamentally have much to do with pay levels. Some employees can be on occasion willing to accept lower pay when the motives are altruistic, but most employees at nonprofits are paid (have to be paid) market rate.
Remember all those Apple and Amazon employees who signed a letter that they're not going back to the office? Last I heard Apple was at 100% compliance
Make no mistake, if Microsoft is matching $10M PPU's with $10M Microsoft RSUs vesting over 4 years, every single employee will join. But I kind of doubt that this is their plan
As others have pointed out, it's easier to sign a letter than actually go through with it. Besides that, wasn't there some employees who said something similar on Friday when this happened?
They didn't say they were going to Microsoft, as far as I can tell. I presume many can get golden offers anywhere including academia and other institutions with stronger nonprofit governance track record.
Very few people in tech are in it for noble reasons. Although, a nice pair of golden handcuffs can let you delude yourself into thinking what you are doing is noble. I can't imagine people working on shadow profiles at Facebook think what they are doing is noble.
You join OpenAI because if there is an open spot you’d take it. Plus it’s a famous company doing cutting edge AI, sure you can read the statement, but everyone wants to eat and get a better resume. It’s a bonus thing to feel.
>your desire potentially to join Sam Altman at Microsoft’s new AI Research Lab. Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation and advances our collective mission.
The podcast This Week In Startups brought up an interesting point that many OpenAI employees are on corporate sponsored work visas and they really can't jump ship to Microsoft. Those visas are tied to OpenAI.
Not sure how many employees it affects and of those, how many are "key people".
(No doubt that Microsoft already understand the logistics of all this and still want to signal their open arms regardless.)
Microsoft is a juggernaut from every angle that has direct ties to all arms of the U.S. government -- they can petition whatever backdoor deals they need to keep the knowledge and talent inside the U.S. rather than exporting it back overseas. They can angle it as a matter of national security without so much as a hint of difficulty.
Any visa issues will be resolved within a matter of days, not even weeks or months.
> Any visa issues will be resolved within a matter of days, not even weeks or months.
Agree. Further I'd add forget Microsoft, even at typical F500 company these visa concerns will be rather small so as not to brought at level of executive attention. Any large company has immigration/visa related department dealing with such things every day with separate piles for critical vs normal employees.
Yes, very much this. The rules are different when you are a >$1T company. You have Congresspeople on speed dial. Also, the Biden administration know what is at stake with their AI Executive Order. It will get done.
Nope this makes no sense and I say this as someone on a corporate sponsored visa. There are primarily 2 visas. The first most common is H1b, H1b transfers are some of the easiest things to do. I have moved from a trillion dollar company to a 3 person company on a H1b transfer. The company just needs a lawyer to do the paperwork and prove they are a company.
The next visa is O1. O1 visa allows transfer only if you work in the same field/ goal as your original visa. In this case it is straightforward, since they are doing literally the same job in a different company. Microsoft applied for thousands of visas a year, there really is no issue here regarding visas except immigrant employee anxiety.
H-1B Visas are transferable with an application; and you can legally join a new company before the application is approved (but it’s, of course, just a little risky).
I don’t think employees would expect Microsoft to drop the ball though.
At this level, MS could go to the White House and insist that keeping these people within the US is a matter of urgent national security, for the same reason there are Nvidia export restrictions to China.
>My honest assessment is that before 2016, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend changing jobs upon the filing of the H-1B. USCIS approved almost 100% of legitimate, well-constructed transfer petitions “back then”.
>Now, it’s kind of a mess. H-1B denials have increased by 27%. Requests for Evidence (often feared as a potential denial indicator) are now issued at a 60% clip (a 40% increase).
>So, I’ve changed my tune and so have many others. Many companies are now encouraging employees not to give notice until the H-1B is approved, assuming premium processing is alive. We no longer feel 100% certain that your transfer petition will be approved, and we, therefore, do not want you to bear the suddenly real risks outlined above.
Transfering? Yes, it's possible. But it's not trivial and, post trump immigration bs, there is a real possibility transfer will not go through. Also usually this takes a few weeks/months.
H-1B transfer is not trivial, takes time to be approved, and while you can start working at the new position when the application is filed, if its then not approved you can't legally work at the new job anymore and are out of status.
Hmm, As some body who has watched the Visa thing from quite close quarters and lost, but saw others win. Let me tell you something. Getting a Green card is something your company can make it happen if they wanted to. Its just how much money they can spend to cook up documentation to justify your case.
A competent immigration attorney, can get you GC in a year if the company was ready to pay for it.
OTOH if you go in the normal EB1 lane it could take an eternity to get one, because now the pleb rules apply to you. Or worse if your bosses won't support you, you likely will not even complete the Visa time. So its really what the top people say will happen in these cases.
If you are important enough that you have to be there, for a company like Microsoft, these are some what like the cash they spend on food stocked in the floor pantry/kitchen areas.
Commenters raising visa issues, but saying that these will be not a problem due to national security. It's certainly very favorable, but I don't know I'd say it's 100%, given bitter divisions in government and recent trouble with filling military positions due to Tuberville. Presumably the administration would have to spend some political capital to do this. Would they? I think so, but would not bet at 100%.
Yeah, if they are employees of the non-profit it could be an issue, because they could be on visas that cannot transfer to a for-profit entity. If they are on something like H1b, then that should not be an issue AFAIK.
"The partnership remains strong" (As we hire all of your employees).
This is going to be fascinating to watch. You have to think all of the usual players are going to offer everyone at OpenAI crazy salaries to break from Microsoft, if for nothing else to disrupt them from taking over OpenAI for free and to sow chaos and "deal doubt" amongst the remaining. It is what I would do if I were Facebook or Google at least.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they had no raises this year because of "economic situations" or some such BS. So watching a bunch of folks get 2x raises doesn't sound like it is going to go down well. Not hard to imagine a lot of discontent with this from that angle as well.
Presumably, this violates MSFT's investment agreement with OpenAI. Any reasonably competent counsel would add "no-poach" protection for a strategic investor investing in a startup, and this is as clear a case of poaching as there is.
Negotiation is always a two way street. I’m a startup founder. Your investors, when they invest, will send you some documents on key provisions (e.g. pro rata rights) and you and they will go back and forth on what is acceptable. You, as a founder, will not have the ability to unilaterally turn down all requests. Especially in early funding rounds.
Not this sort, as far as I'm aware. The variety where you collude with competitors can be under some legal systems.
The point is to discourage market distortion. Some jurisdictions also make employee contract conditions of a similar nature illegal too, as they interfere with personal freedoms.
A lot of business deals though specifically include clauses to prevent one partner from poaching the other's staff, as otherwise one side could do what appears to be happening here: Unilaterally taking over the entire business.
Federally, there is precedent that collaborative projects can be an exception to the general federal prohibition of no poach agreements. Whether that would work on California law (IIRC, the federal prohibition is an application of antitrust law, the California one is a labor protection), and whether the other aspects of the Microsoft-OpenAI agreement would fit in the exception, I don't know.
Most contracts also have a clause that a breach of one part does not invalidate the remainder. There are elements that typically out live the end of a contract as well, often the poaching and non-compete clause
One could argue that firing the Loopt founder guy who was an at-will employee isn't a material event invalidating a contract unless the contract specifies exactly that.
Really? I'm a lawyer, and I can't even see an argument of how firing a CEO would affect investment agreements at all unless Microsoft specifically conditioned their investment on Altman remaining CEO forever.
If the last three days didn't happen and Microsoft announced today that they are buying OpenAI there would have been massive uproar in the tech community against that, like when they bought GitHub.
But now they are seen as saviors of humanity against the evil people who don't want to commercialize AI for maximum profit.
Going to be honest, I still hate them and all I feel is sadness that it feels like the employees of OpenAI are going to end up building microsoft products... I didn't love a lot about OpenAI but honestly I'd rather ChatGPT shut down than become a microsoft product. Though obviously it's naive to wish for that since that's obviously not how it'd go.
Readit News
But I'm just thinking of the rancor that has been heaped on Terraform, for example, for changing its license. The argument always seems to be that Hashicorp mislead contributors by claiming to release their contributions as open source and now they've reneged on that deal.
My understanding of OpenAI's mission was that there was a fear that AI being developed inside of big tech companies would provide undue advantage to the very few companies that were able to afford the teams and hardware necessary. Meanwhile the rest of us would be unaware of those advancement being made behind closed doors while those behemoths created an insurmountable gap.
Yet now, for some reason, everyone is literally cheerleading the gutting of OpenAI and gleefully pushing the employees into one of the biggest and most notorious tech giants there ever was.
You almost have to wonder, is this the greatest psychological twist in recent memory? People aren't just OK with them turning into a profit-seeking venture, they are seemingly begging for it. There is almost no opposition to it. And for what? Because of some guy none of us actually knows, who we've only seen on TV? And big tech guys like Paul Graham, Eric Schmidt, Satya Nadella - a literal who's-who of the tech giant oligarchy - are all fawning over this young man, along with visits to the white house, meeting foreign presidents, etc.
We went from "big corps are bad" to "big corps are saviours" in less than a week. And I'm not even sure what we think they are saving us from.
Moving to MSFT merely means they’ll do the same thing, but with a bit more reliability, a bit more fear of liability, and a bit less of the doomerist sanctimony of the original leadership. Better to at least have a bigco with coherent and stable values like money. The bigco “nonprofit” led by the current board has made erratic decisions, has insane longtermist and EA values, and refused to give any meaningful statement about why they did what they did. Inasmuch as they resist commercialization, it’s to have more opacity and more control not less. How can we trust these people with control over AGI? Better to junk the board and deal with straightforward greed rather than hubris.
So all the bad that you criticize OpenAI for would leave to MS, and yet people are still cheering for it.
I am truly baffled.
Moving to MSFT means they cannot do anything that goes against MSFT's interests.
Everything they ever did, they ever will do belongs to MSFT.
MSFT brings with it all the bloat and risk aversion it needs as a big org, killing the "cutting egde" move-fast, make-it-work nature of OAI that got it to this point in the first place.
Only thing you can be sure of is this thing will now be "closed" forever, with no hope of others benefiting off the hard work of the real people who make it happen.
People are more loyal to their networks than their principles.
Last week he said, "I believe that this will be the most important and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented. And I also believe that if we’re not careful about it, it can be quite disastrous. And so we have to navigate it carefully."
If you run to Microsoft with the entire team, whose entire mission is an amorphous "stock price go up" (I mean, look at how much people are talking about them figuring out a story before stock market opens on Monday), then you have failed OpenAI's charter and founding purpose.
[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
However there are many other sentiments held reasonably by various subgroups, like, “this board overstepped and hasn’t explained itself to our satisfaction” or “we love our boss, he makes us wealthy,” or “if they take my chatGPT away, I’ll be pissed” or “man , I just invested $13B into this ridiculously governed venture and if I don’t fix this my wealth will never approach Balmer’s”
Switching from ‘must do good’ to ‘good is impossible, make as much money as possible’ can happen really quick.
The 80’s Era of ‘greed is good’ followed free love and the hippies pretty closely for a reason, IMO.
I guess the old saying: "If you can't beat them, join them" is the new mantra. And I suppose if you're going to do it, might as well do it with some enthusiasm.
The things I stand for now would not have held in the face of millions in comp 10 years ago, so I don't expect the same of others. I only hope they earn whatever it takes to get them to the next level sooner than later. AI does appear to be worth a good fight for humanity.
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They should take SkyDrive, remove the Drive part and add all new cool AI made with .NET technology; so that's how we get Skynet /s
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
Make no mistake, if Microsoft is matching $10M PPU's with $10M Microsoft RSUs vesting over 4 years, every single employee will join. But I kind of doubt that this is their plan
Actually going is a whole different thing. Why not go to Google or FB or Anthropic if you’re quitting anyway, and they can match the offer.
Hmmmm. The stiff resolve of a spaghetti noodle. I "consider" changing jobs literally every single day.
this only signals desire to leave openai. nothing else.
When challenged, they say ‘someone else would’ve done it anyway, so it might as well be me’. Which isn’t incorrect I think.
In summary, nobody gaf
People talk about the coherence of 700 people signing an open letter as being goal aligned, but I see it more like mortgage payment aligned.
The podcast This Week In Startups brought up an interesting point that many OpenAI employees are on corporate sponsored work visas and they really can't jump ship to Microsoft. Those visas are tied to OpenAI.
Not sure how many employees it affects and of those, how many are "key people".
(No doubt that Microsoft already understand the logistics of all this and still want to signal their open arms regardless.)
Any visa issues will be resolved within a matter of days, not even weeks or months.
Agree. Further I'd add forget Microsoft, even at typical F500 company these visa concerns will be rather small so as not to brought at level of executive attention. Any large company has immigration/visa related department dealing with such things every day with separate piles for critical vs normal employees.
The next visa is O1. O1 visa allows transfer only if you work in the same field/ goal as your original visa. In this case it is straightforward, since they are doing literally the same job in a different company. Microsoft applied for thousands of visas a year, there really is no issue here regarding visas except immigrant employee anxiety.
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Do you really think they're going to feign an offer to join, but then say "oh your immigration status is too complex"? With all of their resources?
I don’t think employees would expect Microsoft to drop the ball though.
These are not your average groups of H1B workers.
Somebody downvoted sibling comment from x86x87 but they didn't give a reason.
It seems the concern for it not being trivial is supported by immigration attorneys. An example excerpt from https://banyan.law/how-risky-is-the-h-1b-transfer/ :
>My honest assessment is that before 2016, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend changing jobs upon the filing of the H-1B. USCIS approved almost 100% of legitimate, well-constructed transfer petitions “back then”.
>Now, it’s kind of a mess. H-1B denials have increased by 27%. Requests for Evidence (often feared as a potential denial indicator) are now issued at a 60% clip (a 40% increase).
>So, I’ve changed my tune and so have many others. Many companies are now encouraging employees not to give notice until the H-1B is approved, assuming premium processing is alive. We no longer feel 100% certain that your transfer petition will be approved, and we, therefore, do not want you to bear the suddenly real risks outlined above.
That is going to go over well with current microsoft employees.
then the $1M-$2M/year OpenAI folks who never built a profitable product enter the building
A competent immigration attorney, can get you GC in a year if the company was ready to pay for it.
OTOH if you go in the normal EB1 lane it could take an eternity to get one, because now the pleb rules apply to you. Or worse if your bosses won't support you, you likely will not even complete the Visa time. So its really what the top people say will happen in these cases.
If you are important enough that you have to be there, for a company like Microsoft, these are some what like the cash they spend on food stocked in the floor pantry/kitchen areas.
They will just buy you a Green card.
This, in an era when we're editing flowcharts, technical documents and schematic diagrams to avoid potentially offensive "master/slave" nomenclature.
Dead Comment
This is going to be fascinating to watch. You have to think all of the usual players are going to offer everyone at OpenAI crazy salaries to break from Microsoft, if for nothing else to disrupt them from taking over OpenAI for free and to sow chaos and "deal doubt" amongst the remaining. It is what I would do if I were Facebook or Google at least.
Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they had no raises this year because of "economic situations" or some such BS. So watching a bunch of folks get 2x raises doesn't sound like it is going to go down well. Not hard to imagine a lot of discontent with this from that angle as well.
We are though taking about OpenAI, by that time probably one of the five most valuable startups in the world.
The point is to discourage market distortion. Some jurisdictions also make employee contract conditions of a similar nature illegal too, as they interfere with personal freedoms.
A lot of business deals though specifically include clauses to prevent one partner from poaching the other's staff, as otherwise one side could do what appears to be happening here: Unilaterally taking over the entire business.
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No matter how smart or dumb that move was.
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But now they are seen as saviors of humanity against the evil people who don't want to commercialize AI for maximum profit.
Absolutely brilliant!