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.
Imagine how that feels for the tens of thousands of MS employees laid off recently. "Had to be done", according to 2.7T$ company.
Followed by: "Hey guys, we don't know exactly what you do but do join us by the several hundreds and don't you worry about compensation, we pretty much have unlimited money to throw at this."
Companies the size of Microsoft of which have 200,000+ employees can reshuffle and sack 5% of their workforce in order to provide capacity for future areas or allow them to be ready to make large investments in different areas.
It is likely that Microsoft had staff working in areas that no longer required the attention they once did.
I want people in jobs too and I am currently going through an unseen reshuffle that is through no fault of my own. But layoffs occur for all sorts of reasons, many of which are not to reduce further acquisitions or hires.
If I was an employee who was laid off, I might justify it given that AI and those employees from OpenAI have become an acquirable gold mine all of a sudden.
This seems to me like it's another nail in the coffin for Google. With Microsoft and its resources (essentially) fully in control of OpenAI tech without the non-profit chains, it can really turn everything upside down, kind of like what Google did to them in the 2000's. When was the last time you used Bard?
So far, every time I use bard it gives me an incorrect answer. But I am happy with how fast it returns it, at least. I haven't had that problem with Bing chat (at least in the past few months), which has pretty much changed the way I search.
That being said, I hope Bard improves drastically. It would be nice to have more competition from them in this space.
I find that Bard does a pretty good job when I query it against my GMail (using @gmail, what is on my schedule?) and Google Docs. Too bad it is not integrated with Google Calendar.
Funny enough, they seem to have adopted googles old playbook: Embrace, extend, and extinguish. On a sidenote, Pichai has been a terrible CEO, during his reign Google went from my favourite of the big tech to my least favourite.
Few people are going to want to move unless most people are moving. So there is a coordination and timing issue here.
I really wonder if there's going to be a new letter from OpenAI employees about demanding the board reinstate Sam and Greg and then resign -- but this time with an actual deadline that the undersigned declare their mass resignation if not met. A genuine letter of conditional resignation. No more "may choose to resign" -- this time, "do resign if".
Then everybody knows to move to Microsoft literally the next day, all at once.
Given the holiday, it seems like midnight the end of this Sunday would be suitable.
It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Another thing to chew on: Imagine if Googlers demanded that the board resign (which are the terms of Sam's reinstatement) or they all walk... I don't think they'd meet with nearly as much positive sentiment.
> It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Interesting, though sadly not very complex. The sentiment around this is so positive because they're backing up Altman, and he's garnered quite a cult lately.
I don't think collective bargaining is that frowned upon.
I guess what you are noticing is that there is a huge overlap between person cultists (fans of Altman, Musk, whatever) and disdain for that they are temporary being part of the lowly wage worker collective.
Excellent point. This is what I find so aggravating about the board's decision. Even if you buy everything that has been reported/speculated, that they were concerned about OpenAI being "too commercial" and Altman leading this commercial charge and being duplicitous in the process, all they've done is completely obliterated whatever part of the nonprofit's charter that still had influence.
"AGI for the benefit of all humanity" will become yet another SV "how do we make the most money" ploy.
I don't see how the board did that. It would just be the employees leaving because they want more monetization and thence pay that spells doom for non-profit AI development.
My read was that they weren't worried about it being too commercial necessarily, but that it would be closely held with only governments and huge companies getting access.
It was created as a response to Google having exclusive access to the best models. If Microsoft lets anyone with an Azure account pay by the query to SOTA models then that would at least be an improvement
Salesforce CEO did the same yesterday. We know twitter can run with a skelton-crew but I’m not sure OpenAI can survive a mass exodus of top AI talent. This is a very interesting sort of collective action but non-adversarial. Management is clamoring for labor and making public offers to people they haven’t met to pay top dollar.
I wonder how Microsoft employees feel like now, after being paid the worst of all FAANG, no merit increases, tens of thousands of layoffs over the last year, they'll now be matching the outrageous comp packages for incoming OpenAI hires...
Not sure why they'd want to. If they can direct-hire the core talent they really don't need OpenAI at all, and if OpenAI totally goes under they don't have to make good on the billions in Azure credits they promised. win-win
Tidbit: Kevin Scott has a podcast ("Behind the Tech") and he had Mira Murati as a guest in July. The podcast interview itself isn't very interesting though.
it will be hard to match up though, before ousting Sam, those OpenAI-ers are expecting tens of millions or more from shares, once they join microsoft, that's pretty much unlikely, which is one reason people go to startups in silicon valley instead of big companies.
There’s an interesting dynamic here. What value of OpenAI to use for conversion calculation? 86b round is pretty much dead if they move to MS, yet 29b is too low (even 86b is low in terms of future potential). And what kind of upward room there will be?
I have no doubt that MS can spend billions in cash or RSU to compensate all of them, but I do believe there’s some gotcha if exodus actually happens and MS might not be so generous in throwing millions of dollar cash for a general backend engineer recently joining OpenAI.
They don't even need all 700+ or even 500 or even 100 employees to join.
If they can get the 4 technical members of the executive team not counting Ilya - Mira, Woj, Bob, and Peter, plus a few other key people like Karpathy then they have what they need and OpenAI is effectively dead.
I would rather wait until Ilja is gone, and then everything will be back to normal. This is much more likely than most joining MS; and I'd rather join Anthropic over MS.
I don't think so. These people are at a company that may not exist anymore next week. It's right around the holidays. It's a horrible time to have uncertainty about employment. I would assume most of them would find it reassuring that there's an opportunity for a seamless transition. Just because there's an open offer doesn't mean they have to go.
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.
I am truly baffled.
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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.
[0] https://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-1
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”
Typical burnout change IMO.
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.
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.
Thank you for the sobering perspective. I think we as a collective need to answer this question.
Everyone wants to see Microsoft Skynet to emerge
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
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.
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Signal employees make $400k to $600k a year. How much is OpenAI paying?
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
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Few
700 out of 770 employees already signed an open letter saying they will consider changing jobs.
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
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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?
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I think peer pressure also plays a part. You want to be part of the majority in case things change, Sam comes back etc.
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.
I don't doubt that a lot will, but it's also easy to sign a letter.
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How reliable is this information, could it be a deliberate rumor spread by interested parties?
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> they will consider changing jobs.
Hmmmm. The stiff resolve of a spaghetti noodle. I "consider" changing jobs literally every single day.
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.
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what this have to do with their willingness to join Microsoft?!?
this only signals desire to leave openai. nothing else.
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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.
Exactly this.
When challenged, they say ‘someone else would’ve done it anyway, so it might as well be me’. Which isn’t incorrect I think.
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.
In summary, nobody gaf
I would wager a very small % of them care about the legal structure of the business and just wanted to build really cool stuff with Sam.
If they were in it for purely noble reasons, they would have already left when it became NotOpenAI.
When you're total compensation depends on the for profit part does it really matter?
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.
it didn't preclude a now common cult of personality problem.
When reading the title I was instantly reminded of "Come to the dark side, we have cookies!"
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/voik6qeguhwaa0hx4zmxm/come-to...
>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.
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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.
Microsoft is no stranger to the visa process. Several of the visas like H1B allow transfers, albeit it will take time and effort to accomplish.
Microsoft, the large american tech giant, is trying to save a 10B dollar investment from boneheads who just blew up the company they invested in.
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?
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.
These are not your average groups of H1B workers.
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Most work visas can be transferred to new companies fairly easily - it's almost trivial. I don't think thats a big deal.
>it's almost trivial. I don't think thats a big deal.
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.
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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.
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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.
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> that matches your compensation
That is going to go over well with current microsoft employees.
0% raise and lower bonus pool in 2023 for Satyas engineers
then the $1M-$2M/year OpenAI folks who never built a profitable product enter the building
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It's sounding more and more like a bluff. Everyone at Microsoft Research has to be seething at this.
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LinkedIn is one of the highest paying companies in tech while MS pays peanuts. Seems like MS has done this before.
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.
They will just buy you a Green card.
Microsoft will make it happen. Even if 350 people are in this situation that is nothing to the immigration arm of Microsoft.
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%.
ICE is a part of the executive branch. There is no Congressional issue.
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 fact that work visas are tied to a concrete employer is the biggest slavery scam the US is pulling off.
I'm continually amazed at how it's still considered OK to call things "slavery" that aren't actually slavery.
This, in an era when we're editing flowcharts, technical documents and schematic diagrams to avoid potentially offensive "master/slave" nomenclature.
Well, so is health insurance, eh.
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Isn't this a thing everywhere? I have the same in UK.
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Add the endless wait time for green card for Indians and you have the perfect recipe for indentured servant exploitation and wage suppression
I think a lot of countries do it this way. I wish they didn't but I think they do, but I may be wrong about that.
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https://nitter.net/kevin_scott/status/1726971608706031670
https://archive.is/GcavN
"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.
Wow, I wonder how MS employees are feeling right now
I would think they feel great. Share price is going through the roof purely based on hype.
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No raises for everyone but they did give promotions out.
I don't really know why, but at this point whenever I read any new OpenAI news, Yakety Sax starts playing in my head.
I agree but this one is Microsoft news so it's Imperial March for me.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/mama-mi-vse-tyazhelo-bol’ny-м...
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.
True. Being a founder myself, I've experienced the back and forth of investment negotiations.
We are though taking about OpenAI, by that time probably one of the five most valuable startups in the world.
Isn't no poach illegal?
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.
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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.
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Yes. And particularly in California.
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This isn't poaching in this case.
One could argue that the board by demolishing the company in one fell swoop effectively relieved Microsoft of some of their contractual obligations.
One could argue that by doing something it is legally allowed to do, the board has not relieved Microsoft of anything.
No matter how smart or dumb that move was.
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.
Absolutely brilliant!
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.
End-run around the anti-trust laws.
Imagine how that feels for the tens of thousands of MS employees laid off recently. "Had to be done", according to 2.7T$ company.
Followed by: "Hey guys, we don't know exactly what you do but do join us by the several hundreds and don't you worry about compensation, we pretty much have unlimited money to throw at this."
And then they say people are too cynical of tech.
Companies the size of Microsoft of which have 200,000+ employees can reshuffle and sack 5% of their workforce in order to provide capacity for future areas or allow them to be ready to make large investments in different areas.
It is likely that Microsoft had staff working in areas that no longer required the attention they once did.
I want people in jobs too and I am currently going through an unseen reshuffle that is through no fault of my own. But layoffs occur for all sorts of reasons, many of which are not to reduce further acquisitions or hires.
If I was an employee who was laid off, I might justify it given that AI and those employees from OpenAI have become an acquirable gold mine all of a sudden.
This seems to me like it's another nail in the coffin for Google. With Microsoft and its resources (essentially) fully in control of OpenAI tech without the non-profit chains, it can really turn everything upside down, kind of like what Google did to them in the 2000's. When was the last time you used Bard?
> When was the last time you used Bard?
Multiple times today. It's not that bad actually sometimes better than chatgpt 3.5 sometimes worse
> When was the last time you used Bard?
So far, every time I use bard it gives me an incorrect answer. But I am happy with how fast it returns it, at least. I haven't had that problem with Bing chat (at least in the past few months), which has pretty much changed the way I search.
That being said, I hope Bard improves drastically. It would be nice to have more competition from them in this space.
I find that Bard does a pretty good job when I query it against my GMail (using @gmail, what is on my schedule?) and Google Docs. Too bad it is not integrated with Google Calendar.
Yesterday.
Funny enough, they seem to have adopted googles old playbook: Embrace, extend, and extinguish. On a sidenote, Pichai has been a terrible CEO, during his reign Google went from my favourite of the big tech to my least favourite.
Embrace extend extinguish was Microsoft’s “old playbook” according to the US Justice department (not Google’s). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
The more things change the more things stay the same :D
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Few people are going to want to move unless most people are moving. So there is a coordination and timing issue here.
I really wonder if there's going to be a new letter from OpenAI employees about demanding the board reinstate Sam and Greg and then resign -- but this time with an actual deadline that the undersigned declare their mass resignation if not met. A genuine letter of conditional resignation. No more "may choose to resign" -- this time, "do resign if".
Then everybody knows to move to Microsoft literally the next day, all at once.
Given the holiday, it seems like midnight the end of this Sunday would be suitable.
It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Another thing to chew on: Imagine if Googlers demanded that the board resign (which are the terms of Sam's reinstatement) or they all walk... I don't think they'd meet with nearly as much positive sentiment.
Finally we figured out a way to support collective action: utilize it in support of a CEO!
> It's interesting how some forms of employee collective action (collective bargaining) are frowned upon in this forum, whereas the sentiment surrounding this is largely positive.
Interesting, though sadly not very complex. The sentiment around this is so positive because they're backing up Altman, and he's garnered quite a cult lately.
Afaik, concrete examples of collective actions have been positive. It's just abstract ideas aren't always positive.
ex. Google's walkout [1]
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18352275
I don't think collective bargaining is that frowned upon.
I guess what you are noticing is that there is a huge overlap between person cultists (fans of Altman, Musk, whatever) and disdain for that they are temporary being part of the lowly wage worker collective.
Wasn't OpenAI created as a counter to big tech AI labs?
Excellent point. This is what I find so aggravating about the board's decision. Even if you buy everything that has been reported/speculated, that they were concerned about OpenAI being "too commercial" and Altman leading this commercial charge and being duplicitous in the process, all they've done is completely obliterated whatever part of the nonprofit's charter that still had influence.
"AGI for the benefit of all humanity" will become yet another SV "how do we make the most money" ploy.
I don't see how the board did that. It would just be the employees leaving because they want more monetization and thence pay that spells doom for non-profit AI development.
My read was that they weren't worried about it being too commercial necessarily, but that it would be closely held with only governments and huge companies getting access.
Maybe the learning from this episode is that the limited liability for-profit company is the worst form of coordination except for all the others?
It was created as a response to Google having exclusive access to the best models. If Microsoft lets anyone with an Azure account pay by the query to SOTA models then that would at least be an improvement
ironically, that's the mission of pre-Sam era.
We'll see this again in discovery.
Salesforce CEO did the same yesterday. We know twitter can run with a skelton-crew but I’m not sure OpenAI can survive a mass exodus of top AI talent. This is a very interesting sort of collective action but non-adversarial. Management is clamoring for labor and making public offers to people they haven’t met to pay top dollar.
Twitter does not run on a skeleton crew, it's spiraling out of control and into irrelevance.
You are replying in a thread about a twit though.
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Even though I hate Elon Musk and twitter so much I got to say that it's running fine without big outages.
It won't make a profit no matter what they do TBH
Uh didn’t we just count twitter hearts from OpenAI employees?
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I wonder how Microsoft employees feel like now, after being paid the worst of all FAANG, no merit increases, tens of thousands of layoffs over the last year, they'll now be matching the outrageous comp packages for incoming OpenAI hires...
>advances our collective mission.
Microsoft's profit.
Msft has enough money to strongarm the law so they can somehow purchase openAi in the end
Not sure why they'd want to. If they can direct-hire the core talent they really don't need OpenAI at all, and if OpenAI totally goes under they don't have to make good on the billions in Azure credits they promised. win-win
wont that get them in legal trouble?
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Can you all please use nitter instead? It loads a lot faster and doesn't track you
Sorry, neither nitter, twitter nor Xitter shall i read.
This made me laugh for some reason
Microsoft bagged the Best Black Friday Deal ever !
Re-Brand ChatGPT as Clippy Reloaded!
Spin it up as a separate company and do a $1T IPO.
Tidbit: Kevin Scott has a podcast ("Behind the Tech") and he had Mira Murati as a guest in July. The podcast interview itself isn't very interesting though.
it will be hard to match up though, before ousting Sam, those OpenAI-ers are expecting tens of millions or more from shares, once they join microsoft, that's pretty much unlikely, which is one reason people go to startups in silicon valley instead of big companies.
This is a part of laying the groundwork for the very first $1T AI startup. A real unicorn.
> Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation
Great if true.
There’s an interesting dynamic here. What value of OpenAI to use for conversion calculation? 86b round is pretty much dead if they move to MS, yet 29b is too low (even 86b is low in terms of future potential). And what kind of upward room there will be?
I have no doubt that MS can spend billions in cash or RSU to compensate all of them, but I do believe there’s some gotcha if exodus actually happens and MS might not be so generous in throwing millions of dollar cash for a general backend engineer recently joining OpenAI.
If they’re replacing PPUs with RSUs it’s definitely great.
What is the usual PPU deal at OpenAI? What does that even mean / how is it valued?
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They don't even need all 700+ or even 500 or even 100 employees to join.
If they can get the 4 technical members of the executive team not counting Ilya - Mira, Woj, Bob, and Peter, plus a few other key people like Karpathy then they have what they need and OpenAI is effectively dead.
Maybe there's a gap between "OpenAI is dead" and "MSFT can build the same"?
They already can build the same given they have access to everything as part of their deal.
But it is not in Microsoft's benefit that OpenAI is dead - they do not have the chops internally to compete yet (my take at least)
I mean, hiring all 700+ of them would certainly mean OAI was dead, what is your point?
It's a great negotiation tactic from MS imo so that OpenAI employees don't budge on their petition knowing MS is backing them
OpenAI may be dead but OpenAI 2 at MS is not guaranteed to live.
Building OpenAI at Microsoft from scratch is a tall order.
... but you'll need to use Teams for collaboration.
That’s an alternative hostile takeover brilliant!
I would rather wait until Ilja is gone, and then everything will be back to normal. This is much more likely than most joining MS; and I'd rather join Anthropic over MS.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
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I knew microsoft lacked ethics but this is beyond that. This is akin to a hostile takeover, simply because openai fired their inside man.
Having said that - i hope they do move over. That’s where ai ends and becomes nothing more but clippy with sprinkles.
Sounds a little desperate now.
MSFT should just give the employees space to make their own decision.
I don't think so. These people are at a company that may not exist anymore next week. It's right around the holidays. It's a horrible time to have uncertainty about employment. I would assume most of them would find it reassuring that there's an opportunity for a seamless transition. Just because there's an open offer doesn't mean they have to go.
And having a solid open offer from Microsoft makes it much easier and less stressful to quickly get a great offer from somewhere else.
Or they can go and simultaneously bid themselves or whole teams to Google and Facebook. The option cost is zero to do this.