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Comment by mcny | Hacker News Reader

> I don't really understanding why the workforce is swinging unambiguously behind Altman.

I have no inside information. I don't know anyone at Open AI. This is all purely speculation.

Now that that's out out the way, here is my guess: money.

These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money. They think they can make more money with Sam Altman in charge.

Once again, this is completely all speculation. I have not spoken to anyone at Open AI or anyone at Microsoft or anyone at all really.

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> These people never joined OpenAI to "advance sciences and arts" or to "change the world". They joined OpenAI to earn money

Getting Cochrane vibes from Star Trek there.

> COCHRANE: You wanna know what my vision is? ...Dollar signs! Money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I wanna go to the stars? I don't even like to fly. I take trains. I built this ship so that I could retire to some tropical island filled with ...naked women. That's Zefram Cochrane. That's his vision. This other guy you keep talking about. This historical figure. I never met him. I can't imagine I ever will.

I wonder how history will view Sam Altman

There are non-negligible chances that history will be written by Sam Altman and his GPT minions, so he'll probably be viewed favorably.

I'm not sure I fully buy this, only because how would anyone be absolutely certain that they'd make more with Sam Altman in charge? It feels like a weird thing to speculatively rally behind.

I'd imagine there's some internal political drama going on or something we're missing out on.

I fully buy it. Ethics and morals are a few rungs on the ladder beneath compensation for most software engineers. If the board wants to focus more on being a non-profit and safety, and Altman wants to focus more on commercialization and the economics of business, if my priority is money then where my loyalty goes is obvious.

> how would anyone be absolutely certain that they'd make more with Sam Altman in charge?

Why do you think absolute certainty is required here? It seems to me that "more probable than not" is perfectly adequate to explain the data.

Really? If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet. Favouring moving oneself from the top 0.5% of global lifetime earners to the top 0.1% (or whatever the percentile shift is) over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology would be depraved.

EDIT: I don't know why this is being downvoted. My speculation as to the average OpenAI employee's place in the global income distribution (of course wealth is important too) was not snatched out of thin air. See: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/9/15/23874111/charit...

You only have to look at humanity's history to see that people will make this decision over and over again.

Why be surprised? This is exactly how it has always been: the rich aim to get even richer and if that brings risks or negative effects for the rest that's A-ok with them.

That's what I didn't understand about the world of the really wealthy people until I started interacting with them on a regular basis: they are still aiming to get even more wealthy, even the ones that could fund their families for the next five generations. With a few very notable exceptions.

It's a selection bias: they people who weren't so intrinsically motivated to get rich are less likely to end up as wealthy people.

It's a combination of that and the reality that wealth is power and power is relative.

Let's say you've got $100 million. You want to do whatever you want to do. It turns out what you want is to buy a certain beachfront property. Or perhaps curry the favor with a certain politician around a certain bill. Well, so do some folks with $200 million, and they can outbid you. So even though you have tons of money in absolute terms, when you are using your power in venues that happen to also be populated by other rich folks, you can still be relatively power-poor.

And all of those other rich folks know this is how the game works too, so they are all always scrambling to get to the top of the pile.

Politicians are cheap, nobody is outbidding anybody because they most likely want the exact same thing.

Status is a relative thing and openai will pay you much more than all your peers at other companies.

> If they work at OpenAI they are already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet

Isn't the standard package $300K + equity (= nothing if your board is set on making your company non-profit)?

It's nothing to scoff at, but it's hardly top or even average pay for the kind of profiles working there.

It makes perfect sense that they absolutely want the company to be for-profit and listed, that's how they all become millionnaires.

> over the safe development

Not if you think the utterly incompetent board proved itself totally untrustworthy of safe development, while Microsoft as a relatively conservative, staid corporation is seen as ultimately far more trustworthy.

Honestly, of all the big tech companies, Microsoft is probably the safest of all, because it makes its money mostly from predictable large deals with other large corporations to keep the business world running.

It's not associated with privacy concerns the way Google is, with advertisers the way Meta is, or with walled gardens the way Apple is. Its culture these days is mainly about making money in a low-risk, straightforward way through Office and Azure.

And relative to startups, Microsoft is far more predictable and less risky in how it manages things.

Apple's walled gardens are probably a good thing for safe AI, though they're a lot quieter about their research — I somehow missed that they even had any published papers until I went looking: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/

Microsoft? Not a walled garden?

I think it only seems that way because the open-source world has worked much harder to break into that garden. Apple put a .mp4 gate around your music library. Microsoft put a .doc gate around your business correspondence. And that's before we get to the Mono debacle or the EEE paradigm.

Microsoft is a better corporate citizen now because untold legions of keyboard warriors have stayed up nights reverse-engineering and monkeypatching (and sometimes litigating) to break out of their walls than against anyone else. But that history isn't so easily forgotten.

I can install whatever I'd like on Windows. I can run Linux in a VM. Calling a document format a wall is really reaching. If you don't have a document with a bunch of crazy formatting, the open office products and Google docs can use it just fine. If you are writing a book or some kind of technical document that needs special markup, yeah, Word isn't going to cut it, never has and was never supposed to.

I don't know how much OpenAI pays. But for this reply, I'm going to assume it's in line with what other big players in the industry pay.

I legitimately don't understand comments that dismiss the pursue of better compensation because someone is "already among the highest lifetime earners on the planet."

Superficially it might make sense: if you already have all your lifetime economic needs satisfied, you can optimize for other things. But does working in OpenAI fulfill that for most employees?

I probably fall into that "highest earners on the planet" bucket statistically speaking. I certainly don't feel like it: I still live in a one bedroom apartment and I'm having to save up to put a downpayment on a house / budget for retirement / etc. So I can completely understand someone working for OpenAI and signing such a letter if a move the board made would cut down their ability to move their family into a house / pay down student debt / plan for retirement / etc.

If you were offered a 100% raise and kept current work responsibilities to go work for, say, a tobacco company, would you take the offer? My guess is >90% of people would.

Funny how the cutoff for “morals should be more important than wealth” is always {MySalary+$1}.

Don’t forget, if you’re a software developer in the US, you’re probably already in the top 5% of earners worldwide.

Focusing on "global earnings" is disingenuous and dismissive.

In the US, and particularly in California, there is a huge quality of life change going from 100K/yr to 500K/yr (you can potentially afford a house, for starters) and a significant quality of life change going from 500K/yr to getting millions in an IPO and never having to work again if you don't want to.

How those numbers line up to the rest of the world does not matter.

I disagree.

First, there are strong diminishing returns to well-being from wealth, meaning that moving oneself from the top 0.5% to the top 0.1% of global income earners is a relatively modest benefit. This relationship is well studied by social scientists and psychologists. Compared to the potential stakes of OpenAI's mission, the balance of importance should be clear.

Two, employees don't have to stay at OpenAI forever. They could support OpenAI's existing not-for-profit charter, and use their earning power later on in life to boost their wealth. Being super-rich and supporting OpenAI at this critical juncture are not mutually exclusive.

Three, I will simply say that I find placing excessive weight on one's self-enrichment to be morally questionable. It's a claim on human production and labour which could be given to people without the basic means of life.

Again, no one in California cares that they are "making more than" someone in Vietnam when food and land in CA are orders of magnitude more expensive there.

OpenAI employees are as aware as anyone that tech salaries are not guaranteed to be this high in the future as technology develops. Assuming you can make things back then is far from a sure bet.

Millions now and being able to live off investments is.

It just makes more sense to build it in an entity with better funding and commercialization. There will be advanced 2-3 AIs and the most humane one doesn't necessarily win out. It is the one that has the most resources, is used and supported by most people and can do a lot. At this point it doesn't seem OpenAI can get that. It seems to be a lose-lose to stay at open AI - you lose the money and the potential to create something impactful and safe.

It is wrong to assume Microsoft cannot build a safe AI especially within a separate OpenAI-2, better than the for-profit in a non-profit structure.

Or maybe they have good reason to believe that all the talk about "safe development" doesn't contribute anything useful to safety, and simply slows down devlopment?

> over the safe development of a potentially humanity-changing technology

May be people who are actually working on it and are also world best researchers have a better understanding of safety concerns?

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