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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

The article implies that the Mira Murati and the rest of the C suite were the ones responsible for getting people to sign the letter threatening to quit unless the board resigned. And there seems to be some direct involvement from Microsoft (even before they announced they would hire employees who quit).

This sounds a lot different from the narrative that it was a grass roots show of support for Sam Altman.

If the CEO, the rest of the execs, and the investors in the for-profit were pushing employees to sign, doing so wasn’t a sign of loyalty to Altman at all.

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It was strange seeing how many people with genuine intentions of advancing AI for good were blindly threatening to join MSFT, a company with much less genuine reputation. I think OpenAI's board is even more controversial than ever now.

To be fair, Microsoft does seem to have repaired a lot of its bad reputation in the last decade or so. Has it not? At least that was my impression.

The word Microsoft used to be borderline toxic.

I found this article, 'VSCode is Designed to Fracture'[0], insightful for its look at the current Microsoft.

Its thesis is that VSCode is meant to leverage open source and popularity to increase closed source vendor lock-in to Microsoft. It cites recent examples of VSCode extensions being closed source, so that while VSCode seems open, the critical portions are not. It's worth reading the full article.

0: https://ghuntley.com/fracture/

Thanks for sharing!

My impression is it was more a case of if it ain't broke don't fix it rather than love for Sam. I mean OpenAI was maybe the world's hottest tech company with many employees about to get rich through share sales and there were proposals to largely destroy that. I can understand how employees would be against.

How many of those employees who signed the petition had a tenure longer than a year? The for-profit stacked the ranks with would-be microsofters and then overran the non-profit board with threats of mutiny and made-up controversy. The non-profit was taken over by pirates.

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