Leaked OpenAI Docs Show Sam Altman Clearly Aware of Silencing Former Employees | Hacker News Reader

Leaked OpenAI Docs Show Sam Altman Clearly Aware of Silencing Former Employees

futurism.com

164 pointsPaul-Craft56 comments

I have zero respect for companies with such predatory behaviour. Not a knee jerk reaction, but threatening employees "diplomatically" with such draconian agreements and even sometimes non-competes should actually be grounds for mass resignation. I worked in a similar company and till date have traumatic memories from that era.

For this and many other reasons, I would never ever use a proprietary AI model in any of my AI projects. "People first" should be the guiding principle for developers.

Wow, so 5 minutes ago this was #1 on HN. Now it's #347. Hmm.. wonder what might have happened?

#413 with 122 upvotes, still just 1 hour after submission.

It was probably flagged because it's a dupe (both Vox stories were already covered on HN)

But it discussed both these two stories and added more thoughts. What is the definition of dupe?

OpenAI sounds like a wolf in sheep's clothing

They never were in sheep’s clothing. They took $10 billion from Microsoft. Anyone closely partnering with a top wolf is probably a wolf cub on a journey into the wolf pack.

From 2015 to 2018 they were non profit but after that it seemed a bit iffy.

I meant after the deal. They might have been OK up to that point.

I think the case study still raises questions about whether we should require specific licensing or contractual terms for what these organizations produce. For instance, that they dual-licensed all their models or (if safety is a worry) always shared them with research institutions. That by itself might have given us GPT3 or GPT4 with the Llama- and Falcon-type communities building on them.

Literally every article ive ever read, or testimony about altman describes an extremely manipulative person.

At some point if it true its true.

You might say that Sam Altman is not consistently candid...

I love when a website uses the word "credibility", and half the website is filled with flashing ads and it has too many trackers and ad scripts to count.

If you trust Sam I feel bad for you

I got 99 problems but Altman ain’t one

Trust him on what? As long as he makes great progress in AI, I don’t care about little flaws that a usual person has especially in his role.

No defense of the act here, but how can someone take a publication seriously that states an opinion in the first sentence, and in the 2nd paragraph uses a clickbait modifier like "draconian"?

Not sure how many really better words there are.

Onerous? Extreme? Oppressive? Bullying?

It does after all refer to a contract people were apparently pressured into signing when quitting (and not when signing up), that apparently offered no new consideration, and required them to never say anything bad about OpenAI, for life, on penalty of losing remuneration another signed contract entitled them to.

It's journalism. But even the lawyers are saying "egregious". Which is really really not good in this context.

"Draconian" fits, considering how it is normally used.

Egregious is a much better word that doesn't intentionally sound alarming.

The only new information here is that his signature was on these documents. This article took 18 paragraphs to say that.

Real journalism that wasn't influenced by SEO or ad views should probably be one sentence with the new information and a link to a previous article filling in the missing context, for those who happen not to have it.

Have a look at how "draconian" is used.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/draconian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draconian

https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/Draconian

Now consider the thing that is happening: someone is being essentially pressured to agree a contract forcing them to stay functionally silent about anything bad they experienced or saw at OpenAI, on pain of losing things they've already earned.

For that individual's experience, "draconian" -- harsh, unusually severe, repressive -- seems like it would be a good fit, right?

And as it is not in the title or the subhead, it's not really being deployed to be clickbait, is it? The title is even more damning

(As an aside, why should this article not intentionally sound alarming? This whole situation is a pretty damning indictment of one of the most influential startups on earth right now. IMO it is alarming.)

Also:

> The only new information here is that his signature was on these documents.

This is what's called "confirming the story". News organisations do this all the time -- corroborate their competitors' stories -- and it is absolutely news.

In this case it's a really big bit of news, to people outside the tech world: it means there will likely prove to be concrete, potentially-lawsuit-bound corroboration that Sam Altman is not "consistently candid".

Are you basing this off of the assumption that every single person reading this has the same relationship to specific words as you?

Egregious and draconian create the same “idea” in my head. There is literally no way to write that takes into account each persons relationship with words.

Mmm, though I think these are two angular perspectives on the same idea, more than they are the same idea.

I feel "egregious" makes more sense for the idea of these bullshit contracts in the general case -- the idea that a lawyer wrote them or signed off on them.

"Draconian" is a really good fit for the experience and outcome for the individual, and for the process by which an individual found themselves signing.

Either way, I don't think there's any reason to minimise what is happening for the employee, or what it means in terms of characterising the conduct and culture of the ultimate unicorn. If stuff like this is allowed to slide, it's not good.

I must be missing some key detail here because this seems even more over blown than AI itself. They wanted to motivate people to not disclose trade secrets? Oh no.

You are making factual errors in your response to the existence of this article.

First, this was not primarily about NDAs and trade secrets, even though an NDA was mentioned. This was primarily about non-disparagement and the ability to criticize OpenAI, see the linked article https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai...

Second, this is not even about the existence of the non-disparagement agreement itself, it's about Altman claiming ignorance about its existence (see: the article again)

Yeah I have signed those before but also rejected them other times, I agree that it’s not exactly warm and fuzzy to have someone want you to sign on a line about your ability to speak freely!

Clawing back vested equity it materially different that a general “incentive”. It’s way outside of standard practice and borderline abuse given the imbalance of negotiating power. Further, if OpenAI or Sam lied publicly by saying they weren’t aware it was going on and did this seems to be the very type of untrustworthy lack of candor that the board identified when they ousted him.

I was a vocal defender of Sam in the immediate aftermath but these facts are definitely concerning. OpenAI is moving fast with a critical and dangerous technology. If their culture isn’t profoundly ethical they shouldn’t be trusted with the privilege and responsibility of what they are up to.

gotcha I get it more now if you thought you already had something in the bag threatening to pull it based on some new requirements is rather bogus

The key details are how completely outside the norms of SV / tech this behavior is; how they, and Sam specifically, clearly lied about it - especially egregious when they want to be seen as the trustworthy steward of "AGI"; and as a business story, how this seems to be eroding trust of the company among their current employees and how damaging this will likely be in their efforts to recruit top AI talent. I don't think there will be quite so many heart emoji tweets for Sam in the future.

...and it's gone from the front page

> "We want to make sure you understand that if you don't sign, it could impact your equity," one rep told an outgoing employee, according to Vox.

The article is doing a lot of click-bait stuff here. The quote, without the source, is shown at the top of the article, near Sam Altman's face and a title referencing Sam Altman. However, the quote is not from Sam Altman, which makes its placement a bit disingenuous.

I am not invested in defending Altman, but this type of journalism is trash clickbait and a far bigger issue than a tech company threatening employees' vested equity unless they comply in some sort of non-NDA NDA scheme.

That's looking purely at the headline and a single quote that they chose for it. There is a lot more if you read the actual article.

They make a case that Altman signed documents where it's quite clear the intention is to be able to claw back vested equity. And that quote in the headline isn't meant to try and attribute it directly to Altman -- but to show just how well-known the policy was.

I read the whole article, that's where I found the quote attribution. Like I said, I'm not here to defend Altman, or attack him. It's just disingenuous journalism - or click-bait journalism.

No evidence in the article that Altman knew about this, and intentionally clickbaity and misleading title.

Quoting: "there are only two plausible reasons for Altman's alleged lack of knowledge: either he didn't fully read the employment contracts he was signing or he was lying." No evidence was offered that he read the contracts.

You are technically true. However, if you sign contracts you haven't read, you would have a hard time defending your innocence in court. This applies even more for higher positions like CEO.

Yes, legally responsible. There's no legal violation here, though. The article made a specific claim: that Altman was aware of something. It provided no evidence that he was.

If it accused him of some criminal misdeed, then it wouldn't matter if he was aware of it, as long as he signed the illegal order. That would be a different story, but clearly in this case it doesn't apply.

> No evidence was offered that he read the contracts

This excuse only works for people who do not get paid for doing exactly this: the power to sign contracts, exit papers, stuff like that on behalf of the company, and, therefore, be aware of their contents. "I didn't go through the contract before agreeing to its content by signing it" is a damning verdict for someone in this position. You don't have to prove he read it: he signed, therefore he's responsible.

I didn't say anything about responsibility. The article has a title and it's intentionally misleading.

Smear campaign on going.

Altman's got his signature on docs he claims to know nothing about. How it is a "smear campaign" to report that?

Oh you.

These people have weightier issues like the ethics of the hypothetical technological future on their capacious minds, and mustn't be dragged down to your mucky little level of discussing the ethics of the very real business present.

Seriously: don't bother them with these little questions of the rights of actually enumerable humans to whom they have contractual responsibilities! They're busy thinking in great depth about how their product might affect the rights of all the humans they haven't yet sold it to.

One does wonder how the accelerationist ethic conceives of the tradeoff between a hundred future happy fulfilled lives or two hundred permanently indentured serfs.

Is it a smear campaign when you did it to yourself?

"Despite the best efforts of his words, his actions continued their relentless smear campaign."

"My 'we never actually took away people's remuneration using the contracts they signed swearing them to silence' t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt"

It’s a smear campaign because of the focus, not if he or he did not do what he said

Altman is a billionaire. I'm sure he's got a good crisis management PR team to handle the pickle that he's found himself in. He'll survive.

Won’t someone think of the tech CEOs

You registered your account in 2023, so you're relatively new here, but you're in the wrong place with that sort of comment.

Or maybe you're not, Hacker News has evolved away from its mission and audience and I'm in the wrong place.

Pretty telling you directed that at my comment rather than the absolute horseshit comment I responded to.

HN's intended community wants desperately to be those tech CEOs/tech billionaires. So, your comment is a little ironic.

Statistically speaking, tech billionaires are rare among humans. We must protect the species on the brink of extinction!

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40447431

They refer to different articles, though.

It doesn't need to be the same article to be a duplicate submission, it just needs to have no significant new information compared to recent submissions that already got a lot of HN attention.

This article is literally just summarizing the Vox article with no new information or insight. And the HN submission for the Vox article had 1784 points and 544 comments.

[deleted]

Can share the link over there. That's where the discussion is, and there's lots of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com