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Comment by skilled | Hacker News Reader

If I was at OpenAI making stupid money and I had to deal with a psycho boss once in a while, I’d probably be fine with it.

I think most people would, as was evident by the amount of people who backed him to come back as the CEO.

Not that every one of those people knew this, but there certainly were people who did.

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From the article:

> On the podcast, Toner attributed Altman's swift return to employees being told that the company would collapse without him.

> Additionally, once a potential return seemed likely, employees feared retaliation from Altman if they did not support him, she said.

> employees being told that the company would collapse without him.

These employees are smart enough to decide for themselves how critical they believe Altman is.

I also get the vibe from her that she believes those employees are dumb sheep who can't decide for themselves who their lead should be.

I only listened to parts of it but I did not get that vibe. For me it sounds like there was a lot of pressure applied. Particularly given the secondaries it does not at all surprise me that it was a very likely outcome.

If a leader does not want to step down and the leader has power, that leader can wreck chaos where the rational move is to leave the leader in place. I don’t know enough about OpenAI or Sam Altman to judge the situation but given the absolutely chaotic situation when it unfolded it sounded very rational to restore the prior status quo.

Well she thinks the same of the general population, that is that they would believe everything generated by AI

> those employees are dumb sheep who can't decide for themselves

The point is that they are smart because they know not to put themselves at risk with actions that would not lead to get rid of a threat.

> (...) decide for themselves who their lead should be.

They didn't had a vote or a choice. People living under a dictatorship also don't decide who their leader is when the dictator prompts them to show their support.

You somehow missed the whole point, which is that once retaliation was extremely likely these employees decided to not put themselves at risk.

This is how dictators get their 99% approval rating, and why democracies enshrine the right to vote in secrecy.

Crowd dynamics and snap decisions are very different from individuals and carefully considering all aspects before jumping in.

> Altman's swift return to employees being told that the company would collapse without him.

Regardless of who said/who thought that... Why would it?

Engineers need to take a good look at the mirror and stop idolizing "visionary jerk" figures.

Um...because Microsoft offered to take on all staff at existing pay rates if OpenAI imploded? That was the pivotal point IIRC.

Altman impersonating Roko's Basilisk is very much on-point for an AI company.

Huh, its Roko's Basilisk all along

I think it’s complicated and more tied in with your personal ambitions and passions than money. I imagine that most people making stupid money at the forefront of LLM development are probably very passionate about their work. I imagine that will make the career/person side of things much more intertwined than say… making stupid money working in finance.

It’s fairly easy to deal with bad upper management, poor organisational decision making, political infighting, silly bureaucracy, pseudo-work and a range of other nonsense when you’re mostly in it for the tech and go home at 4pm (or whenever you go home in your country). It’s quite another thing if you actually care about the mission.

OpenAI dual structure also makes things super complicated and adds gas to the fire. Like Altman doesn't own anything but has some weird VC fund, and all fuckery around employee compensation.

Past a certain point, money doesn't matter to people of principle.

Surely you mean principles dont matter to people with money?

"If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say." -Winston Zeddemore

I think you underestimate the power of cults of personality and the extreme tech bubble people in Silicon Valley live in. People who are backing these individuals genuinely want to work with them, be around them, and most are hoping to become them one day. The percentage of those who deal with their shenanigans just for the money is likely very low.

you don't threaten to walk out in retaliation while vague-tweeting heart emojis because you think your CEO is a mere sociopath, IMO you do it because A, you won't build generational wealth without him, B, you feel there's an existential risk to humanity under any other leadership or C, you're a pragmatist whose social rank is proportional to how enthusiastic you are about the emperors' fashion

(OpenAI feels cultish to me as an outsider, some north korea shit going on there, us against the world)

Hm.

I can see how it looks cultish. I know people who work there, and I know someone who managed to escape (with outside assistance) from scientology, and… if they're a cult, it's one about how dangerous AI could be, not how great Altman is.

But both of these examples are mere anecdotes; I have no formal qualifications to discuss cults, and contact with only two current staff members.

I'm sure there is a truth to it. But as soon as Sam Altman & Elon musk get mentioned this entire forum gets highjacked by hating on them instead of having an interesting discussion.

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