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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand why people still take statements like these at face value. These aren't her personal thoughts and feelings. The letter was carefully crafted by OpenAI's PR team under strict direction from Sam and the board. Whatever the real story is is sitting under many layers of NDAs and threats of clawing back/diluting her shares, and we will not know it for a long time. What I can say for certain is no executive in her position ever willingly resigns to pursue different passions/spend more time with their family/enjoy retirement or whatever else.

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It sounds like you probably are already aware, but perhaps most people don't take statements like those at face value but we have all been conditioned to "shut up and move on", by people who appear to be able to hold our careers hostage if we displease them.

I mostly agree that "willingly resigns to pursue other passions" is unlikely however "quit in frustration over $working_conditions" is completely plausible. Those could be anything from disagreeing with some strategy or thinking your boss is too much of a jerk to work with over your alternative options.

> no executive in her position ever willingly resigns to pursue different passions/spend more time with their family/enjoy retirement or whatever else

Especially when they enjoy a position like hers at the most important technology company in a generation.

Time will tell about openai's true import. Right now, the jury is very much out. Even in the llm space, it is not clear that openai will be the ultimate victor. Especially if they keep hemorrhaging talent.

You're right - OpenAI may or may not be the ultimate victor.

But RIGHT NOW they are in a very strong position in the world's hottest industry. Any of us would love to work there! It therefore seems reasonable that no one would voluntarily quit. (Unless they're on their deathbed, I suppose.)

Still, certainly the most visible.

They also get the most revenue and users.

> What I can say for certain is no executive in her position ever willingly resigns to pursue different passions/spend more time with their family/enjoy retirement or whatever else.

Do you think that's because executives are so exceedingly ambitious, or because pursuing different passions is for some reason less attractive?

It’s because they can’t imagine themselves doing it so they imagine that everyone must be like that. It’s part hubris and part lack of creativity/empathy.

Think about if you’ve ever known someone you’ve been envious of for whatever reason who did something that just perplexed you. “They dumped their gorgeous partner, how could they do that?” “They quit a dream job, how could they do that?” “They moved out of that awesome apartment, how could they do that?” “They dropped out of that elite school, how could they do that?”

Very easily actually.

You’re seeing only part of the picture. Beautiful people are just as annoying as everybody else. Every dream job has a part that sucks.

If you can’t imagine that, you’re not trying hard enough.

You can see this in action in a lot of ways. One good one is the Ultimatum Game:

https://www.core-econ.org/the-economy/microeconomics/04-stra...

Most people will end up thinking that they have an ironclad logical strategy but if you ask them about it, it’ll end up that their strategy is treating the other player as a carbon copy of themselves.

I would say that reaching this type of position requires exceeding amount of ambition, drive and craving in the first place, and all and any steps during the process of getting there solidify that by giving the dopamine hits to be addicted to such success, so it is not a case where you can just stop and decide "I'll chill now".

Dopamine hits... I wonder if this explains why the OpenAI folks tweet a lot... It's kind of weird right, to tweet a lot?

But all these tweets from lower level execs as well.

I mean I love Machine Learning twitter hot takes because it exposes me to interesting ideas (and maybe that is why people tweet) but it seems more about status seeking/marketing than anything else. And really as I learn more, you see that the literature is iterating/optimizing the current fashion.

But maybe no weirder than commenting here I guess though.. maybe this is weird. Have we all collectively asked ourselves, why do we comment here? It's gotta be the dopamine.

Have some dopamine, I upvoted you!

There may be a story, and I'm sure she worded the message carefully, but I don't see any reason to doubt she worded it herself. "Create the time and space to do my own exploration" is beautiful compared to the usual. To me means she is confident enough in her ability to do good in the world that the corporate identity she's now tethered to is insignificant by comparison.

> I don't see any reason to doubt she worded it herself.

Because ... that's not how these things are done in high-profile companies.

I myself have done the job of writing PR for executives, and at a vastly lower-profile startup than OpenAI.

Wouldn't such a statement rather be written by her own lawyers and trusted advisors?

Either way, it's meaningless prose.

It's like the "smile". The smile that I see on faces when I walk around - I mean the faces that I have never seen before and will never see again. Smiles on those faces which are not really smile unless we call it a smile every time facial muscle stretch. It's just pulling your corners of the lip away from the middle and just nod mindlessly which often actually looks more of a frown than a smile but that's called the polite mandatory smile. Nobody who has ever smiled in their lives or have seen someone really smile takes those smiles as smiles at face value, do they?

It was probably crafted with ChatGPT?

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