It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on. What exactly is their mission now other than generating big $?
What I find the most troubling in this reaction is how hostile it is to the actual talent. It accuses everyone and anyone who is even considering to join Meta in particular but any competitor in general as being a mercenary. It's using the poisoning the well fallacy to shield OpenAI from any competition. And why? Because he believes he is in a personal mission? This emits "some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make" energy. Not cool.
The contrast between SpaceX and the defense primes comes to mind… between Warren Buffett and a crypto pumper-and-dumper… between a steady career at (or dividend from) IBM and a Silicon Valley startup dice-roll (or the people who throw money into said startups knowing they’re probably going to lose it)
Capital is supposed to be mobile. Economic theory is based on the idea that capital should flow to its best use (e.g., investors should withdraw it from companies that aren't generating sufficient returns and provide it to those who are) including being able to flow across international borders. Labor is restricted from flowing across international boundaries by law and even job hopping within a country is frowned upon by society.
We have lower rates of taxation on capital (capital gains and dividends) than on labor income because we want to encourage investment. We're told that economic growth depends on it. But doesn't economic growth also depend on people working and shouldn't we encourage that as well?
There's an entire industry dedicated to tracking investment yields for capital and we encourage the free flow of this information "so that people can make informed investing decisions". Yet talking about salaries with co-workers is taboo for some reason.
The list goes on and on and on.
It's just about rich people wanting a bigger share of the pie and having enough money to buy the policies they prefer.
Similarly, we have laws that guarantee our right to talk with our coworkers about our income, but the penalties have been completely gutted. And the penalty for companies illegally colluding on salary by all telling a third party what they are paying people and then using that data to decide how much to pay is ... nada.
We need to figure out how to have people who work for a living fund political campaigns (either directly with money or by donating our time), because this alternative of a badly-compressed jpeg of an economy sucks.
Yet our government is descending into authoritarianism and AI is fueling rising data center energy demands exacerbating the climate crisis. And that is to say nothing of the role that AI is playing in building more effective tools for population control and mass surveillance. All these things are happening because the governance of our future is handled by the ultra-wealthy pursuing their narrow visions at the expense of everyone else.
Thus we have no reason to expect good “governance” at the hands of this wealthy elite and we only see evidence to the opposite. Altman’s skill lies in getting people to believe that serving these narrow interests is the pursuit of a higher purpose. That is the story of OpenAI.
It is also clear Sam Altman and OpenAI’s core values remain intact.
So wrong on so many levels - what a time to be alive.
I remember defending a hiring candidate who had said he got into his specialty because it paid better than others. We hired him and he was great, worth his pay. No one else on the hiring team could defend a bias against someone looking out for themselves.