The premise of founding OpenAI as a nonprofit with "nobler" goals than making money was that it would be a strong magnet to the right talent. Going to work for Microsoft (or any other tech company for that matter), from that point of view, is like crossing over to the dark side of the force. It will be interesting to see how many of OpenAI's employees were there because of its nonprofit status, and how many were there in spite of it.
I suspect very little people joined OpenAI for their noble non-profit mission after they introduced their for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI compensation was and still is top notch. Compare it to Signal, which is a true non-profit (and salaries are a lot lower).
Nonprofit status relates to the absence of investor payouts, and doesn't fundamentally have much to do with pay levels. Some employees can be on occasion willing to accept lower pay when the motives are altruistic, but most employees at nonprofits are paid (have to be paid) market rate.
There comes a point where if an organization has something unique there is no point in selling it, they'd just use it for their own gain and watch the AI multiply their initial investment.
It has happened already, the best hedge funds are not open to investors but ran as a pension scheme for employees and founders.
Interesting, but deceptive. Those are, as noted, "Key Employees and Officers." I just assume most employees with the title "Software Developer" aren't making over five times what Moxie is making.
Your number seems to be coming from a very small sample size (single digit N?), and GP's link is only about "key" employees like CxOs, VPs and top-ranking engineers.
I wonder what a median rank-and-file employee at these companies make.
Remember all those Apple and Amazon employees who signed a letter that they're not going back to the office? Last I heard Apple was at 100% compliance
Make no mistake, if Microsoft is matching $10M PPU's with $10M Microsoft RSUs vesting over 4 years, every single employee will join. But I kind of doubt that this is their plan
It's at least the denominator and likely both. I personally know a non-zero number of people formerly there who found a different job or retired when Apple insisted on everyone returning to the office.
Do you have a source for this? At other tech companies I'm aware of, the numbers are still much lower than 100%, even after threats of performance impact.
There was no significant uptake on any letter at Apple.
One reason is that retaliation is very possible. The opacity of the executive team was not a feature of Steve Jobs’s Apple, but the Time Cook-era opaqueness combines poorly withthe silo’d, top down nature of Apple’s management which _was_ inherited from Steve Jobs.
The opaqueness, I think, is a result of Tim Cook integrating the retail and corporate sides of the company; retail salespeople are treated better, but software engineers are treated a little more like retail salespeople.
Since the pandemic, Apple execs have seemed to be isolated in a bubble and are not listening to the rank and file anymore. The people they do listen to seem to be out of touch.
Oh yes, it's going to create waves. People who've had compensation stagnation at Microsoft, reduced bonuses, "belt tightening" now see that "well, we're willing to throw stupid amounts of money at those people over there, just not you".
Yeah but in these kinds of big companies there are supposedly compensation "bands" by technical level. When salaries within each band are very different, it can be an impediment to talent mobility within the company.
The CTO of Microsoft tweeted this morning that they would hire any OpenAI employees who wanted to join MS with commensurate pay. For whatever that’s worth.
As others have pointed out, it's easier to sign a letter than actually go through with it. Besides that, wasn't there some employees who said something similar on Friday when this happened?
This is simply a matter of momentum. If enough of the signatories follow through more will cross the bridge until there are too few people left to keep it going and then there will be an avalanche. It all depends on the size of the initial wave and the kind of follow on. If that stops at 200 people leaving it will probably stay like that, if that number is 300 or even 400 out of the 700 then OpenAI will be dead because the remainder will move as well.
I have no idea what the process was for gathering the signatures, but one way to solve this problem is a mutual confidentiality pact that goes away with enough momentum. Ask people if they're willing to sign, but if you can't get 50% of the people to sign the document and all the signatures go away.
Similar things are done when doing anonymous 360 surveys in the workplace. If not enough people in a certain pool respond, the feedback doesn't get shared.
Unless they promised to withhold the letter until 50% signed.
Also I have enough savings and my skills are in demand enough that I wouldn’t consider signing such a letter much of a risk. The researchers at openAI are likely a good deal more in demand than I am.
While the financial future is significantly less certain than it was a week ago, many of those employees have RSU-equivalents potentially worth FU money. Even if you are going to land on your feet, it is still making a statement to walk away from that payday.
If you believe that your profit share is going to be worth much much more with the current board gone, then threatening to walk away to force them to resign isn’t really walking away from much.
I agree that it is surprising that the first big whiff of collective bargaining that we see in Big Tech is “let’s save this asshole CEO (who would probably try to bust any formal unionization),”[1] rather than trying to safeguard the workers in the industry as a whole. But I just attribute that to Silicon Valley being this weird hero-worship-libertarian-fantasy cosplay rather than outright conspiracy.
[1] Just to clarify, I don't know Sam and I am taking the usual labor viewpoint that most CEOs, in order to become CEOs, had to be a certain sort of asshole who would be likely to do other such asshole things. There are some indications that this sort of assholery is what he was fired for but it's kinda hard to read between the lines here.
Everything about this post is spot-on. The CEO got ousted because he lied to the board and went against the company's mission to make safe AGI. He tried to milk OpenAI for money and personal gain, and the board actually did something to stop it.
The downvotes here are pretty irrational. But that's the defining feature of class warfare: we're all closer to homelessness than a billion dollars, but we've been conditioned to believe the opposite.
They didn't say they were going to Microsoft, as far as I can tell. I presume many can get golden offers anywhere including academia and other institutions with stronger nonprofit governance track record.
>We , the undersigned, may choose to resign from OpenAI
and join the newly announced Microsoft subsidiary run by Sam Altman and Greg
Brockman Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAl
employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join.
It does suggest more than their willingness to leave.
Very few people in tech are in it for noble reasons. Although, a nice pair of golden handcuffs can let you delude yourself into thinking what you are doing is noble. I can't imagine people working on shadow profiles at Facebook think what they are doing is noble.
You join OpenAI because if there is an open spot you’d take it. Plus it’s a famous company doing cutting edge AI, sure you can read the statement, but everyone wants to eat and get a better resume. It’s a bonus thing to feel.
