OpenAI has something called PPUs (“Profit Participation Units”) which in theory is supposed to act like RSUs albeit with a capped profit and no voting rights, but in practice is entirely a new legal invention and we don’t really know how it works.
Is that not what Altman is referring to when he talks about vested equity? My understanding was employees had no other form of equity besides PPUs, in which case he’s talking non-misleadingly about the non-narrow case of vested PPUs, ie the thing people were alarmed about, right?
It may be that talking about “vested equity” is avoiding some lie that would occur if he made the same claim about the PPUs. If he did mean to include the PPUs as “vested equity” presumably he or a spokesperson could clarify, but I somehow doubt they will.
Fwiw I will also be a bit surprised, because yeah.
My thought is that the strategy Sam uses with stuff is to only invoke the half-truth if it becomes necessary later. Then he can claim points for candor if he doesn’t go down that route. This is why I suspect (50%) that they will avoid clarifying that he means PPUs, and that they also won’t state that they will not try to stop ex-employees from exercising them, and etc. (Because it’s advantageous to leave those paths open and to avoid having clearly lied in those scenarios.)
I think of this as a pattern with Sam, e.g. “We are not training GPT-5” at the MIT talk and senate hearings, which turns out was optimized to mislead and got no further clarification iirc.
There is a mitigating factor in this case which is that any threat to equity lights a fire under OpenAI staff, which I think is a good part of the reason that Sam responded so quickly.
By announcing that someone who doesn’t sign the restrictive agreement is locked out of all future tender offers, OpenAI effectively makes that equity, valued at millions of dollars, conditional on the employee signing the agreement — while still truthfully saying that they technically haven’t clawed back anyone’s vested equity, as Altman claimed in his tweet on May 18.
What do you mean by pseudo-equity?
OpenAI has something called PPUs (“Profit Participation Units”) which in theory is supposed to act like RSUs albeit with a capped profit and no voting rights, but in practice is entirely a new legal invention and we don’t really know how it works.
Is that not what Altman is referring to when he talks about vested equity? My understanding was employees had no other form of equity besides PPUs, in which case he’s talking non-misleadingly about the non-narrow case of vested PPUs, ie the thing people were alarmed about, right?
It may be that talking about “vested equity” is avoiding some lie that would occur if he made the same claim about the PPUs. If he did mean to include the PPUs as “vested equity” presumably he or a spokesperson could clarify, but I somehow doubt they will.
I’d be a bit surprised if that’s the answer, if OpenAI doesn’t offer any vested equity, that half-truth feels overly blatant to me.
Fwiw I will also be a bit surprised, because yeah.
My thought is that the strategy Sam uses with stuff is to only invoke the half-truth if it becomes necessary later. Then he can claim points for candor if he doesn’t go down that route. This is why I suspect (50%) that they will avoid clarifying that he means PPUs, and that they also won’t state that they will not try to stop ex-employees from exercising them, and etc. (Because it’s advantageous to leave those paths open and to avoid having clearly lied in those scenarios.)
I think of this as a pattern with Sam, e.g. “We are not training GPT-5” at the MIT talk and senate hearings, which turns out was optimized to mislead and got no further clarification iirc.
There is a mitigating factor in this case which is that any threat to equity lights a fire under OpenAI staff, which I think is a good part of the reason that Sam responded so quickly.
Okay I guess the half-truth is more like this:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees