Can you further commit to removing any other provisions from employment agreements that could be used to penalize employees who publicly raise concerns about company practices, such as the ability to prevent employees from selling their equity in private “tender offer” events?
and OpenAI’s reply just repeats the we-don’t-cancel-equity thing:
OpenAI has never canceled a current or former employee’s vested equity. The May and July communications to current and former employees referred to above confirmed that OpenAI would not cancel vested equity, regardless of any agreements, including non-disparagement agreements, that current and former employees may or may not have signed, and we have updated our relevant documents accordingly.
One thing in OpenAI’s letter is object-level notable: they deny that they ever committed compute to Superalignment.
To further our safety research agenda, last July we committed to allocate at least 20 percent of the computing resources we had secured to AI safety over a multi-year period. This commitment was always intended to apply to safety efforts happening across our company, not just to a specific team. We continue to uphold this commitment.
Altman tweeted the same thing at the time the letter was published.
I think this is straightforward gaslighting. I didn’t find a super-explicit quote from OpenAI or its leadership that the compute was for Superalignment, but:
The announcement was pretty clear: > Introducing Superalignment > We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. To solve this problem within four years, we’re starting a new team, co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, and dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date to this effort.
As far as I know, everyone—including OpenAI people and people close to OpenAI—interpreted the compute commitment as for Superalignment
I never heard it suggested that it was for not-just-superalignment
Sidenote on less explicit deception — the “20%” thing: most people are confused about 20% of compute secured in July 2023, to be used over four years vs 20% of compute, and when your announcement is confusing and indeed most people are confused and you fail to deconfuse them, you’re kinda culpable. OpenAI continues to fail to clarify this — e.g. here the senators asked “Does OpenAI plan to honor its previous public commitment to dedicate 20 percent of its computing resources to research on AI safety?” and OpenAI replied “last July we committed to allocate at least 20 percent of the computing resources we had secured to AI safety over a multi-year period.” This sentence is close to the maximally misleading way to say the commitment was only for compute we’d secured in July 2023, and we don’t have to use it for safety until 2027.
I’m confused by this reply — even pretending OpenAI is totally ruthless, I’d think it’s not incentivized to exclude people from tender offers, and moreover it’s incentivized to clarify that. Leaving it ambiguous leaves ex-employees in a little more fear of OpenAI excluding them (even though presumably OpenAI never would, since it would look sooo bad after e.g. Altman said “vested equity is vested equity, full stop”), but it looks bad to people like me and the senators...
Clarification on the Superalignment commitment: OpenAI said:
We are dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date over the next four years to solving the problem of superintelligence alignment. Our chief basic research bet is our new Superalignment team, but getting this right is critical to achieve our mission and we expect many teams to contribute, from developing new methods to scaling them up to deployment.
The commitment wasn’t compute for the Superalignment team—it was compute for superintelligence alignment. (As opposed to, in my view, work by the posttraining team and near-term-focused work by the safety systems team and preparedness team.) Regardless, OpenAI is not at all transparent about this, and they violated the spirit of the commitment by denying Superalignment compute or a plan for when they’d get compute, even if the literal commitment doesn’t require them to give any compute to safety until 2027.
Also, they failed to provide the promised fraction of compute to the Superalignment team (and not because it was needed for non-Superalignment safety stuff).
Two weeks ago some senators asked OpenAI questions about safety. A few days ago OpenAI responded. Its reply is frustrating.
OpenAI’s letter ignores all of the important questions[1] and instead brags about somewhat-related “safety” stuff. Some of this shows chutzpah — the senators, aware of tricks like letting ex-employees nominally keep their equity but excluding them from tender events, ask
and OpenAI’s reply just repeats the we-don’t-cancel-equity thing:
!![2]
One thing in OpenAI’s letter is object-level notable: they deny that they ever committed compute to Superalignment.
Altman tweeted the same thing at the time the letter was published.
I think this is straightforward gaslighting. I didn’t find a super-explicit quote from OpenAI or its leadership that the compute was for Superalignment, but:
The announcement was pretty clear:
> Introducing Superalignment
> We need scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us. To solve this problem within four years, we’re starting a new team, co-led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, and dedicating 20% of the compute we’ve secured to date to this effort.
As far as I know, everyone—including OpenAI people and people close to OpenAI—interpreted the compute commitment as for Superalignment
I never heard it suggested that it was for not-just-superalignment
Sidenote on less explicit deception — the “20%” thing: most people are confused about 20% of compute secured in July 2023, to be used over four years vs 20% of compute, and when your announcement is confusing and indeed most people are confused and you fail to deconfuse them, you’re kinda culpable. OpenAI continues to fail to clarify this — e.g. here the senators asked “Does OpenAI plan to honor its previous public commitment to dedicate 20 percent of its computing resources to research on AI safety?” and OpenAI replied “last July we committed to allocate at least 20 percent of the computing resources we had secured to AI safety over a multi-year period.” This sentence is close to the maximally misleading way to say the commitment was only for compute we’d secured in July 2023, and we don’t have to use it for safety until 2027.
Most important to me were 3, 4a, and 9. Maybe also 6; I’m unfamiliar with the facts there.
I’m confused by this reply — even pretending OpenAI is totally ruthless, I’d think it’s not incentivized to exclude people from tender offers, and moreover it’s incentivized to clarify that. Leaving it ambiguous leaves ex-employees in a little more fear of OpenAI excluding them (even though presumably OpenAI never would, since it would look sooo bad after e.g. Altman said “vested equity is vested equity, full stop”), but it looks bad to people like me and the senators...
OpenAI has said something internally about including past employees in tender events, but this leaves some ambiguity and I wish OpenAI had answered the question.
Clarification on the Superalignment commitment: OpenAI said:
The commitment wasn’t compute for the Superalignment team—it was compute for superintelligence alignment. (As opposed to, in my view, work by the posttraining team and near-term-focused work by the safety systems team and preparedness team.) Regardless, OpenAI is not at all transparent about this, and they violated the spirit of the commitment by denying Superalignment compute or a plan for when they’d get compute, even if the literal commitment doesn’t require them to give any compute to safety until 2027.
Also, they failed to provide the promised fraction of compute to the Superalignment team (and not because it was needed for non-Superalignment safety stuff).