I agree, but I also doubt the contract even has been widely retracted. Why do you think it has, Jacob? Quite few people have reported being released so far.
(This is Kelsey Piper). I am quite confident the contract has been widely retracted. The overwhelming majority of people who received an email did not make an immediate public comment. I am unaware of any people who signed the agreement after 2019 and did not receive the email, outside cases where the nondisparagement agreement was mutual (which includes Sutskever and likely also Anthropic leadership). In every case I am aware of, people who signed before 2019 did not reliably receive an email but were reliably able to get released if they emailed OpenAI HR.
If you signed such an agreement and have not been released, you can of course contact me on Signal: 303 261 2769.
I am quite confident the contract has been widely retracted.
Can you share your reasons for thinking this? Given that people who remain bound can’t say so, I feel hesitant to conclude that people aren’t without clear evidence.
I am unaware of any people who signed the agreement after 2019 and did not receive the email, outside cases where the nondisparagement agreement was mutual (which includes Sutskever and likely also Anthropic leadership).
Excepting Jack Clark (who works for Anthropic) and Remco Zwetsloot (who left in 2018), I would think all the policy leadership folks listed above meet these criteria, yet none have reported being released. Would you guess that they have been?
I have been in touch with around a half dozen former OpenAI employees who I spoke to before former employees were released and all of them later informed me they were released, and they were not in any identifiable reference class such that I’d expect OpenAI would have been able to selectively release them while not releasing most people. I have further been in touch with many other former employees since they were released who confirmed this. I have not heard from anyone who wasn’t released, and I think it is reasonably likely I would have heard from them anonymously on Signal. Also, not releasing a bunch of people after saying they would seems like an enormously unpopular, hard to keep secret, and not very advantageous move for OpenAI, which is already taking a lot of flak for this. I also have a model of how people choose whether or not to make public statements where it’s extremely unsurprising most people would not choose to do so.
I would indeed guess that all of the people you listed have been released if they were even subject to such agreements in the first place, which I do not know (and the fact Geoffrey Irving was not offered such an agreement is some basis to think they were not uniformly imposed during some of the relevant time periods, imo.)
I also have a model of how people choose whether or not to make public statements where it’s extremely unsurprising most people would not choose to do so.
I agree it’s unsurprising that few rank-and-file employees would make statements, but I am surprised by the silence from those in policy/evals roles. From my perspective, active non-disparagement obligations seem clearly disqualifying for most such roles, so I’d think they’d want to clarify.
It sounds from this back and forth like we should assume that Anthropic leadership who left from OAI (so Dario and Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, others?) are still under NDA because it was probably mutual. Does that sound right to others?
I have not heard from anyone who wasn’t released, and I think it is reasonably likely I would have heard from them anonymously on Signal. Also, not releasing a bunch of people after saying they would seems like an enormously unpopular, hard to keep secret, and not very advantageous move for OpenAI, which is already taking a lot of flak for this.
I’m not necessarily imagining that OpenAI failed to release a bunch of people, although that still seems possible to me. I’m more concerned that they haven’t released many key people, and while I agree that you might have received an anonymous Signal message to that effect if it were true, I still feel alarmed that many of these people haven’t publicly stated otherwise.
I also have a model of how people choose whether or not to make public statements where it’s extremely unsurprising most people would not choose to do so.
I do find this surprising. Many people are aware of who former OpenAI employees are, and hence are aware of who was (or is) bound by this agreement. At the very least, if I were in this position, I would want people to know that I was no longer bound. And it does seem strange to me, if the contract has been widely retracted, that so few prominent people have confirmed being released.
It also seems pretty important to figure out who is under mutual non-disparagement agreements with OpenAI, which would still (imo) pose a problem if it applied to anyone in safety evaluations or policy positions.
We’re removing nondisparagement clauses from our standard departure paperwork, and we’re releasing former employees from existing nondisparagement obligations unless the nondisparagement provision was mutual. We’ll communicate this message to former employees.
They have communicated this to me and I believe I was in the same category as most former employees.
I think the main reasons so few people have mentioned this are:
As I mentioned, there is still some legal ambiguity and additional avenues for retaliation
Some people are taking their time over what they want to say
Most people don’t want to publicly associate themselves with a controversial situation
Most people aren’t inclined to disparage their former employer anyway, and so they may not think of their own situation as that big of a deal
I agree, but I also doubt the contract even has been widely retracted. Why do you think it has, Jacob? Quite few people have reported being released so far.
(This is Kelsey Piper). I am quite confident the contract has been widely retracted. The overwhelming majority of people who received an email did not make an immediate public comment. I am unaware of any people who signed the agreement after 2019 and did not receive the email, outside cases where the nondisparagement agreement was mutual (which includes Sutskever and likely also Anthropic leadership). In every case I am aware of, people who signed before 2019 did not reliably receive an email but were reliably able to get released if they emailed OpenAI HR.
If you signed such an agreement and have not been released, you can of course contact me on Signal: 303 261 2769.
Can you share your reasons for thinking this? Given that people who remain bound can’t say so, I feel hesitant to conclude that people aren’t without clear evidence.
Excepting Jack Clark (who works for Anthropic) and Remco Zwetsloot (who left in 2018), I would think all the policy leadership folks listed above meet these criteria, yet none have reported being released. Would you guess that they have been?
I have been in touch with around a half dozen former OpenAI employees who I spoke to before former employees were released and all of them later informed me they were released, and they were not in any identifiable reference class such that I’d expect OpenAI would have been able to selectively release them while not releasing most people. I have further been in touch with many other former employees since they were released who confirmed this. I have not heard from anyone who wasn’t released, and I think it is reasonably likely I would have heard from them anonymously on Signal. Also, not releasing a bunch of people after saying they would seems like an enormously unpopular, hard to keep secret, and not very advantageous move for OpenAI, which is already taking a lot of flak for this. I also have a model of how people choose whether or not to make public statements where it’s extremely unsurprising most people would not choose to do so.
I would indeed guess that all of the people you listed have been released if they were even subject to such agreements in the first place, which I do not know (and the fact Geoffrey Irving was not offered such an agreement is some basis to think they were not uniformly imposed during some of the relevant time periods, imo.)
Thanks, that’s helpful context.
I agree it’s unsurprising that few rank-and-file employees would make statements, but I am surprised by the silence from those in policy/evals roles. From my perspective, active non-disparagement obligations seem clearly disqualifying for most such roles, so I’d think they’d want to clarify.
It sounds from this back and forth like we should assume that Anthropic leadership who left from OAI (so Dario and Daniela Amodei, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, others?) are still under NDA because it was probably mutual. Does that sound right to others?
I’m not necessarily imagining that OpenAI failed to release a bunch of people, although that still seems possible to me. I’m more concerned that they haven’t released many key people, and while I agree that you might have received an anonymous Signal message to that effect if it were true, I still feel alarmed that many of these people haven’t publicly stated otherwise.
I do find this surprising. Many people are aware of who former OpenAI employees are, and hence are aware of who was (or is) bound by this agreement. At the very least, if I were in this position, I would want people to know that I was no longer bound. And it does seem strange to me, if the contract has been widely retracted, that so few prominent people have confirmed being released.
It also seems pretty important to figure out who is under mutual non-disparagement agreements with OpenAI, which would still (imo) pose a problem if it applied to anyone in safety evaluations or policy positions.
See the statement from OpenAI in this article:
They have communicated this to me and I believe I was in the same category as most former employees.
I think the main reasons so few people have mentioned this are:
As I mentioned, there is still some legal ambiguity and additional avenues for retaliation
Some people are taking their time over what they want to say
Most people don’t want to publicly associate themselves with a controversial situation
Most people aren’t inclined to disparage their former employer anyway, and so they may not think of their own situation as that big of a deal