Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

https://www.wired.com/story/sam-altman-meta-ai-talent-poaching-spree-leaked-messages/

by spenvo • 1 year ago

344 676 1 year ago

ilioscio• 1 year ago

At least from the outside, OpenAI's messaging about this seems obnoxiously deluded, maybe some of those employees left because it starts feels like a cult built on foundations of self importance? Or maybe they really do know some things we don't know, but it seems like a lot of people are eager to keep giving them that excuse.

But then again, maybe they have such a menagerie of individuals with their heads in the clouds that they've created something of an echo chamber about the 'pure vision' that only they can manifest.

reactordev• 1 year ago

I think it’s more of the latter. We’ve already seen others beat them in their own game. Only for them to come back with a new model.

In the end, this is the same back and forth that Apple and Sun shared in the late 90s or Meta and Google in 2014. We could have made non-competes illegal today but we didn’t.

toast0• 1 year ago

(post employment) Non-competes have been non-enforcable in California since 1872. They became illegal in California last year.

A federal rule would be nice, but the state rule where a lot of the development happens could be sufficient.

dandanua• 1 year ago

In our times, every narcissist sees himself as a saint and a messiah on a mission to save the world, while doing the complete opposite of that. And they get very angry when they see other narcissists trying to do the same.

DebtDeflation3• 1 year ago

This is the most succinct description of our current reality that I've ever seen. Kudos!

bdangubic• 1 year ago

lovely words. except there isn’t single one that gives two shits about the world

reb• 1 year ago

Ehh, this take feels ungenerous to me. You don't have to believe a private firm is a holy order for it to benefit from a culture filled with "we believe this specific project is Important" people vs "will work at whatever shop drops the most cash" people.

Mercenaries by definition select for individual dollar outcomes, and its impossible for that not to impact the way they operate in groups, which is generally to the group's detriment unless management is incredibly good at building group-first incentive structures that don't stomp individual outcomes.

That said, mercenary-missionaries are definitely a thing. They're unstoppable forces culturally and economically, and that could be who we're seeing move around here.

evklein• 1 year ago

Yeah it's a tough spot he's found himself in. How do you convince people who know more about this stuff than anybody that you're barreling towards something that's an improbability? It seems that most of them have made their choice to turn more towards reality, the material reality, and register their skill with an organization that holds that in higher regard. I can't blame them, and neither can he, but he also can't help himself when it comes to reiterating the hype. He might be projecting about that 'deep-seated cultural issue' he's prescribing to meta, and lashing out against those who don't accept it.

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

I can't blame them, and neither can he

He's certainly trying with statements like this.

To be fair, he's hardly alone. Business is built on dupers and dupees. The duper talks about how important the mission of the business is while taking the value of the labor of the dupee. If he had to work for the money he pays the dupee, he would be a lot less interested in the mission.

_stillmind• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/9i9vo

ipsum23• 1 year ago

The game theoretic aspect of this is quite interesting. If Meta will make OpenAI's model improvements open source, then the value of every poached employee will be worth significantly less as time goes on. That means it's in the employees best interest to leave first, if their goal is to maximize their income.

bilbo0s2• 1 year ago

Open source could also be a bait and switch.

ie - Zuck has no intention to keep opening up the models he creates. Thus, he knows he can spend the money to get the talent. Because he has every intention to make it back.

HardCodedBias• 1 year ago

Zuck has the best or the second best distribution on the planet.

If he neutralizes the tech advantage of other companies his chances of winning rise.

jekwoooooe3• 1 year ago

Allegedly they were offered 100m just in the first year. I think they will be fine

paxys2• 1 year ago

That was immediately proven to be false, both by Meta leadership and the poached researchers themselves. Sam Altman just pulled the number out of his ass in an interview.

ipsum23• 1 year ago

That's my point. The ones that left early got a large sum of money. The ones that leave later will get less. That would incentivize people to be the first to leave.

freejazz• 1 year ago

Like the culture of OpenAI where Microsoft threatened to poach the entire staff so they caved?

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

For a group of people who talk incessantly about the value of unrestricted markets, tech bros sure hate having to participate in free labor markets.

Being a missionary for big ideas doesn't mean dick to a creditor.

reverendsteveii3• 1 year ago

Capitalists don't like markets, or at least not the markets that we're told capitalism will bring about. Those markets are supposed to increase competition and drive down prices until companies are making just barely enough to survive. What capitalist wants that for himself? He wants decreased competitions and sky high prices for himself, and increased competition and lower prices for his competitors and suppliers.

Dracophoenix3• 1 year ago

Capitalists don't like markets, or at least not the markets that we're told capitalism will bring about.

The "markets" most people learn about are artificial Econ 101 constructions. They're pedagogical tools for explaining elasticity and competition under the assumption that all widgets are equally and infinitely fungible. An assumption which ignores marginal value, individual preferences, innovation and other things that make real markets.

What capitalist wants that for himself? He wants decreased competitions and sky high prices for himself, and increased competition and lower prices for his competitors and suppliers.

The capitalist wants to be left to trade as he sees fit without state intervention.

mlinhares2• 1 year ago

That didn't work for the American colonies, Portugal and Spain were very focused on being missionaries and were beaten by the Dutch and Brits that just wanted to make money.

hollerith2• 1 year ago

The motive for settling the colonies in New England was emphatically not to make money.

echelon_musk2• 1 year ago

How about the Caribbean?

MangoToupe2• 1 year ago

That really depends on the time period. The puritanical core of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was certainly replaced by commercial/trade interests long before their war with the crown.

dragonwriter2• 1 year ago

The idea that the Spanish and Portuguese colonial effort wasn't droven by economic gain above all else is also beyond silly.

elros• 1 year ago

I believe Portuguese got there looking for a shorter route to India (money) and eventually settled the land for gold, silver, brazilwood, diamonds and sugarcane (money).

mlinhares2• 1 year ago

Nah, they very much wanted to do missionary work and find Preston John, they invested in a lot of shitty missions for absolutely no reason other than to try to convert people to the church.

Conquerors is a great read on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquerors:_How_Portugal_Forge...

And don't get me wrong, they were very successful at filling their pockets with gold, but could have been even more if they were mostly mercenaries like the brits and the dutch.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

90% of the reason Spain and Portugal explored the new world was for wealth (spices, gold/silver, sugar, brazilwood). The rest of the reason was to spread their religion and increase their national power. Missions only popped up 30 years after they first began colonization.

The Dutch, British, and French were initially brought to the new world because they'd heard how rich it was and wanted a piece of the pie. It took them a while to establish a hold because the Spanish defended it so well (incumbents usually win) and also they kept settling frozen wastelands rather than tropical islands.

The religiously persecuted groups (who were in no way state-sponsored) came 120 years after Spain's first forays.

MangoToupe2• 1 year ago

It's also worth noting that missions were often a chit to curry political favor with the catholic church. This was sort of the manufactured consent of the 17th century.

There's also this illuminating letter sent from King Leopold II to missionaries in the late 19th century: https://www.fafich.ufmg.br/~luarnaut/Letter%20Leopold%20II%2...

I would quote it, but it's worth reading in its entirety and is extremely blunt in its intent.

HWR_142• 1 year ago

In what way did the Spanish lose out to the Dutch or the Brits? Did you only think of North America and forget everything south of the rio grande (and a good deal north of it)?

codingwagie• 1 year ago

The value of these researchers to meta is surely more than a few billion. Love seeing free markets benefit the world

ipsum23• 1 year ago

How do you figure? If you assume that Meta gets the state of the art model, revenue is non-existent, unless they start a premium tier or put ads. Even then, its not clear if they will exceed the money spent on inference and training compute.

HWR_142• 1 year ago

It's worth a few billion (easily) to keep people's default time sink as aimlessly playing on FV/IG as opposed to chatting with ChatGPT. Even if that scroll is replaced by chatting with llama as opposed to seeing posts.

simianwords6• 1 year ago

Im a bit torn about this. If it ends up hurting OpenAI so much that they close shop, what is the incentive for another OpenAI to come up?

You can spend time making a good product and get breakthroughs and all it takes is for meta to poach your talent, and with it your IP. What do you have left?

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

Trade secrets and patent laws still apply.

But also, every employee getting paid at Meta can come out with the resources to start their own thing. PayPal didn't crush fintech: it funded the next twenty years of startups.

spenvo• 1 year ago

OpenAI's tight spot:

1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of drama; and OpenAI has most of the stink from the initial (valid) grievance of "AI-companies are stealing from artists". The endless hype and FUD cycles, going back to 2022, have worn industry people out, as well as the flip flop on "please regulate us". 6) Its original, core strategic alliance with Microsoft is extremely strained. 7) and, related to #6, its corporate structure is extremely unorthodox and likely needs to change in order to attract more investment, which it must (to train new frontier models). Microsoft would need to sign off on the new structure. 8) Musk is sniping at its heels, especially through legal actions.

Barring a major breakthrough with GPT-5, which I don't see happening, how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company? Maybe the answer is they drop the frontier model aspect of their business? If we are really far from AGI and are instead in a plateau of diminishing returns that may not be a huge deal, because having a 5% better model likely doesn't matter that much to their primary bright spot:

Brand loyalty from the average person to ChatGPT is the best bright spot, and OpenAI successfully eating Google's search market. Their numbers there have been truly massive from the beginning, and are I think the most defensible. Google AI Overviews continue to be completely awful in comparison.

nashashmi3• 1 year ago

They have majority of the attention and market cap. They have runway. And that part is the most important thing. Others don’t have the users to grand test developments.

ninininino• 1 year ago

I'm not so sure they have runway.

XAI has Elon's fortune to burn, and Spacex to fund it.

Gemini has the ad and search business of Google to fund it.

Meta has the ad revenue of IG+FB+WhatsApp+Messenger.

Whereas OpenAI $10 billion in annual revenue, but low switching costs for both consumers and developers using their APIs.

If you stay at the forefront of frontier models, you need to keep burning money like crazy, that requires raising rounds repeatedly for OpenAI, whereas the tech giants can just use their fortunes doing it.

jekwoooooe3• 1 year ago

OpenAI has no shot without a huge cash infusion and to offer similar packages. Meta opened the door.

blueblisters2• 1 year ago

If they can turn ChatGPT into a free cash flow machine, they will be in a much more comfortable position. They have the lever to do so (ads) but haven't shown much interest there yet.

I can't imagine how they will compete if they need to continue burning and needing to raise capital until 2030.

storgendibal• 1 year ago

The interest and actions are there now: Hiring Fidji Simo to run "applications" strongly indicates a move to an ad-based business model. Fidji's meteoric rise at Facebook was because she helped land the pivot to the monster business that is mobile ads on Facebook, and she was supposedly tapped as Instacart's CEO because their business potential was on ads for CPGs, more than it was on skimming delivery fees and marked up groceries.

wavemode• 1 year ago

how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company?

I doubt that OpenAI needs or wants to be a sustainable company right now. They can probably continue to drum up hype and investor money for many years. As long as people keep writing them blank checks, why not keep spending them? Best case they invent AGI, worst case they go bankrupt, which is irrelevant since it's not their own money they're risking.

logsr3• 1 year ago

The biggest problem OAI has is that they don't own a data source. Meta, Google, and X all have existing platforms for sourcing real time data at global scale. OAI has ChatGPT, which gives them some unique data, but it is tiny and very limited compared to what their competitors have.

LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to improve and adapt to current events they need fresh human created data, which requires a mechanism to separate human from AI content, which requires owning a platform where content is created, so that you can deploy surveillance tools to correctly identify human created content.

edm0nd• 1 year ago

OAI has a deal with reddits corpus of data to use.

They will either have to acquire a data source or build their own moving forward imo. I could see them buying reddit.

Sam Altman also owns something like ~10% of reddits stock since they went public.

VirusNewbie• 1 year ago

Good analysis, my counter to it is that OpenAI has one of the leading foundational models, while Meta, despite being a top paying tech company, continued to release sub par models that don't come close to the other big three.

So, what happened? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the culture and/or infra at Meta? If it was just because Zuckerburg bet on the wrong horses to lead their LLM initiatives, what makes us think he got it right this time?

fzzzy2• 1 year ago

For one thing, all the trade secrets going from openai and anthropic to meta.

simianwords6• 1 year ago

Maybe employees realised this and left OpenAI for this reason.

comfysocks3• 1 year ago

The flip-flop on regulation sounds like: “please regulate us (in a way that builds a moat for incumbents out of fear of an imagined future doom scenario)” and “please Don’t regulate us (in a way that prevents us from stealing, and causing actual harm now).”

dinkdonkbell• 1 year ago

Didn't many of the missionaries at OpenAI go to Thinking Machines Lab?

https://thinkingmachines.ai/

9283409232• 1 year ago

Is he comparing working at OpenAI to religion? Is that not a crazy analogy to make? Cult like behavior to say the least. It's also funny the entire business of AI is poaching content from people.

Yeul2• 1 year ago

AI as a religion should scare any investor. Where are the products that you can sell for moolah?

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

The product is a model that takes knowledge and puts it in a form that can act on it without a human doing the acting.

You sell it to people who don't want to pay other people while getting the same productivity.

bagels• 1 year ago

They have product that they derive revenue from.

pera• 1 year ago

Religions and cults are actually extremely lucrative.

For many investors the product is the hype.

rpjt• 1 year ago

The most popular religions are super wealthy and lucrative

rchaud3• 1 year ago

Religion delivers a recurring revenue model that isn't taxed and where criminal confessions can't be used in court if made to a high-ranking company officer. It's the perfect business.

Hoasi2• 1 year ago

Also, some religions have the best branding ever. Studying religions will teach you marketing and virality.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

Kenneth Copeland suggests religion can be enough

cs702• 1 year ago

I like sama and many other folks at OpenAI, but I have to call things how I see them:

"What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it's very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target."

Translation from corporate-speak: "We're not as rich as Meta."

"Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does, and I'm confident we can fix the problems."

Translation from corporate-speak: "We're not as rich as Meta."

"And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way." "Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be." "Missionaries will beat mercenaries."

Translation from corporate-speak: "I am high as a kite." (All companies building AGI claim to be doing it in a good way.)

mzajc• 1 year ago

"But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does"

Translation from corpospeak: "I think my pivot to for-profit is very clever and unique" :)

ASalazarMX2• 1 year ago

The perfect corollary is that Altman is as mercenary, if not more, than Zuckerberg, given all the power grabs he did in OpenAI. Even the "Open" in OpenAI is a joke.

He just has less options because OpenAI is not as rich as Meta.

philosophty• 1 year ago

Two rich kids who have mostly paid-to-win their way into the game are predictably fighting using money because that's all they bring to the table.

davidcbc• 1 year ago

Does he have the same conviction when people from other companies decide to join OpenAI?

FirmwareBurner• 1 year ago

It's only bad when other people do it.

latexr4• 1 year ago

It’s only bad when other people do it to him.

rchaud3• 1 year ago

"Apostates who turned to darkness" vs "Converts who saw the light".

a4isms2• 1 year ago

There can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God!

https://norberthaupt.com/2015/11/22/the-rabbit-god-and-the-d...

neilv2• 1 year ago

Can someone make an honest argument for how OpenAI staff are missionaries, after the coup?

I'd be very happy to be convinced that supporting the coup was the right move for true-believer missionaries.

(Edit: It's an honest and obvious question, and I think that the joke responses risk burying or discouraging honest answers.)

throwawayq34232• 1 year ago

100% agree. You are hearing the dictator claim righteousness.

ASalazarMX2• 1 year ago

I'd bet 100 quatloos that your comment will not have honest arguments below. You can't nurture missionaries in an exploitative environment.

CamperBob2• 1 year ago

Not to mention, missionaries are exploitative. They're trying to harvest souls for God or (failing the appearance of God to accept their bounty) to expand the influence of their earthbound church.

The end result of missionary activity is often something like https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang... .

Bottom line, "But... but I'm like a missionary!" isn't my go-to argument when I'm trying to convince people that my own motives are purer than my rival's.

TylerE• 1 year ago

Eh? Plenty of cults like Jehivahs Witnesses that are exploitive as hell.

kenjackson• 1 year ago

I'm not very informed about the coup -- but doesn't it just depend on what side most of the employees sat/sit on? I don't know how much of the coup was just egos or really an argument about philosophy that the rank and file care about. But I think this would be the argument.

kevindamm2• 1 year ago

There was a petition with a startlingly high percentage of employees signing it, but no telling how many of them felt pressured to to keep their job.

actionfromafar• 1 year ago

An honest argument is that cults often have missionaries.

m463• 1 year ago

Missionary (from wikipedia):

A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary

Post coup, they are both for-profit entities.

So the difference seems to be that when meta releases its models (like bibles), it is promoting its faith more openly than openai, which interposes itself as an intermediary.

ponector3• 1 year ago

That is just an act of corpo-ceo bulshitting employees and press about high moral standards, mission, etc. Don't trust any of his words.

noname120• 1 year ago

Yes, especially not his

casualscience• 1 year ago

yeah, I used to work in the medical tech space, they love to tell you how much you should be in it for the mission and that's why your pay is 1/3 what you could make at FAANG... of course, when it came to our sick customers, they need to pay market rates.

sitkack• 1 year ago

Anytime someone tells you to be in it for the mission, you are expendable and underpaid.

pj_mukh5• 1 year ago

Honest answer*:

I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about.

Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself, it should re-align its business model away from the feeds.

In that way, as a missionary chasing super intelligence, I'd prefer OpenAI.

*because I don't have an emotional connection to OpenAI's changing corporate structure away from being a non-profit:

makeitdouble5• 1 year ago

As a thought exercise, OpenAI can partner to apply the technology to:

- online gambling

- kids gambling

- algorithmic advertising

Are these any better ? All of these are of course money wells and a logical move for a for-profit IMHO.

And they can of course also integrate into a Meta competitor's algorithmic feeds as well, putting them at the same level as Meta in that regard.

All in all, I'm not seeing them having any moral high ground, even purely hypotheticaly.

eli_gottlieb2• 1 year ago

If you have "superintelligence" and it's used to fine-tune a corporate product that preexisted it, you don't have superintelligence.

svara• 1 year ago

I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing,

OpenAI announced in April they'd build a social network.

I think at this point it barely matters who does it, the ways in which you can make huge amounts of money from this are limited and all the major players after going to make a dash for it.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

In that way, as a missionary chasing super intelligence, I'd prefer OpenAI.

There ain't no missionary, they all doing it for the money and will apply it to anything that will turn dollars.

delfinom• 1 year ago

This is just a CEO gaslighting his employees to "think of the mission" instead of paying up

No different than "we are a family"

buremba• 1 year ago

But “we are family”

logsr3• 1 year ago

“I have never been more confident in our research roadmap,” he wrote. “We are making an unprecedented bet on compute, but I love that we are doing it and I'm confident we will make good use of it. Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does, and I'm confident we can fix the problems.”

tldr. knife fights in the hallways over the remaining life boats.

_Algernon_4• 1 year ago

Altman has to be the most transparently two-faced tech CEO there is. I don't understand why people still lap up his bullshit.

Foobar8568• 1 year ago

Money.

Grimblewald4• 1 year ago

dumb people need symbols. Same reason elon gets worship.

bigyabai7• 1 year ago

Tim Cook is right there. If I say "Vision Pro" I'll probably get downvoted out of a mere desire to not want to talk about that little excursion.

dkdbejwi383• 1 year ago

People buy into the BS and are terrified of missing out or being left behind.

blitzar4• 1 year ago

"He looks like such a nice young man"

KaiserPro2• 1 year ago

There are a couple of ways to read the "coup" saga.

1) Altman was trying to raise cash so that openAI would be the first,best and last to get AGI. That required structural changes before major investors would put in the cash.

2) Altman was trying to raise cash and saw an opportunity to make loads of money

3) Altman isn't the smartest cookie in the jar, and was persuaded by potential/current investors that changing the corp structure was the only way forward.

Now, what were the board's concerns?

The publicly stated reason was a lack of transparency. Now, to you and me, that sounds a lot like lying. But where did it occur and what was it about. Was it about the reasons for the restructure? was it about the safeguards were offered?

The answer to the above shapes the reaction I feel I would have as a missionary

If you're a missionary, then you would believe that the corp structure of openai was the key thing that stops it from pursuing "damaging" tactics. Allowing investors to dictate oversight rules undermines that significantly, and allows short term gain to come before longterm/short term safety.

However, I was bought out by a FAANG, one I swear I'd never work for, because they are industrial grade shits. Yet, here I am many years later, having profited considerably from working at said FAANG. turns out I have a price, and it wasn't that much.

8note2• 1 year ago

yeah... didnt the missionaries all leave after the coup? and the folks who remain are the mercenaries looking for the big stock win after sama figures out a way to be acquired or IPO?

all the chatter here at least was that the OpenAI folks were sticking around because they were looking for a big payout

throwawayq34232• 1 year ago

I'm sorry how is the mission of OpenAI any different than their competitors? They are for-profit they offer absurd salaries, etc.

jekwoooooe3• 1 year ago

No no no don’t you get it they have this multi entity “non profit” and something something “capped profit” yet everyone is employed by the for profit. But they just want to give AGI for free right

bluecalm• 1 year ago

Do I "poach" a stock when I offer more money for it than the last transaction value? "Poaching" employees is just price discovery by market forces. Sounds healthy to me. Meta is being the good guys for once.

jimmywetnips• 1 year ago

[flagged]

datavirtue2• 1 year ago

You must be new here. No joking allowed.

nativeit• 1 year ago

The elderly couple showed up with baseball bats?

Freedom2• 1 year ago

Sounds like some tariffs should be applied as as well considering there's now a trade imbalance!

noisy_boy3• 1 year ago

    s/good guys/willing to pay/

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

"Do Not Be Explicitly Useful"—Strategic Uselessness as Liability Buffer

This is a deliberate obfuscation pattern. If the model is ever consistently useful at a high-risk task (e.g., legal advice, medical interpretation, financial strategy), it triggers legal, regulatory, and reputational red flags. a. Utility → Responsibility

If a system is predictably effective, users will reasonably rely on it.

And reliance implies accountability. Courts, regulators, and the public treat consistent output as an implied service, not just a stochastic parrot.

This is where AI providers get scared: being too good makes you an unlicensed practitioner or liable agent.

b. Avoid “Known Use Cases”

Some companies will actively scrub capabilities once they’re discovered to work “too well.”

For instance:

A model that reliably interprets radiology scans might have that capability turned off.

A model that can write compelling legal motions will start refusing prompts that look too paralegal-ish or insert nonsense case law citation.

I think we see this a lot from ChatGPT. It's constantly getting worse in real world uses while exceeding at benchmarks. They're likely, and probably forced, to cheat on benchmarks by using "leaked" data.

joshdavham3• 1 year ago

I think Meta already has very deep cultural problems.

If you've ever browsed teamblind.com (which I strongly recommend against as I hate that site), you'll see what the people who work at Meta are like.

meta_ai_x• 1 year ago

That's true with every Tech company employees. They all want $1 M TC and work 10 hours / week

darth_avocado2• 1 year ago

You’re describing the management not the employees

FooBarBizBazz• 1 year ago

The 4% Rule means everybody with $25M is getting $1M per year for zero hours of work per week. Google tells me Sam has $1.7B.

thomassmith65• 1 year ago

Off topic, but the existence of this teamblind.com site escaped my notice till now.

Is there a particular reason to hate it (aside from it being social media)?

beering• 1 year ago

Mainly because it brings out the worst in people. It’s easy to read Blind too much and take on a very cynical, money-driven view of everything in your life, which of course a Blind addict would justify as clear-eyed and pragmatic.

runeblaze2• 1 year ago

It has obvious pros, but since you asked about the cons —- anonymity brings the worst out of people; TC chasing leads to a reductionist view of people’s values and skills.

For example unlike HN you don’t often do technical discussions on blind, by design. So it is a “meta”-level strategy discussion of the job, then it skews politics, gossips, stock price etc..

This is compounded by it being social media, where negativity can be amplified 5-10x.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

I looked at it once, seemed full of young men discussing hair loss issues and how to get a girlfriend.

joshdavham3• 1 year ago

I hate teamblind because it makes me feel really negative about our industry.

I actually really like tech - the problems we get to work on, the ever-changing technological landscape, the smart and passionate people, etc, etc. But teamblind is just filled with cynical, wealth-obsessed and mean careerists. It's like the opposite of HN in many ways.

And if you ever wondered where the phrase "TC or GTFO" originated... it's from teamblind.

yodsanklai2• 1 year ago

What are they like? since you recommend not browsing this site?

joshdavham3• 1 year ago

The posts from Meta employees on teamblind are generally cynical, status/wealth-obsessed and mean.

tmaly• 1 year ago

this open competition for talent is better than that time all the big tech firms were working to actively suppress wages.

ramesh31• 1 year ago

We're talking about a few hundred people here, globally. The entire goal is to suppress everyone else's wages to zero.

unit_circle• 1 year ago

Side note: I'm noticing more and more of these simple, hyperbolic headlines specifically of statements that public figures make. A hallmark of the event being reported is a public figure making a statement that will surely have little to no effect whatsoever.

Calling these statements "slamming" (a specific word I see with curious frequency) is so riling to me because they are so impotent but are described with such violent and decisive language.

Often it's a politician, usually liberal, and their statement is such an ineffectual waste of time, and outwardly it appears wasting time is most of what they do. I consider myself slightly left of center, so seeing "my group" dither and waste time rather than organize and do real work frustrates me greatly. Especially so since we are provided with such contrast from right of center where there is so much decisive action happening at every moment.

I know it's to feed ranking algorithms, which causes me even more irritation. Watching the brain rot get worse in real time...

Animats• 1 year ago

Yeah, yeah, typical rich guy whining when labor makes some gains.

blackhaj72• 1 year ago

Couldn't think of a worse steward of AI than Meta/Zuck (not a fan of OpenAI either). One of the most insidious companies out there.

Sad to see Nat Friedman go there. He struck me as "one of the good ones" who was keen to use tech for positive change. I don't think that is achievable at Meta

psunavy03• 1 year ago

But if they give you tens of millions of reasons to go there . . .

garciasn• 1 year ago

For Sam to seemingly claim that Meta is hiring mercenaries while OpenAI is hiring missionaries seems a bit counter to OpenAI's mission of having closed weight models vs an open weights at Meta.

I could definitely see those who are 'missionaries' wanting to give it away. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

blackhaj72• 1 year ago

Agreed

mempko• 1 year ago

Missionaries vs mercenaries? Which company is releasing open source models? Please remind me I forgot.

cjoelrun• 1 year ago

Isn't Meta's open model closer to OpenAI's mission then OpenAI.

DaSHacka• 1 year ago

Ironically, Altman's statement wasnt all that wrong, in a sense.

He just mixed up who the "Missionaries" and who the "Mercenaries" were.

toofy• 1 year ago

hilarious seeing that he views it this way when his company is so very well known for taking (strong arguments say stealing) everything from everyone.

i’m noticing more and more lately that our new monarchs really do have broken thought patterns. they see their own abuse towards others as perfectly ok but hilariously demand people treat them fairly.

small children learn things that these guys struggle to understand.

jddj• 1 year ago

I think they understand that it's all performative

kypro• 1 year ago

Sam comes across as an extremely calculating person to me. I'm not suggesting he's necessarily doing this for bad reasons, but it's very clear to me the public facing communications he makes are well considered and likely not fully reflective of his actual views and positions on things, but instead what he believes to be power maximising.

He's very good at creating headlines and getting people talking online. There's no doubt he's good at what he does, but I don't know why anyone takes anything he says seriously.

FireBeyond• 1 year ago

Even more blatantly and directly, "Don't you dare use our model, trained on other people's work, to train yours".

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

SBF demonstrated how utilitarian thought + massive money can easily spiral into self-centered anti-social behavior.

Being a billionaire seems to be inherently bad for human brains.

jackallis• 1 year ago

I don't know which pedastal Sam is standing on to point finger at others? Who are the missionaries and who are the mercenaries? What part of OpenAI is Open?

seatac76• 1 year ago

“First comes the Missionary, then comes the Mercenary, then comes the Army”

Wonder if that applies here.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

"Talent" doesn't make a business successful, and paychecks aren't the reason most people switch jobs. This is like Sam announcing to the world "it sucks working for our company, don't come here".

jrm42• 1 year ago

Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.

pydry2• 1 year ago

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement.

The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.

landl0rd• 1 year ago

The price tag on this stuff, in human capital, data, and hardware, is high enough to preclude that sort of “perfect competition” environment.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Quarrelsome2• 1 year ago

they did say "accidentally". I find that people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is often the best case outcome.

jrm42• 1 year ago

Oh, absolutely -- I definitely meant that in the least complimentary way possible :). In a way, it's just the triumph of the ideals of "open source," -- sharing is better for everyone, even Zuck, selfishly.

moralestapia3• 1 year ago

he's just commoditizing the complement

That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?

somenameforme2• 1 year ago

The reason Machiavellianism is stupid is that the grand ends the means aim to obtain often never come to pass, but the awful things done in pursuit of them certainly do. So the motivation behind those means doesn't excuse them. And I see no reason the inverse of this doesn't hold true. I couldn't care less if Zuckerburg thinks open sourcing Llama is some grand scheme to let him to take over the world to become its god-king emperor. In reality, that almost certainly won't happen. But what certainly will happen is the world getting free and open source access to LLM systems.

When any scheme involves some grand long-term goal, I think a far more naive approach to behaviors is much more appropriate in basically all cases. There's a million twists on that old quote that 'no plan survives first contact with the enemy', and with these sort of grand schemes - we're all that enemy. Bring on the malevolent schemers with their benevolent means - the world would be a much nicer place than one filled with benevolent schemers with their malevolent means.

ddellacosta2• 1 year ago

Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg

Considering the rest of your comment it's not clear to me if "anthropomorphizing" really captures the meaning you intended, but regardless, I love this

echelon4• 1 year ago

Most of Meta's models have not been released as open source. Llama was a fluke, and it helps to commoditize your compliment when you're not the market leader.

There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.

A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.

phyrex• 1 year ago

That's not true, the llama that's open source is pretty much exactly what's used internally

_aavaa_3• 1 year ago

Llama is not open source. It is at best weights available. The license explicitly limits what kind of things you are allowed to use the outputs of the models for.

saubeidl10• 1 year ago

There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.

Deepseek, Baidu.

casebash• 1 year ago

Oh, they're actually the bad guys, just folks haven't thought far enough ahead to realise it yet.

plemer• 1 year ago

OK, lay it on us.

robocat• 1 year ago

bad guys

You imply there are some good guys.

What company?

lawn• 1 year ago

This is an instance of bad guys fighting bad guys.

add-sub-mul-div• 1 year ago

Your ability to use a lesser version of this AI on your own hardware will not save you from the myriad ways it will be used to prey on you.

jayd16• 1 year ago

And an inability to do so would not have saved you either.

simianwords6• 1 year ago

Why not? Current open models are more capable than the best models from 6 months back. You have a choice to use a model that is 6 months old - if you still choose to use the closed version that’s on you.

burroisolator• 1 year ago

AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.

hardwaresofton6• 1 year ago

Another funny possibly sad coincidence is that the licenses that made open source what it is will probably be absolutely useless going forward, because as recent precedent has shown, companies can train on what they have legally gained access to.

On the other hand, AGPL continues to be the future of F/OSS.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Open source may be necessary but it is not sufficient. You also needed the compute power and architecture discoveries and the realisation that lots of data > clever feature mapping for this kind of work.

A world without open source may have given birth to 2020s AI but probably at a slower pace.

lynx972• 1 year ago

[flagged]

tomhow2• 1 year ago

This is hopelessly naive

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

eleveriven3• 1 year ago

It's not ideal, but having major players accidentally propping up an open ecosystem is probably the best-case outcome we could've hoped for

Tepix2• 1 year ago

Do we know if Meta will stick to its strategy of making weights available (which isn't open source to be clear) now that they have a new "superintelligence" subdivision?

saubeidl10• 1 year ago

What's even crazier is that China are the good guys when it comes to open source AI.

_heimdall2• 1 year ago

We would have to know their intent to really know if they fit a general understanding "the good guys."

Its very possible that China is open sourcing LLMs because its currently in their best interest to do so, not because of some moral or principled stance.

tim3333• 1 year ago

One private company in China, funded by running a quant hedge fund. I'm not sure China as in Xi is good.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

It's really hard to tell. If instructions like the current extreme trend of "What a great question!" and all the crap that forces one to put

  * Do not use emotional reinforcement (e.g., "Excellent," "Perfect," "Unfortunately").
  * Do not use metaphors or hyperbole (e.g., "smoking gun," "major turning point").
  * Do not express confidence or certainty in potential solutions.

into the instructions, so that it doesn't treat you like a child, teenager or narcissistic individual who is craving for flattery, can really affect the mood and way of thinking of an individual, those Chinese models might as well have baked in something similar but targeted at reducing the productivity of certain individuals or weakening their beliefs in western culture.

I am not saying they are doing that, but they could be doing it sometime down the road without us noticing.

andsoitis3• 1 year ago

OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence

Let’s assume for a moment that OpenAI is the only company that can build AGI (specious claim), then the question I would have for Sam Altman: what is OpenAI’s plan once that milestone is reached, given his other argument:

And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way,” he added. “Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be.

If building AGI is OpenAI’s only goal (unlike other companies), will OpenAI cease to exist once mission is accomplished or will a new mission be devised?

darth_avocado2• 1 year ago

OpenAI’s only goal isn’t building AGI. It is to build it first and make money off it.

a_bonobo• 1 year ago

Exactly! The Microsoft-OpenAI agreement states that AGI is whatever makes them 100 billion in profits. Nothing in there about anything intelligence related.

The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

zeryx• 1 year ago

Is there even a point to money post AGI?

cma• 1 year ago

The profit cap was supposed to be for first to acheive AGI being end game, and would ensure redistribution (though with apparently some kind of Altman tax through early World Coin ownership stake). When they realized they wouldn't reach AGI with current funding and they were so close to $100 billion market cap they couldn't entice new investors on $100 billion in profits, why didn't they set it to, say, $10 trillion instead of infinity? Because they are missionaries?

A leaked email from Ilya early on even said they never planned to open source stuff long term, it was just to entice researchers at the beginning.

Whole company is founded on lies and Altman was even fired from YC over self detailing or something in I think a deleted YC blog post if I remember right.

SchemaLoad• 1 year ago

What even is the monetization plan for AI. Seems like the cutting edge tech becomes immediately devalued to nothing after a few months when a new open source modal is released.

After spending so many billions on this stuff, are they really going to pay it all off selling API credits?

DebtDeflation3• 1 year ago

And in the meantime, their goal is clearly to make money off non-AGI AI.

I constantly get quasi-religious vibes from the current AI "leaders" (Altman, Amodei, and quite a few of the people who have left both companies to start their own). I never got those sort of vibes from Hinton, LeCun, or Bengio. The latest crop really does seem to believe that they're building some sort of "god" and that their god getting built first before one of their competitors builds a false god is paramount (in the literal meaning of the term) for the future of the human race.

blueblisters2• 1 year ago

Nope AGI is not the end goal - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.

IMO, AGI is already a very nebulous term. Superintelligence seems even more hand-wavy. It might be useful to define and understand limits of "intelligence" first.

Nasrudith• 1 year ago

Superintelligence has always been rhetorical slight of hand to equate "better than human" with "literally infinitely improving and godlike" in spite of optimization always leveling off eventually for one reason or another.

jaza2• 1 year ago

I wouldn't worry, I forecast we'll have peace in the Middle East before we have true AGI.

elzbardico2• 1 year ago

Said the guy whose life mission seems to be to convert a non-profit into a for-profit entity.

trhway2• 1 year ago

look around - CA - missionaries have the best real estate. And another related note on connection between strong promotion of devotion to ideas and it is being a good business - the Abrahamic monotheism was a result of the successful marketing campaign "only the donations made here are donations to the real god" of that Temple back then against several other competing ones. (Curiously that the current historic stage of AI, on the cusp, be it 3 or 30 years, of emergence of AGI is somewhat close to that point in history back then. Thus in particular a flood of messiahs and doom sayers would only increase.)

timewizard2• 1 year ago

In short: "Liars prosper in the short term."

Quarrelsome2• 1 year ago

the Abrahamic monotheism was a result of the successful marketing campaign

I thought it was because everyone was accepted, technically equal, and sins were seen as something inherent and forgivable (at least with Christianity) whereas paganism and polythiesms can tend towards rewarding those with greater resources (who can afford to sacrifice an entire bull every religious cycle), thereby creating a form of religious inequality. At least that was one of the somewhat compelling arguments I heard that described the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.

apwell23• 1 year ago

  Another said: “Yes we’re quirky and weird, but that’s what makes this place a magical cradle of innovation,” wrote one. “OpenAI is weird in the most magical way. We contain multitudes.”

i thought i was reading /r/linkedinlunatics

seydor• 1 year ago

This is a bad year to talk about missions and ideologies. Just take the money and run

amarcheschi• 1 year ago

Had he been doing the poaching, he would be saying mercenaries will beat missionaries. Why believe in ceos words at this point

pier25• 1 year ago

So he believes OpenAI is in some kind of moral or humanitarian mission? Is he lying or just delusional?

jrflowers• 1 year ago

Hmm on the one hand somebody could have unimaginable wealth but on the other hand they could be in a religion started by a former reddit ceo, it is truly an unsolvable riddle

jlebar3• 1 year ago

I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

I work at OAI, but I'm speaking for myself here. Sam talks to the company, sometimes via slack, more often in company-wide meetings, all the time. Way more than any other CEO I have worked for. This leaked message is one part of a long, continuing conversation within the company.

The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are. It certainly has humbled my own reactions to news. (In this particular instance I don't think there's so much right and wrong but more that I think if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different.)

Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168

gphil• 1 year ago

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.

gist3• 1 year ago

I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.

The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.

This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/

jlebar3• 1 year ago

coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true

My profile is trivially connected to my real identity, I am not anonymous here.

lossolo• 1 year ago

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

Not only that, but how can we know if his interpretation or "feelings" about these discussions are accurate? How do we know he isn't looking through rose-tinted glasses like the Neumann believers at WeWork? OP isn't showing the missing discussion, only his interpretation/feelings about it. How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.

aleph_minus_one• 1 year ago

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others.

Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN.

Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that

- take an enormous amount of time to learn,

- where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply

- where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly

are much more rarely prone to this phenomenon. It is no coincidence that in the last two points I make comparisons to (natural) languages: it is not easy to bullshit in a live interview that you know some natural language well if the counterpart has at least some basic knowledge of this natural language.

joules77• 1 year ago

I think its more the site's architecture that promotes this behavior.

In the offline world there is a big social cost to this kind of behavior. Platforms haven't been able to replicate it. Instead they seem to promote and validate it. It feeds the self esteem of these people.

Karrot_Kream• 1 year ago

It's hard to have an informed opinion on Algebraic Geometry (requires expertise) and not many people are going to upvote and engage with you about it either. It's a lot easier to have an opinion on tech execs, current events, and tech gossip. Moreover you're much more likely to get replies, upvotes, and other engagement for posting about it.

There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.

crystal_revenge• 1 year ago

This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot.

The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself. He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does).

I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served someone else's interests, even if they personally thought they were doing divine work).

wat100002• 1 year ago

The headline makes it sound like he's angry that Meta is poaching his talent. That's a bad look that makes it seem like you consider your employees to be your property. But he didn't actually say anything like that. I wouldn't consider any of what he said to be "slams," just pretty reasonable discussion of why he thinks they won't do well.

I'd say this is yet another example of bad headlines having negative information content, not leaks.

makeitdouble5• 1 year ago

The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps.

Until the tide turns.

jiggawatts• 1 year ago

Worse: employees are often actively deceived by management. Their “close relationship” is akin to that of a farmer and his herd. Convinced they’re “on the inside” they’re often blind to the truth that’s obvious from the outside.

Or simply they don’t see the whole picture because they’re not customers or business partners.

I’ve seen Oracle employees befuddled to hear negative opinions about their beloved workplace! “I never had to deal with the licensing department!”

dylan604• 1 year ago

Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible.

Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later?

if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different

If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well.

SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting him on the interwebs.

jacquesm4• 1 year ago

Technically, after being labelled a missionary you can't really blame people for spreading the word of the almighty.

diggan2• 1 year ago

Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168

Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;)

Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.

echelon4• 1 year ago

There are ten measures by which a model can/should be open:

1. The model code (pytorch, whatever)

2. The pre-training code

3. The fine-tuning code

4. The inference code

5. The raw training data (pre-training + fine-tuning)

6. The processed training data (which might vary across various stages of pre-training and fine-tuning)

7. The resultant weights blob

8. The inference inputs and outputs (which also need a license; see also usage limits like O-RAIL)

9. The research paper(s) (hopefully the model is also described in literature!)

10. The patents (or lack thereof)

A good open model will have nearly all of these made available. A fake "open" model might only give you two of ten.

impossiblefork• 1 year ago

Open weights is unobjectionable. You do get a lot.

It's nice to also know what the training data is, and it's even nicer to be aware of how it's fine-tuned etc., but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.

tikhonj• 1 year ago

Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..."

Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.

threetonesun• 1 year ago

Little Miyazaki knock offs posting on the Nazi Hellsite former known as Twitter isn't really helping how the "public" feels about OAI either.

phatfish• 1 year ago

I agree with the sentiment.

Having been behind the scenes of HN discussion about a security incident, with accusations flying about incompetent developers, the true story was the lead developers new of the issue, but it was not prioritised by management and pushed down the backlog in place of new (revenue generating) features.

There is plenty of nuance to any situation that can't be known.

No idea if the real story here is better or worse than the public speculation though.

bboygravity• 1 year ago

I totally agree that most articles (pretty much all news/infotainment) is devoid of any information.

At the same time all I need to know about Sam is in the company/"non-profit's" name, which is in itself is now simply a lie.

incoming1211• 1 year ago

Sounds like someone is upset they didn't get poached.

furyofantares• 1 year ago

I've experienced that. Absolutely.

But I've also experienced that the outside perspective, wrong as it may be on nearly all details, can give a dose of realism that's easy to brush aside internally.

KaiserPro2• 1 year ago

I too worked at a place where hot button issues were being leaked to international news.

Leaks were done for a reason. either because they agree with the leak, really disagree with the leak, or want to feel big because they are a broker of juicy information.

Most of the time the leaks were done in an attempt to stop something stupid from happening, or highlight where upper management were making the choice to ignore something for a gain elsewhere.

Other times it was there because the person was being a prick.

Sure its a tiny part of the conversation, but in the end, if you've got the point where your employees are pissed off enough to leak, that's the bigger problem.

beoberha• 1 year ago

I understand the massive anti-OpenAI sentiment here, but OpenAI makes a really great product. ChatGPT and its ecosystem are widely used by millions every day to make them more productive. Losing these employees doesn’t bode well for users.

Meta doesn’t really have a product unless you count the awful “Meta AI” that is baked into their apps. Unless these acquisitions manifest in frontier models getting open sourced, it feels like a gigantic brain drain.

jstummbillig• 1 year ago

Meta's real AI product is actually even worse than that and insidious: They try to run over companies who are (in contrast) successfully advancing AI with money they made by hooking teens on IG, and then just use the resulting inferior product as a marketing tool.

gist3• 1 year ago

In any case this is business and in many cases how business operates. Nice try on Sam's part to try and make it like it's a bad thing and everybody is for the good of the purpose.

paxys2• 1 year ago

Pretty telling that OpenAI only now feels like it has to reevaluate compensation for researchers while just weeks ago it spent $6.5 billion to hire Jony Ive. Maybe he can build your superintelligence for you.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

Poachers don't like poachers. We all remember the secret and illegal anti-poaching agreement between Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Google and Pixar.

lizknope• 1 year ago

hinting that the company is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization.

TL ; DR

Some other company paid more and got engineers to join them because the engineers care more about themselves and their families than some annoying guy's vision.

sashank_1509• 1 year ago

Do we know what numbers we are talking about here. I’ve heard

1. “So much money your grandchildren don’t need to work”

2. 100M

3. Not 100M

So what is it? I’m just curious, I find 100M hard to believe but Zuck is capable of spending a lot.

homefree• 1 year ago

I hope xAI wins. I think Sam's self-portrayal as a missionary has a lot of irony - I see him as the ultimate mercenary.

It's always challenging to judge based entirely on public perceptions, but at some point public evidence adds up. The board firing, getting maybe fired from YC (disputed), people leaving to start anthropic because of him, people stating they don't want him in charge of AGI. All the other execs leaving. His lying in congress, his lying to the board, his general affect just seems off - not in an aspie way, but in some dishonest way. Yeah it's subjective, but it's a point and it's different from Zuckerberg, Musk etc. who come across as earnest. Even PG said if dropped on an island of cannibals you'd come back and Sam would be king.

I'm rooting for basically any of the other (American) players in the game to win.

At least Zuck is paying something close to the value these people might generate instead of having them sign hostile agreements to claw back their equity and then feigning ignorance. If NBA all stars get 100M$+ contracts, it's not crazy for a John Carmack type to command the same or more - the hard part is being able to identify the talent, not justify the value created by the leverage of the correct talent (which is huge).

lordfrito• 1 year ago

Sam Altman complaining about mercenary behavior from competitors... Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Guess he's unhappy he's not the one being mercenary in this situation.

logsr3• 1 year ago

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WrTKZKG7Ahc -- I would probably take Ari Emanuel's word on this one

alganet• 1 year ago

Why does this feel like the "Friendship Ended With Musadir" meme?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/friendship-ended-with-mudasir

zeofig• 1 year ago

That's rich. Almost as rich as Sam.

agnosticmantis• 1 year ago

What’s the profile of these talents like? And what are the skills that are most highly sought after?

Is it the researchers or the system engineers that scale the prototypes? Or other skills/expertise?

scotty79• 1 year ago

Poaching. Such a nasty word for merely offering and employee a better deal. A place where his work is not underpaid.

jacquesm4• 1 year ago

Sam vs Zuck... tough choice. I'm rooting for neither. Sam is cleverly using words here to make it seem like OpenAI are 'the good guys' but the truth is that they're just as nasty and power/money hungry as the rest.

jeremyjh• 1 year ago

And thus far, considerably less “open”.

fluidcruft• 1 year ago

Sam Altman literally casts himself a God apparently and that's somehow to be taken as an indictment of his rivals. Maybe it's my GenX speaking but that's CEO bubblespeak for "OpenAI is fucked, abandon ship".

sidcool• 1 year ago

Strictly between the two, I'd go with Sam

silent_echo• 1 year ago

Suchir Balaji

morepork• 1 year ago

This looks similar to what Meta (then Facebook) did a decade ago and basically broke the agreements between Apple, Google, etc. to not poach each others employees

zmmmmm• 1 year ago

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 $?

benatkin2• 1 year ago

They haven't released much closed source, open weights in comparison to their competitors, but they made their Codex agent Open Source while Claude Code is still closed source.

jonplackett2• 1 year ago

That’s just a wrapper though isn’t it. The secret sauce is still secret.

beebmam• 1 year ago

A company's mission is not an individual's mission. I personally would never hire an engineer whose main pursuit is money or promotions. These are the laziest engineers that exist and are always a liability.

cschep• 1 year ago

this is so, so out of touch.

Cantinflas• 1 year ago

What is your opinion on managerial virtue signaling?

cubancigar11• 1 year ago

"I would never give me money to someone who wants money."

quantified• 1 year ago

Everyone is the chairman of the board of their lives, with a fiduciary duty to their shareholder, namely themselves. You can decide to hire only employees who either believe in mission over pay or who are willing to mouth the words, but you will absolutely miss out on good employees.

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.

Bendy• 1 year ago

And I would never work for someone with such a paranoid suspicion of the motives of their employees, who doesn’t want to take any responsibility in their employees’ professional growth, and who doesn’t want to pay them what they’re worth.

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

Exactly. He says missionaries and immediately follows it by talking about compensation (ie a mercenary incentive)

motorest• 1 year ago

It says something that he still believes he has "missionaries" after betraying all the core principles that OpenAI was founded on.

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.

chvid2• 1 year ago

It is a widely accepted definition of AGI that it is something that is either really smart (or generates more than 100B usd in revenue).

It is also clear Sam Altman and OpenAI’s core values remain intact.

spencerflem• 1 year ago

Lol, I'm sure Sam Altman's ideals haven't changed but you're a fool if you think OpenAI is aiming for anything loftier than a huge pile of money for investors.

hliyan• 1 year ago

It's absoluely ridiculous that investors are driven (and are expected to be driven) by maximisation of return of investment, and that alone, but when labour/employees exhibit that same behaviour, they are labeld "mercenaries" or "transacitonal".

misterhill• 1 year ago

He was very happy when money caused them all to back him despite the fact that he obviously isn't a safe person to have in a position of power. But if they realize they have better money options than turning OpenAI into a collusion against its original foundation and mostly for his benefit, well then they are mercenaries..

alwa• 1 year ago

Couldn’t his claim apply equally to investors and employees? In both categories, people who are there to do stuff for mercenary reasons are likely to be (in his view) missing some of the drive and cohesion of a group of “true believers” working for the same purpose?

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)

DebtDeflation3• 1 year ago

These examples of double standards for labor vs capital are literally everywhere.

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.

grafmax• 1 year ago

He claims to be advancing progress. He believes that progress comes from technology plus good governance.

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.

blitzar4• 1 year ago

It says something that he believes he is anything but a Mercenary

ahartmetz2• 1 year ago

He believes anything that's profitable for him.

eleveriven3• 1 year ago

Yeah, that "missionaries" line feels pretty rich coming from the guy who presided over OpenAI's pivot from nonprofit ideals to capped-profit reality

whiteboardr• 1 year ago

Oh the hypocrisy - one of the biggest thiefs and liars calling “his” people jumping ship “mercenaries”.

So wrong on so many levels - what a time to be alive.

g42gregory• 1 year ago

He says, while driving $4 million car. :-)

angst• 1 year ago

“I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI.”

- Ilya Sutskever, Co-founder, co-lead of Superalignment Team , Departed early 2024

- May 15, 2025, The Atlantic

Anyway, I concur it's a hard choice as one other comment mentions.

godelski5• 1 year ago

Is this a button any one person should have their finger on?

TFYS4• 1 year ago

Exactly. AGI is something that will significantly affect all of humanity. It should be treated like nuclear weapons.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

They don't make buttons large enough for multiple people to press. It's always going to be someone in the end.

beng-nl• 1 year ago

Good point. I like George Hotz’ philosophy on this - paraphrasing badly - if everyone has AI, nobody can be subjugated by AI.

8note2• 1 year ago

its a button everyone should have finger on. if you can get it to do something good, go for it?

energy123• 1 year ago

I want Sam to win more than I do Zuck, just based on the proven negativity generated by Meta. I don't want that individual or that company anywhere near additional capital, power, capability or influence.

baq• 1 year ago

Between the trio of Thiel, Zuck and sama I’d pick the fourth option - I don’t want to be on that train anymore

btheunissen• 1 year ago

At the start of the “LLM boom” I was optimistic that OAI/Anthropic were in a position finally unseat the Big 4 in at least this area. Now I’m convinced the only winners are going to be Google, Meta, Amazon, and we are right back to where we started.

richardatlarge• 1 year ago

Yes, I’ve never seen a more sociopathic company than Meta. They are so true to the cliched ethos of “you are the product.” Sickens me that society has facilitated the rise of such banality of evil

latexr4• 1 year ago

The hypocrite who violates everyone else’s privacy to sell ads, or the scammer who collects eyeballs in exchange for cryptocurrency and whose “product” has been banned in multiple countries…

Yeah, there’s no good choice here. You should be rooting for neither. Best case scenario is they destroy each other with as little collateral damage as possible.

raverbashing• 1 year ago

Does any of those OpenAI spinoffs have something to show already or are they still "raising money"

Taek• 1 year ago

It's weird to hear Sam Altman call the employees of OpenAI 'missionaries' based on their intense policies that seem determined to control how people think and act.

Imagine if in 2001 Google had said "I'm sorry, I can't let you search that" if you were looking up information on medical symptoms, or doing searches related to drugs, or searching for porn, or searching for Disney themed artwork.

It's hard for me to see anyone with such a strong totalitarian control over how their technology can be used as a good guy.

philip1209• 1 year ago

The modern iPhone vs. Android battle

HeartStrings• 1 year ago

Look… it’s afraid

zombiwoof2• 1 year ago

When even Scam Altman disliked Zuck we have reached AI bottom

zbyforgotp• 1 year ago

Zuck poaches AI devs and places them under Wang - how does that work? Wang doesn’t make impression of being a brilliant researcher or coder just a great deal maker (to put it diplomatically).

qnleigh• 1 year ago

An observation: most articles with titles of the form "A SLAMS B" put forward a narrow, one-sided view of the issue they report on. Oftentimes they're shallow attempts to stir outrage for clicks. This one is just giving a CEO a platform to promote how awesome he thinks his company is.

All these articles and videos of people "slamming" each other; it doesn't move the needle, and it's not really news.

bux932• 1 year ago

Seems to me that articles with titles in the form "A SLAMS B" take a single negative comment that A made about something associated with B and build a few paragraphs around it as if it were a huge controversy, while in the mean time both A and B already forgot about the issue.

ChuckMcM• 1 year ago

I don't know, maybe all the big AI companies could come to an agreement not to poach each others employees?[1]

It is always surprising to me when billionaire CEOs are complaining that their own employees are min-maxing their earning potential.

[1] https://www.ere.net/articles/tech-firms-settle-case-admit-se...

nwmcsween• 1 year ago

Sam Altman complaining about "unethical" corporate behavior is pure gold

karel-3d• 1 year ago

Why is it still called Meta? Do they still do the Metaverse thing?

alex_young• 1 year ago

It’s kind of rich that he’s complaining about Facebook paying engineers ’too much’, given the history here.

A decade ago Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Adobe all had anti poaching agreements, and Facebook wouldn’t play ball, paid people more, won market share, and caused the salary boom in Silicon Valley.

Now Facebook is paying people too much and we should all feel bad about it?

byyoung3• 1 year ago

then why convert to for-profit?

noufalibrahim• 1 year ago

One variable that I think it missing here is that Meta is profitable whereas OpenAI is not.

eleveriven3• 1 year ago

If Meta is offering better comp and a clean slate with strong leadership, some people are going to take that bet

gilfoyle• 1 year ago

Sam Altman went from "I'm doing this because I love it" to proposing to receive 7% equity in the for-profit entity in a matter of months. Now he calls out researchers leaving for greener pastures as mercenaries while the echo of "OpenAI is nothing without its people" hasn't faded.

gadders• 1 year ago

i.e. "I've already made my generational wealth. How dare my employees try and get some for their own families?"

yaro330• 1 year ago

Poor Sama, let us play a sad song on the smallest violin.

nspattak• 1 year ago

so let me get this straight, do they like free markets or not ?

lanthissa• 1 year ago

there has yet to be a value openAI originally claimed to have that has lasted a second longer than there was profit motive to break it.

they went from open to closed. they went from advocating ubi to for profit. they went from pacific to selling defense tech. they went from a council overseeing the project to a single man in control.

and thats fine, go make all the money you can, but don't try do this sick act where you try to convince people to thank you for acting in your own self interest.

otikik• 1 year ago

"We are missionaries" is the new "We are a family".

thih92• 1 year ago

What I hear is: “The person that profits from employees who don’t prioritize money encourages employees to not prioritize money.”

Unsurprising, unhelpful for anyone other than sama, unhealthy for many.

BoorishBears2• 1 year ago

This concept is not at all tied to trying to depress salaries and goes back decades: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/mercenaries-vs-m...

I don't imagine Sam Altman said this because he thinks it'll somehow save him money on salaries down the line.

rightbyte• 1 year ago

The 2000 article seem to refer to prospect capitalists and Altmam refers to workers.

I don't think the context is the same. In the context of Altman, he wants 'losers'.

jrvarela56• 1 year ago

Says the mercenary...

PostOnce• 1 year ago

Parachute Sam into an island of cannibals, come back in 5 years, and he'll be king. Unless, of course, one of the cannibals is Mark Zuckerberg; then he might just get eaten.

komali24• 1 year ago

If you're getting poached, pay more. If you can't pay more, give away your equity instead. Nobody owes you their labor, especially if you're already a billionaire.

Joel_Mckay• 1 year ago

Startups with unstable revenue models often don't stand a chance against FANG company budgets. Also, high-level talent is rarely fungible with standard institutional training programs, and have options that are more rewarding than a CEOs problems.

Unfortunately, productive research doesn't necessarily improve with increased cash-burn rates. As many international post docs simply refuse to travel into the US these days for "reasons". =3

"The CEO and the Three Envelopes" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38725206 )

bux932• 1 year ago

Wage cuts will continue until morale improves

Festro• 1 year ago

What an odd turn of phrase. Historically speaking, mercenaries have absolutely slaughtered missionaries in every confrontation.

If missionaries could be mercenaries, they would.

antupis• 1 year ago

The term comes from John Doerr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6iwEYmbCwk . But Altman kicked most missionaries out during corporate turmoil in 2023, so not sure where this comes from.

tim3333• 1 year ago

From that by the way

...one hand The Mercenaries they have enormous Drive they're opportunistic like Andy Grove they believe only the paranoids survive they're really sprinting for the short run but that's quite different I suggest to you than the missionaries who have passion not paranoia who are strategic not opportunistic and they're focused on the big idea in partnerships. It's the difference between focusing on the the competition or the customer.

It's a difference between worshiping at the altar of Founders or having a meritocracy where you get all the ideas on the table and the best ones win it's a difference between being exclusively interested in the financial statements or also in the mission statements it's a difference between being a loner on your own or being part of a team having an attitude of entitlement versus contribution or uh as Randy puts it living a deferred Life Plan versus a whole life that at any given moment is trying to work difference between just making money anybody tells you they don't want to make money is lying or making money and making meaning Al also or my bottom line is it's the difference between success or success and significance.

epolanski2• 1 year ago

Also, OpenAI ain't missionaries, it's a for profit company full of people working there for a fat paycheck and equity.

revskill• 1 year ago

Both are orthogonal concepts.

megablast• 1 year ago

Except we have a lot more missionaries than mercenaries now. Right? So who won?

a_c• 1 year ago

Missionary as founder, mercenary as employee, everyone happy

avidphantasm• 1 year ago

And both missionaries and mercenaries are responsible for the abuse and obliteration of many millions. Neither are forces for good.

conartist63• 1 year ago

The force has a light side and a dark side. Apparently Switzerland is so famously neutral because their national export was mercenaries. You can't take sides in wars of you want to sell soldiers to both sides...

But also I imagine that it helps when you wish to stay neutral if people are afraid of what you could do if you were directly involved in a conflict.

nashashmi3• 1 year ago

Mercenaries get paid to follow orders and kill. Missionaries are more independent. That is the sell point to the OpenAI worker.

conartist63• 1 year ago

Yeah apparently being well fed and paid and extensive lly prepared helped? It's like these mercenaries were actually what you would call "professionals"

sksrbWgbfK• 1 year ago

The Knights Templar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_Templar) were kinda both, but modern AI is more mercenary in order to grab all the profits and become a monopoly nowadays.

zurfer• 1 year ago

Everybody talks about what this does to OpenAI, but I do wonder how this shakes out for Meta.

If the person next to you gets paid 20x more than you, you might be a bit unhappy when they are not 20x more helpful.

yard20102• 1 year ago

Pay up mofo, or shut up.

keeeba• 1 year ago

Just checking my notes here.

This is the same Sam Altman who abandoned OpenAI’s founding mission in favour of profit?

No it can’t be

cies• 1 year ago

Or the one who's sister filed a suit against him for sexual abuse?

"missionary" pfff...

conartist63• 1 year ago

Yeah I can't help but think he is starting to more closely fit the definition for mercenary.

For example, I'm on a mission to build a better code editor for the world. That's cost me 4 years of my life and several hundred thousand dollars.

He wanted one, so he bought it for 3 billion. I think he's doomed to fail there for pretty much the exact reasons he states here...

achrono• 1 year ago

The word "beat" and "mercenaries" are also quite important here -- to me, this is Altman's way of saying "you losers who left OpenAI, you will pay a steep price, because we will mess with you really deeply". The threat to Meta is just a natural consequence of that, to the extent that Meta clings onto said individuals.

p1dda• 1 year ago

'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

And hypocrites will never stop whining

yieldcrv• 1 year ago

If you aren’t accepting the highest bid then you are contributing to your gender’s wage gap in the wrong direction.

And before you make your rebuttal, if you wouldn’t accept $30,000 equivalent for your same tech job in Poland or whatever developed nation pays that low, then you have no rebuttal at all.

forgetcolor• 1 year ago

Amazing the distinction Sam sees between himself and Zuck while most see no distinction at all.

noisy_boy3• 1 year ago

That means he is moaning because Meta is able to inflict sufficient pain for him to feel it. Seems Meta is pretty serious about it.

Job market forces working as they should.

basisword• 1 year ago

I think it's more that he's reinforcing the 'mission' and defining the good guys/bad guys so that he doesn't lose more employees to Meta.

noisy_boy3• 1 year ago

Could be but how many of the people in OpenAI still believe in that 'mission' thing after all the drama he has been involved in for so long?

charlescearl• 1 year ago

“I am proud of how mission-oriented our industry is as a whole; of course there will always be some mercenaries.”

In the context of the decisions of largely East Asia born technical staff, can’t help but reflect on the role of actual western missionaries and mercenaries in East Asia over the last 100+ years & also the DeepSeek targeted sinophobia.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Boxer-Rebellion

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_missions_in_China

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Beleaguer

https://monthlyreview.org/2025/02/01/imperialism-and-white-s...

d4rkn0d3z• 1 year ago

There is a fairly strong scientific/historical argument that suggests neither mercenaries nor missionaries have had made any significant contribution to the outcome of any important human conflict or endeavour. Rather microscopic life is in control, and we are keen to rationalize the outcomes into stories of human heroes and villians.

Therefore, wish for the army with the best immune system.

In other words, we should probably be asking what viral/bacterial content is transferred in these employee trades and who mates with who. This information is probaly as important to the outcome as the notions of "AGI" swirling around.

rayiner• 1 year ago

Danger Will Robinson. Antitrust law exists again.

basfo• 1 year ago

It always makes me laugh this millionaire rhetoric about “THE MISSION.” I once had a CEO who suddenly wanted us to be on call 24/7, every other week. His argument? Commitment. The importance of "the mission". Becoming a market leader, and so on.

As AlbertaTech says, “we make sparkling water.” I mean, what’s the mission? A can of sparkling water on every table? Spreading the joy of carbonated water to the world? No. You sell sparkling water because you want to make a profit. That kind of speech is just a way to hide the fact that you're trying to cut three full-time positions and make your employees work off-hours to increase margins. Or, like in this case, pay them less than the competition with the same objective.

Sam Altman might actually have a mission, turning us all into robot slaves, but that’s a whole different conversation.

qwertox2• 1 year ago

Sam Altman is not a bit different than Mark Zuckerberg. His mission is to make money and get as much information to process about individuals, to be used for his benefit, all the rest is just blah blah.

d--b• 1 year ago

I think half of him truly believes that his work ultimately will benefit humanity as a whole and half of him is a cynical bastard like the rest of them.

Ultimately, he’ll just realize that humanity doesn’t give a fuck, and that he’s in it for himself only.

And the typical butterfly-to-caterpillar transition will be complete.

doctorwho42• 1 year ago

Well a lot of AI bros think that AI can generate novel solutions to all of the world's problems, they just need more data and processing power. I.E. the AI God (all knowing), which when you take a step back is utter lunacy. How can LLM's generate solutions to climate change if it's a predictive model.

All of this to say, they delude themselves that the future of humanity needs "AI" or we are doomed. Ironically, the creation and expansion of LLM's drastically increased the power usage of humanity to its own detriment.

taco_emoji• 1 year ago

We have essentially zero reason to believe he cares about any benefit to humanity at all.

blitzar4• 1 year ago

I too truly believe that if you make me the richest person in the world, at the expense of all other people, it will be a benefit to humanity.

scyzoryk_xyz2• 1 year ago

It'll be a sad type of fun watching him become another disgusting and disconnected bazillionaire. Remember when Mark was a Honda Fit driving Palo Alto based founder focused on 'connecting people' and building a not yet profitable 'social network' to change the world?

This is a repeat of the fight for talent that always happens with these things. It's all mercenary - it's all just business. Otherwise they'd remain an NGO.

I can't help but think that it would have been a much better move for him to get fired from OpenAI. Allow that to do it's own thing and start other ventures with a clean reputation, and millions instead of billions in the bank.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

Remember when Mark was a Honda Fit driving Palo Alto based founder focused on 'connecting people'…?

That Mark must have come after the Mark that created a site in college where the visitor compared two women and ranked which of the two were "hotter".

defraudbah• 1 year ago

Millionaires will beat missionaries, that's how zuck sees it and I cannot say he's wrong

cue_the_strings• 1 year ago

When you hear him saying it, it's funny.

When you hear this reiterated by employees, who actually believe it, then it's sad. Obviously not in this situation, but I've actually heard this from people. Some of them were even pros. "There is no fool like an educated fool."

a4isms2• 1 year ago

Vocational Awe and the Lies We Tell Ourselves (2018):

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-...

HN Discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24602956

This has always applied to tech workers.

getpokedagain• 1 year ago

This is one of the most fascinating things I've found in the past ten or so years. When did people in general begin to buy into the bullshit spewed by big shots in corporate or really any commercial venture. People at least implicitly understood that the boss just wanted money and would fuck you, nature or his own firmly held beliefs to get it.

People are now shocked when a company cuts a loved product or their boss fires them when someone cheaper comes along.

swat535• 1 year ago

Since when the employees believed it?

Anyone who has worked at OpenAI or is currently working there has lost all credibility in my eyes. When their dear leader, Sam was "fired", they staged a coup to save their paychecks.

These people are just out there to may a buck and scam people with "AGI" and now that there is plenty of competition and superior models, I'm hearing crickets from them.

All they had going for them was first to market and they managed to damage the brand, lose their top talent, deliver a subpar product and convert a nonprofit into for profit.

bilsbie• 1 year ago

Dumb question. If they’re willing to pay so much for AI talent. Why won’t companies hire experienced software engineers willing to learn AI on the job? Seems like there should be a big market for that.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

Perhaps it takes too long. The talent they do have would have to split their duties in order to train the incoming engineers.... Just a guess.

bluGill• 1 year ago

Don't those have phd's? They are the smartest with background that would take a while to learn.

you are on the right, but only for companies investing for the long term

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

I think there isn't a shortage but it let's you get the best now. The very best. Born genius plus didn't cruise, worked hard too, kind of best.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

Meta just wants to have a story for its stock price to go up.

It is definitely worth spending a couple hundred million to make your stock price go up tens of billions for several months.

Presumably not all of that hundreds of millions in investment will be waste, too.

Meta knows they have close to a 0% chance of overtaking ChatGPT or Gemini.

runeblaze2• 1 year ago

there kind of is, but also note we are talking about the exceptional talent here. I don’t think Meta is mass poaching the pure engineer types at OpenAI either

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

They are: https://openai.com/residency/

However, skilling people up on specialized skill sets in a reasonable time frame requires having people around to teach them. And those people need to know not just the skills, but how to teach them well. And it takes time away from those people doing the job, so that approach will slow development in the short run.

But the companies are trying.

yeyeyeyeyeyeyee• 1 year ago

I don't even know what that's supposed to mean.

megaloblasto• 1 year ago

I can't stand missionaries.

elif• 1 year ago

I've seen paying people too much completely erode the core of teams. It's really hard to convince yourself to work 60 hour weeks when you have generational FU$ and a family you love.

michaelanckaert• 1 year ago

Is working than 60 hours a week necessary to have a good team? Sure, having FU$ as you put it removes the necessity to keep the scale of your work life balance tipped to the benefit if your employer. But again, a good work life balance should not imply erosion the team.

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

I'd say it would be easier to do 60 hours when you can afford servants to take care of the rest of life.

nilkn6• 1 year ago

There's limited or no evidence of this in other domains where astonishing pay packages are used to assemble the best teams in the world (e.g., sports).

sorcerer-mar5• 1 year ago

Sports have a much, much tighter feedback loop on performance than anything in software, and certainly tighter than R&D.

Same with a lot of the financial roles with comp distributions like this.

dbspin• 1 year ago

There's vast social honour and commensurate status attached to activities like bing a sports / movie star. Status that can easily be lost, and cannot be purchased for almost any amount of money. Arguably that status is a greater motivator than the financial reward - ie.: see the South Korean idol system. It's certainly not going to be diminished as a motivator by financial reward. There's no equivalent for AI researchers. At best the very best may win the acclaim of their peers and a Nobel prize. It's not a remotely equivalent level of celebrity / access to all the treasures the world can provide.

sebastos• 1 year ago

Take-one-for-the-team salaries trump there too. Tom Brady and the Patriots dynasty say hi.

dmoy3• 1 year ago

Man I disagree with this on multiple points:

I wouldn't describe a team full of people who don't want to work 60 hour weeks as "eroded", cus like... That's 6x 10 hour days leaving incredibly little time for family, chores, unwinding, etc. Once in awhile maybe, but sustained that'll just burn people out.

And also by that logic, is every executive paid $5M+/yr in every company, or every person who's accumulated say $20M, also eroding their team? Or is that only applied to someone who isn't managing people, for some reason?

azan_• 1 year ago

There are people that are capable of working 60+/week long term without burnout, they are very rare but do exist (I know like two or three).

gosub1003• 1 year ago

That's why CEO pay is so low. They take the honor in leadership and across the board just take a menial compensation package. Why work hard , 60 hrs a week even, if you get paid FU$? This is why boards limit comp packages so aggressively.

driverdan• 1 year ago

It's really hard to convince yourself to work 60 hour weeks

Why would they do that? There is absolutely no reason to overwork.

RogerL• 1 year ago

really hard to convince yourself to work 60 hour weeks

Good!

inerte2• 1 year ago

I was ready to downvote you giving examples how +$100m net worth individuals are probably the hardest workers (or were, to get there) just like most of the people replying to you, but your `and a family you love` tripped me. I sorta agree... if you want be maximize time with family and you have FU$, would you really really work that hard?

I am not saying exactly they don't love their family... but it's not necessarily a priority over glory, more money, or being competitive. And if the relationship is healthy and built on solid foundations usually the partner knows what they're getting into and accept the other person (children on the other hand had no choice).

It's a weird take to tie this up with team morale, tough.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

Working more than 50 hours a week is counter-productive, and even working 50 hours a week isn't consistently more productive than working 40 hours a week.

It is very easy to mistake _feeling_ productive and close with your coworkers for _being_ productive. That's why we can't rely on our feelings to judge productivity.

mikkom• 1 year ago

Says a guy who is poaching openAI

akkad33• 1 year ago

Why the bible lingo?

octocop• 1 year ago

I don't think it's strange because it feels like Meta is trying to do what OpenAI originally set out to do with making AI accessible to everyone.

tom_m3• 1 year ago

What drama. Hype it up. Make the bubble bigger.

If Sam Altman is upset, he should look in the mirror for making his people work so many hours. They didn't leave because of the pay.

ActionHank• 1 year ago

Every single one of these companies are like IBM selling servers, we're all waiting for the home computer, that's when things will really take off.

softwaredoug2• 1 year ago

Mercenaries over missionaries.

Many employers want employees to act like cult members. But then when going gets tough, those are often the first laid off, and the least prepared for it.

Employers, you can't have it both ways. As an employee don't get fooled.

neves3• 1 year ago

We are not a company, we are a family

softwaredoug2• 1 year ago

These CEOs will be the first to say "we are a team, not a family" when they do layoffs.

kayodelycaon• 1 year ago

Ferengi Rules of Acquisition:

#6: Never allow family to stand in the way of opportunity.

#111: Treat people in your debt like family… exploit them.

#211: Employees are the rungs on the ladder of success. Don't hesitate to step on them.

meepmorp• 1 year ago

Well, we're a family, but you're still being disowned at layoff time

sailfast• 1 year ago

1000x this. You should ideally feel like you’re part of a great group of folks and doing good work - but this is not a guarantee of anything at all.

When it comes down to it, you’re expendable when your leadership is backed into a corner.

ryeguy_24• 1 year ago

100% agree. There is no reason for employees to be loyal to a company. LLM building is not some religious work. It’s machine learning on big data. Always do what is best for you because companies don’t act like loyal humans, they act like large organizations that aren’t always fair or rationale or logical in their decisions.

saubeidl10• 1 year ago

LLM building is not some religious work.

To a lot of tech leadership, it is. The belief in AGI as a savior figure is a driving motivator. Just listen to how Altman, Thiel or Musk talk about it.

neves3• 1 year ago

But at least consider the impact on society of your job. A lot of these big companies are nocive and addictive and are destroying our society fabric.

quijoteuniv• 1 year ago

Only be loyal to doing work :)

asoneth• 1 year ago

Employers, you can't have it both ways.

Exactly. Though you can learn a lot about an employer by how it has conducted layoffs. Did they cut profits and management salaries and attempt to reassign people first? Did they provide generous payouts to laid off employees?

If the answer to any of these questions is no then they're not worth committing to.

stevenAthompson• 1 year ago

A Ronin is just a Samurai who has learned his lesson.

ramoz• 1 year ago

Missionaries https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zt7BPxHqbkU

bko• 1 year ago

I think there's more to work than just taking home a salary. Not equally true among all professions and times in your life. But most jobs I took were for less money with questionable upside. I just wanted to work on something else or with different people.

The best thing about work is the focus on whatever you're doing. Maybe you're not saving the world but it's great to go in to have one goal that everyone goes towards. And you get excited when you see your contributions make a difference or you build great product. You can laugh and say I was part of a 'cult', but it sure beats working a misearble job for just a slightly higher paycheck.

anshumankmr3• 1 year ago

Only place you can say if you are an employee and a missionary is well if you are a missionary or working in a charity/ NGO etc trying to help people/animals etc.

The rest of us are mercenaries only.

ysofunny• 1 year ago

or if you own the company

foobiekr3• 1 year ago

During the first ever layoff at $company in 2001, part of the dotcom implosion, one of my coworkers who got whacked complained that it didn’t make sense as he was one of the companies biggest boosters and believers.

It was supremely interesting to me that he thought the company cared about that at all. I couldn’t get my head around it. He was completely serious, he kept arguing that his loyalty was an asset. He was much more experienced than me (I was barely two years working).

In hindsight, I think it is true that companies value that in a way. I’ve come to appreciate people who just stick it out for awhile. I try and make sure their comp makes it worth their while. They are so much less annoying to deal with than the assholes who constantly bitch or moan about doing what they’re paid for.

But as a personal strategy, it’s a poor one. You should never love or be loyal to something that can’t love you back.

citizenpaul• 1 year ago

The one and ONLY way I've ever seen "company" loyalty rewarded in any way is if you have a DIRECT relationship with a top level senior manager (C-suite). They will specifically protect you if they truly believe you are on "their side" and you are at their beck and call.

serial_dev• 1 year ago

Companies appreciate loyalty… as long as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. The moment you ask for more money or they need to reduce the workforce, all of that goes out the window.

yibg• 1 year ago

I think loyalty has value to the company but not as much as people think. To simplify it, multiple things contribute to "value" and loyalty is just a small part of it.

m3kw9• 1 year ago

That’s because you don’t believe/realize in the mission of the product and its impact to society. When if work at Microsoft, you are just working to make MS money as they are like a giant machine.

That said it seems like every worker can be replaced. Lost stars replaced by new stars

Henchman21• 1 year ago

They sure can have it both ways. They do now.

tracker1• 1 year ago

Especially for an organization like OpenAI that completely twisted its original message in favor of commercialization. The entire missionary bit is BS trying to get people to stay out of a sense of what exactly?

I'm all for having loyalty to people and organizations that show the same. Eventually it can and will shift. I've seen management changed out from over me more times than I can count at this point. Don't get caught off guard.

It's even worse in the current dev/tech job market where wages are being pushed down around 2010 levels. I've been working two jobs just to keep up with expenses since I've been unable to match my more recent prior income. One ended recently, and looking for a new second job.

HellDunkel• 1 year ago

No. The cult members are less likely to be laid off. Simply because they don‘t stand out and provide less surface for attack.

jstop107• 1 year ago

This was an important argument in the book The Network State. Corporate politics is the small game right now. Sam is trying to build a Global network state

techterrier• 1 year ago

People taking my money in exchange for doing a thing - Missionaries People taking someone else's money in exchange for doing a thing - Mercenaries

got it

pizzafeelsright2• 1 year ago

Missionaries are sent, called by faith.

Mercs don't take money, they earn it.

Why not be both?

moonshadow565• 1 year ago

Holy order

tempodox• 1 year ago

Please, spare me that hypocritical holier-than-thou crap. Who would fall for that?

iamleppert• 1 year ago

Sam needs to pony up and reach into that purse of his if he wants to keep his few remaining staff.

hearsathought• 1 year ago

Mercenaries are just missionaries with better funding. Altman needs more capital to compete.

kylecordes• 1 year ago

That's the kind of thing you say when you don't want to pay the market price.

throwaway31131• 1 year ago

What goes around comes around...

From March of this year,

"As we know, big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been engaged in a fierce battle for the best tech talent, but OpenAI is now the one to watch. They have been on a poaching spree, attracting top talent from Google and other industry leaders to build their incredible team of employees and leaders."

https://www.leadgenius.com/resources/how-openai-poached-top-...

not2b• 1 year ago

We shouldn't use the word "poaching" in this way. Poaching is the illegal hunting of protected wildlife. Employees are not the property of their employers, and they are free to accept a better offer. And perhaps companies need to revisit their compensation practices, which often mean that the only way for an employee to get a significant raise is to change companies.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

Indeed! It would be illegal _not_ to poach employees: https://www.goodspeedmerrill.com/blog/2023/12/what-is-a-no-p...

tehjoker• 1 year ago

this shit sounds so fake it makes me want to die. all these capitalist perverts pretending that they believe in anything at all is completely preposterous and is at odds with capitalism. you’re all mercenaries and criminals Sam.

WaltPurvis• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure Sam Altman's only mission in life is to be as personally wealthy as Mark Zuckerberg. Is that mission really supposed to inspire undying loyalty and insane workloads from OpenAI staffers?

inerte2• 1 year ago

Yes, if wealth is also what they want, and they believe the crumbs trickling down will be big enough.

jme789• 1 year ago

You realize he takes a <$100k salary and doesn't own any equity in OpenAI right?

thepasswordis• 1 year ago

Remember: we’re all in this together!

Is there a single person that takes what Sam is saying here seriously?

ndgold• 1 year ago

Actually, I think that people who do it for the love of the game are the true winners here, whether they work for a company or not. You can't beat intrinsic motivation.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

Intrinsic motivation + a seven figure paycheck seems strictly better than intrinsic motivation alone

Hoasi2• 1 year ago

Competition is good, right? Open source the models! Open source the employees, too. Why not? Enough with Sam's whining.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

It's the same way billionaires argue for free trade, until it comes to immigration. As soon as it might help people who work for a living, suddenly none of their principles apply.

lawlessone• 1 year ago

Why doesn't Sam try hire more juniors and train them up?

FrustratedMonky2• 1 year ago

By 2025, haven't all employees learned to see through this? Just like the "we're all family" tropes. It's all just attempts at brains washing employees into working longer hours, because of the 'purpose'. But they wont benefit, they can be let go anytime.

JoshTko• 1 year ago

"ChatGPT can you give me a catchy phrase I can use to sway the public discourse against Meta that puts OpenAI in the most favorable light? Also sprinkle in some alliteration if you could"

fudgy73• 1 year ago

I don't think I've ever seen someone use two semicolons in one sentence.

blotfaba• 1 year ago

In a for-profit system, literally everybody is a mercenary. Thoughts, prayers, and vibes don't put food on my table or pay my bills and compute expenses.

roguecoder13• 1 year ago

It is hilarious how much capitalists hate capitalism as soon as it benefits workers.

isx726552• 1 year ago

“Poaching”? It’s called the free market.

Capitalists always hate capitalism when it comes to employees getting paid what they are worth. If the market will bear it, he should embrace it and stop whining.

jasonm23• 1 year ago

Sam Altman... missionary... I see, that's how the most manipulative person in AI ... oh damn.

- - -

We're faced with a future defining moment, in the hands of emotional infants.... "God" or "the collective actions of humanity" ... save us.

gmerc• 1 year ago

He's just talking to his cult.

tuannx• 1 year ago

Meta AI Talent Jiahui Yu: $100M signing bonus, $10M+/year. Alexandr Wang: $100M+ bonus, salary undisclosed. Senior AI Talent: $18M–$100M bonus, $2M–$10M/year. Strategy: Huge bonuses to poach from OpenAI, Google.

Real Madrid Transfers Cristiano Ronaldo: $80M transfer (2009), $15M/year. Gareth Bale: $120M transfer (2013), $17M/year. Kylian Mbappé: $115M bonus (2024), $36M/year. Strategy: Big fees and wages for “Galacticos” to dominate.

Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'

Related Stories