A brief overview of recent OpenAI departures (Ilya Sutskever, Jan Leike, Daniel Kokotajlo, Leopold Aschenbrenner, Pavel Izmailov, William Saunders, Ryan Lowe Cullen O'Keefe[1]). Will add other relevant media pieces below as I come across them.
Some quotes perhaps worth highlighting:
Even when the team was functioning at full capacity, that “dedicated investment” was home to a tiny fraction of OpenAI’s researchers and was promised only 20 percent of its computing power — perhaps the most important resource at an AI company. Now, that computing power may be siphoned off to other OpenAI teams, and it’s unclear if there’ll be much focus on avoiding catastrophic risk from future AI models.
-Jan suggesting that compute for safety may have been deprioritised even despite the 20% commitment. (Wired claims that OpenAI confirms that their "superalignment team is no more").
“I joined with substantial hope that OpenAI would rise to the occasion and behave more responsibly as they got closer to achieving AGI. It slowly became clear to many of us that this would not happen,” Kokotajlo told me. “I gradually lost trust in OpenAI leadership and their ability to responsibly handle AGI, so I quit."
(Additional kudos to Daniel for not signing additional confidentiality obligations on departure, which is plausibly relevant for Jan too given his recent thread. Cullen also notes that he is "not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI").
Edit:
-Shakeel's article on the same topic.
-Kelsey's article about the nondisclosure/nondisparagement provisions that OpenAI employees have been offered. She also reports OpenAI saying that they *won't* strip anyone of their equity for not signing the secret NDA going forward.
-Sam Altman responds to the backlash around equity here, claiming to not know about this and being open to "fixing" things, though given Sam's claims around genuine embarrassment, not clawing back vested equity / never doing it for people who do not sign a separation agreement / in the process of fixing it, it does seem like asking ex-employees to email him individually if they're worried about their nondisparagement agreement is not the most ideal way of fixing this.
-Wired claims that OpenAI confirms that their "superalignment team is no more".
-Cullen O'Keefe notes that he is "not under any non-disparagement obligations to OpenAI".
- ^
Last two names covered by Shakeel/Wired, but thought it'd be clearer to list all names together
According to Kelsey's article, OpenAI employees are coerced into signing lifelong nondisparagement agreements, which also forbid discussion of the nondisparagement agreements themselves, under threat of losing all of their equity.
This is intensely contrary to the public interest, and possibly illegal. Enormous kudos for bringing it to light.
In a legal dispute initiated by an OpenAI employee, the most important thing would probably be what representations were previously made about the equity. That's hard for me to evaluate, but if it's true that they were presented as compensation and the nondisparagement wasn't disclosed, then rescinding those benefits could be a breach of contract. However, I'm not sure if this would apply if this was threatened but the threat wasn't actually executed.
CA GOV § 12964.5 and 372 NLRB No. 58 also offer some angles by which former OpenAI employees might fight this in court.
CA GOV § 12964.5 talks specifically about disclosure of "conduct that you have reason to believe is unlawful." Generically criticizing OpenAI as pursuing unsafe research would not qualify unless (the speaker believes) it rises to the level of criminal endangerment, or similar. Copyright issues would *probably* qualify. Workplace harrassment would definitely qualify.
(No OpenAI employees have alleged any of these things publicly, to my knowledge)
372 NLRB No. 58 nominally invalidates separation agreements that contain nondisparagement clauses, and that restrict discussion of the terms of the separation agreement itself. However, it's specifically focused on the effect on collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act, which could make it inapplicable.