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By far the largest move of labour solidarity from Silicon Valley coders ever, 700+/770 OpenAI employees sign letter to the Board threatening to quit unless they re-instate the fired CEO and President

Hundreds of OpenAI staff threaten to go to Microsoft if board doesn’t quit

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/openai-employees-revolt-after-board-names-new-ceo-and-altman-heads-to-microsoft/

Hundreds of OpenAI employees have threatened to resign and follow ousted leader Sam Altman to Microsoft unless the current board resigns.

Hundreds of OpenAI staff threaten to go to Microsoft if board doesn’t quit

THE TWO ALREADY GOT RE-HIRED BY MICROSOFT FOR MILLIONS AND ARE WEALTHY BEYOND ANYBODY'S DREAMS

44 comments

Rojo27

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Mass layoffs in tech industry, I sleep.

Shareholders don't want the old CEO back, real shit.

Cult of personality if I've ever seen it. This is so fucked up.

davel

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It’s funny because it’s a clash between the Altman personality cult and the ~~much larger and~~ actually insane Eliezer Yudkowsky/LessWrong “rationality” cult.

Edit: I don’t actually know which is the larger cult so I crossed that out.

Rojo27

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kombucha-disgust

davel

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More context: Pivot to AI: Replacing Sam Altman with a very small shell script

ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider

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Tech workers and fully lacking proletarian consciousness. Name a more iconic duo.

pinguinu

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The epitome of labor aristocracy, no surprises there...

culpritus

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Samuel Harris Altman

Is this guy just Sam Harris from another timeline?

Altman was the CEO of Reddit for eight days in 2014

lmao wat?

Altman co-founded Tools For Humanity in 2019, a company building a global iris-based biometric system using cryptocurrency, called Worldcoin. [...] Using a distribution mechanism for its cryptocurrency similar to UBI, Worldcoin attempts to incentivize users to join its network by getting their iris scanned using Worldcoin's orb-shaped iris scanner.

In 2019, Altman held a fundraiser at his house in San Francisco for 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang.

After the success of ChatGPT, Altman made a world tour in May 2023 where he visited 22 countries and met multiple leaders and diplomats, including British prime minister Rishi Sunak, French president Emmanuel Macron, Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez, German chancellor Olaf Scholz, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol, and Israeli president Isaac Herzog. He stood for a photo with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.

dead-dove-3

The government of Indonesia issued the country's first "golden visa", a 10-year border pass, to Altman in September 2023.

This guy is the next Elon I guess. Seems he's quite cozy with the 'global rules-based order' minders.

GrouchyGrouse

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Samuel Harris Altman is the "alt man" of Sam Harris so yes to your first question.

ChaosMaterialist

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He's heavily involved with the venture capital scene, especially ycombinator, which is why he has the keys to just about every Silicon Valley company.

LeninsWorldTour

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By far the largest move of labour solidarity from Silicon Valley coders, 700+/770 OpenAI employees sign a letter to the Board threatening to quit

dean-smile

unless they re-instate the fired CEO and President

dean-frown

OprahsedCreature

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"650 knights leave their kingdom to support their defecting lord" or a "shiny new version of 47 Ronin."

Jesus Christ we've sunk back into feudalism

Tachanka

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I think Varoufakis rants about this a lot

OprahsedCreature

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It's depressing enough for me to think about. Poor Yanis, thinking about it long enough to write a book about it

DefinitelyNotAPhone

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Anyone who's spent more than twenty minutes in corporate America knows it was feudalism all along. Half my job is just keeping a handful of senior managers vaguely happy lest their endless infighting spillover into my life like a bunch of feuding lords burning down a peasant's farm for being in the way of their glorious battlefield.

CTHlurker

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In general, large corporations tend to make a lot more sense if you think about them like feudal europe. There are so many decisions from management and above that literally don't make sense in a capitalist framework that you have to go further back to understand how those knuckledraggers think.

ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider

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Stand up for your employers, folks. They need the private jets more than you do.

Tankiedesantski

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Throwing the Silicon Valley unions in the same bin as cop unions.

JohnBrownsBussy2

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As I pointed out in my thread, this is a bit moot. Altman and Brockman aren't likely to come back. Rather, this move just allows Microsoft to acquire basically everything of value at OpenAI without buying out the company. Microsoft has the hardware, has rights to use OpenAI's technology, and now will have all of its talent. OpenAI will be left with the just its debt.

jackmarxist

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Doesn't Microsoft own 49% of the company?

JohnBrownsBussy2

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Yes, but this lets them get 100% of OpenAI's real assets for that minority stake. It also lets them avoid the anti-trust issues of getting a merger approved (assuming the board would approve a sale which is unlikely given its ideological bent.)

GaveUp

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@UlyssesT@hexbear.net

Tachanka

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leave him alone, this post will give him a stroke lmfao

GaveUp

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No I need another SV techie to feel this soul crushing pain with me

CannotSleep420

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I knew Ulysses lived near SV, but I've never seen him say he's a techie. I thought he was a school teacher.

UlyssesT

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Not a techie, but went to class and roomed with techies. All of the exposure, none of the perks agony-shivering

GaveUp

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Working is another hellhole level of exposure be glad you never experienced that at least

UlyssesT

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The scary part is the handful of computer touchers I maintained contact with after they got whisked away into surveillance or even military-industrial empires present themselves as superficially happy about their work. Not just on LinkedIn; they sort of present themselves like a LinkedIn account. bootlicker

For those reading that don't know what that is like, just imagine a typical HackerNews community circlejerk but lived and spoken. agony-4horsemen

GaveUp

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They probably are truly happy working on that dumb ass empire 1984 nerd shit

I'm so fucking jealous of them all

Tachanka

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misery dooby loving company

SexUnderSocialism

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popcorn-time

UlyssesT

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rust-darkness

plinky

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He is the messiah

Sutskever annoyed at Altman pushing to launch GPTs when Sutskever is concerned about a future when autonomous AI may become potentially dangerous.

edge

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But they don't even make autonomous AI?

invalidusernamelol

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Yeah, but they're obsessed with sci-fi stuff and don't really understand their product. They're worshiping a pantasm because their effective altruism cult would require them to like stop global warming if they didn't fully believe that a spreadsheet could turn people into paperclips.

And stopping global warming means no more treats.

Philosoraptor

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Solidarity with their libertarian-alert CEO.

marx-doomer

Bloobish

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libertarian-approaching just libertarians protecting one of their own

combat_brandonism

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Google, the ONLY highly paid tech company with a union has LITERALLY 400/180,000 employees unionized but OpenAI can get 85% OF THE EMPLOYEES TO FIGHT FOR THEIR HIGHEST OVERLORDS???

Part of this is your average craven tech worker. But I don't think that's all of it. Maybe not even half.

The other part of this is that you can't organize workers to build shop floor power in the open, with the tools built for organization and used by the workers. Like even for the few non-bullshit jobs employed in tech, easily over 50% of the worker's time is spent doing organization. On slack, in jira, over email, etc. etc. etc. Building worker power would be trivial if you could harness those tools and time to organize the workers to act collectively against management. But you get fired or otherwise retaliated against if management even catches a whiff that you might have aspirations at any amount of worker control (I've seen it). Whereas the board only manages the company through the C-level, so Altman himself or one of his lackeys easily could've fomented this direct action with those tools, with no fear of reprisal.

GaveUp

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I know a few Google union workers that have openly advertised the union in group chats of thousands of people after every layoff + benefits cut and have the AWU logo in their profile picture that gets prominently seen on every software they use

My friend has also talked shit about Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google founders + 51% voting share owners) to try and stop the worship of them on these same group chats

None of them ever got talked to by HR

combat_brandonism

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huh, fair enough. I've only ever organized in smaller shops (200-30k fte) and I've seen people retaliated against for merely asking if the company would voluntarily recognize, or if there could be a c-level position held by a worker rep

shows what management thinks of the threat posed by the AWU tbh.

if I'm understanding what you mean by group chats, part of that goes to my point tho--they're doing this in group chats or on blind or whatever, not using the tools & time dedicated to organizing by the company itself.

GaveUp

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they're doing this in group chats or on blind or whatever

This is through the company Google chat instance in community group chats that the union thinks is best reachable like all the new grad groups, trans groups, black groups, etc.

darkmode

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it's news like this rolling in constantly lately that vindicates my decision to quit being a corporate software developer forever even though it's left me without that sweet blood-soaked paycheck. Fuck these people, quit your job.

isame

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Without doxing, what do you do now? Where'd you take those skills?

darkmode

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Honestly you have to be in either a privileged or rock-bottom depressed state in order to make that kind of decision. It took me years to figure out where to take the skills and even what I wanted to do with myself.

I work part time and I make music now. I don’t have solid career advice I’m just some douche who threw a dart at a college major 10 years ago and have the type of personality to grit my teeth through work I don’t like.

So I guess my short answer is take those skills and apply them to goals that serve you beyond a paycheck, if you can.