Man, Microsoft really is just smelling the blood in the water and going on the attack.
I'm wondering if they're aiming to bankrupt OpenAI and rob their talent, then buy the assets they've created for pennies on the dollar instead of spending half a billion training their own GPT4
I would absolutely believe it, makes a lot of sense.
Call me crazy, but I think Altman provoked the OpenAI non-profit board deliberately so that they would fire him and thus be cut free without legal penalty of that board's non-profit limitations -- along with whatever other contractual obligations he owed OpenAI (if any) -- and be able to go straight to Microsoft, followed by whoever wanted to come along with him.
No more binding contractual obligations, no more "non-profit" limitations, the sky is now the only limit to personal and professional profit, and Altman can work directly for OpenAI's biggest investor. Meanwhile that investor also gets to swallow all the good parts of OpenAI whole, without much more investment than it has already made, certainly not the full selling price OpenAI would command on the free market if it were for sale.
Win/win/win all around for everyone -- except the OpenAI non-profit board and its stated goals.
The entire thing seems so perfectly engineered, including Altman taking it to Twitter as soon as the board fired him, and playing the rest of it out in the public eye, with Microsoft becoming his employer less than 48 hours later, that it's hard to see it as anything else.
Even Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) was chiming in on Twitter through the weekend and before Altman was "officially" hired, which is rather odd to me -- unless he already had inside knowledge that Altman's post-directorate legal position with OpenAI would not be threatened by it.
I expect more information will be coming out in the next few weeks that will clear it up one way or another, but today I don't believe for two seconds that any of this was a surprise to either Altman or Microsoft.
ChatGPT has been down or intermittent all day. I'm interested in what happens with those model weights and structures.
This is very Star Wars-y. Join the new Empire!
Hiring someone that OpenAI chose to fire is pretty clearly fair play, but how does this declaration not directly run afoul of anti-poaching laws?
(Disclaimer: not a lawyer)
Anti-poaching laws?
IIUC companies in the US can poach all they want. Non-poach agreements are not enforceable, I think.
It would be pretty anticompetitive to allow non-poach agreements, considering that the US uses at-will employment. If a competitor wants to make an offer to your employees, your employees should be free to accept that offer. At-will employment is a two-way street.
It’s the reverse. Companies get in trouble for agreeing to not poach employees from each other.
What anti-poaching laws? At most this would violate non-compete clauses that may exist, but those generally aren't enforceable anyways.
Most non-poaching clauses in non-competes specify that the person signing it can't recruit employees from their old work, usually for X number of years. Microsoft almost certainly didn't sign any non-competes and unless Sam Altman is the one making this offer there aren't any non-compete violations happening.
Non-competes and poaching clauses aren’t based on any laws, and it turns out they aren’t even legally binding in many cases.
I'm not arguing they are, but that they aren't relevant at all in this case. They aren't even designed to address this situation (binding or otherwise).
Seemed like you were answering their question, but I reread and get what you were trying to say now.
The only thing I'm familiar with that resembles anti poaching laws in America is tampering rules in sports leagues but they have all these exemptions and such. Anti poaching laws in tech industry would be pretty catastrophic.
You can't go to the business and recruit. Public statements, LinkedIn messages, etc are totally fine.
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