Editor’s note, May 18, 2024, 7:30 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s tweet on Saturday afternoon that the company was in the process of changing its offboarding documents.
On Monday, OpenAI announced exciting new product news: ChatGPT can now talk like a human.Â
It has a cheery, slightly ingratiating feminine voice that sounds impressively non-robotic, and a bit familiar if you’ve seen a certain 2013 Spike Jonze film. “Her,” tweeted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, referencing the movie in which a man falls in love with an AI assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
But the product release of ChatGPT 4o was quickly overshadowed by much bigger news out of OpenAI: the resignation of the company’s co-founder and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who also led its superalignment team, as well as that of his co-team leader Jan Leike (who we put on the Future Perfect 50 list last year).
The resignations didn’t come as a total surprise. Sutskever had been involved in the boardroom revolt that led to Altman’s temporary firing last year, before the CEO quickly returned to his perch. Sutskever publicly regretted his actions and backed Altman’s return, but he’s been mostly absent from the company since, even as other members of OpenAI’s policy, alignment, and safety teams have departed.Â
But what has really stirred speculation was the radio silence from former employees. Sutskever posted a pretty typical resignation message, saying “I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial…I am excited for what comes next.”Â
Leike … didn’t. His resignation message was simply: “I resigned.” After several days of fervent speculation, he expanded on this on Friday morning, explaining that he was worried OpenAI had shifted away from a safety-focused culture.
Questions arose immediately: Were they forced out? Is this delayed fallout of Altman’s brief firing last fall? Are they resigning in protest of some secret and dangerous new OpenAI project? Speculation filled the void because no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking.Â
It turns out there’s a very clear reason for that. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.Â
If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.
While nondisclosure agreements aren’t unusual in highly competitive Silicon Valley, putting an employee’s already-vested equity at risk for declining or violating one is. For workers at startups like OpenAI, equity is a vital form of compensation, one that can dwarf the salary they make. Threatening that potentially life-changing money is a very effective way to keep former employees quiet.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment in time for initial publication. After publication, an OpenAI spokesperson sent me this statement: “We have never canceled any current or former employee’s vested equity nor will we if people do not sign a release or nondisparagement agreement when they exit.”
Sources close to the company I spoke to told me that this represented a change in policy as they understood it. When I asked the OpenAI spokesperson if that statement represented a change, they replied, “This statement reflects reality.”
On Saturday afternoon, a little more than a day after this article published, Altman acknowledged in a tweet that there had been a provision in the company’s off-boarding documents about “potential equity cancellation” for departing employees, but said the company was in the process of changing that language.
All of this is highly ironic for a company that initially advertised itself as OpenAI — that is, as committed in its mission statements to building powerful systems in a transparent and accountable manner.Â
OpenAI has spent a long time occupying an unusual position in tech and policy circles. Their releases, from DALL-E to ChatGPT, are often very cool, but by themselves they would hardly attract the near-religious fervor with which the company is often discussed.Â
What sets OpenAI apart is the ambition of its mission: “to ensure that artificial general intelligence — AI systems that are generally smarter than humans — benefits all of humanity.” Many of its employees believe that this aim is within
