Going to work for these big SV corps is and always has been directly in service of US empire, that's literally what built the valley in the first place.
> I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.
I get that there's nuance, but this feels like they want to make a big ethical stand without burning any bridges. You can have one of those.
"If you disagree this strongly with their actions, how can you still respect them?" is a decent description of the latter.
OpenAI already had military contracts while this employee was at the company and there was no open letter last year about that.
Prior to that, they were at Meta and joined OpenAI after ChatGPT took off.
If they thought that AGI was about "principles" then not only they were naive, but it leads me to believe that they were only there for the RSUs, just like their time at Meta.
Why is it so hard to be honest and just say you were there for the money, fame and RSUs and not for so called "AGI"?
Everyone will do this, because everyone will believe that everyone will do this.
Even worse, there really is no guarantee that the great powers will create the best terminators. Everyone talks about China and the US. (And we should.) At the same time however, we should all keep in mind that nations from India and Indonesia, to North and South Korea will not be simply sitting on their hands while the US and China forge ahead.
A future where 4 million dollar American or Chinese terminators are easily overwhelmed by thousands and thousands of 5 dollar Indian autonomous devices is not at all outside the realm of future possibilities.
That's what makes it all so concerning. We can kind of see where it leads in terms of enhanced capability potential for non-state actors, but we can't really see a way to avoid that future.
And while we are waiting, there're another few wars to be done.
It just shows that they have done poor research about the company before joining (Meta is just as bad) and are in on the grift (joined OpenAI only after post-ChatGPT) and this employee does not believe what they are saying.
Absolutely nothing wrong with something written with AI. Just pointing it out.
Any employee who stays, especially given the financial cushion they have, is complicit. Shame on all of them.
But here’s the sad truth: most of the knowledge workers at OpenAI won’t be of any value sometime soon because of the very tool they’re building.
Everyone has their own unique situation
So it wouldn't even be worth a HN submission. Well, I think it can still go under exception for exceptional news.
structuredPizza•2h ago