[kryz]

I suspect this may not have gone down the way the article is reporting.

OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr.

Yet because workers were reportedly affected by the content Sama cancelled the contract?

I think we all know they would just replace the $2/hr workers.

It doesn’t check out

[richrichardsson]

> OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr.

This kind of shit really boils my piss.

I did extra work on the Alexander movie in Morocco. There was a pay disparity between what the local production company were paying Westerners vs what they paid locals [1]. I'm almost 100% sure the production company paying the local company would have been paying the same price for both.

[1] - this isn't even the half of what was wrong with the situation; they were filming during Ramadan, so the locals couldn't eat/drink/smoke anything during the daylight hours and made to stand around in the blazing sun. One old lady fainted. The production company asked the Westerners to please try and keep out of sight whilst drinking/eating/smoking between takes, but then at the same time telling us we can't move from our spots lest we break continuity. Towards the end of filming it almost turned into a riot due to the bad treatment of the locals. Total joke.

[factsarelolz]

Not sure why this isn't the top comment.

Sama could have provided the mental health support that employees may have needed with the 10$/hr per employee profit they were making. Sama didn't and decided that instead of losing profit by providing their employees with mental healthcare they canceled the contract.

Smells fishy.

[notahacker]

That's effectively answered a paragraph down. Sama cancelled the contract after being asked by OpenAI to collect material that was illegal under US law, at a time when a negative story about work they were doing for Facebook meant that journalists were interested in interviewing their [ex]employees

That's sufficiently risky for a company to be prepared to fire a high profile client, and whilst their margins were huge the value of the actual project was only $200k, which isn't going to seem like riches to Sama's California-based management team.