[CaveTech]

I think it's relatively easy to prove that the main motivation for the majority of employees is not mission alignment, simply by the fact that salaries within OpenAI are in the top few percentile of the field.

I don't believe this is necessarily in conflict with the mission though. Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important.

[neilv]

> Employees are mercenaries, it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively. The employee becomes forcefully aligned with the mission because that is the key to their personal enrichment. They are paid to contribute, their personal beliefs are not all that important.

I think that might be the norm, but it's sounds like an awful dynamic.

It's also unfortunate if you want to do something better. We have many mercenaries companies that have appropriated some of the language we might use to characterize something better.

So, say you're trying to found a company with grand ideals, made up of people who care about the mission, you actively want a diversity of ideas, etc., and almost every sentence you can think of to communicated that a bunch of candidates nodding, "Yeah, yeah, whatever, we've heard this a hundred times, just tell me what the TC is, for the 18 months I'll stay here".

[JohnFen]

> it's up to management/leadership to enforce the mission and make sure employees contribute to it positively.

But surely, the primary tool that leadership has to do that is by selecting employees who are on the same page as them. A purely mercenary workforce is very undesirable unless the company is also mercenary.