[AndrewKemendo]

Because at some point, the plurality of employees do not subordinate their personal desires to the organizational desires.

The only organizations for which that is a persistent requirement are typically things like priest hoods

[romwell]

The plurality of employees are not the innovators that made the breakthrough possible in the first place.

People are not interchangeable.

Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money. The ones that matter most would have different motivation.

Of course, of your sole goal is to create a husk that milks the achievement of the original team as long as it lasts and nothing else — sure, you can do that.

But the "organizational desires" are still desires of people in the organization. And if those people are the ducks that lay the golden eggs, it might not be the smartest move to ignore them to prioritize the desires of the market for those eggs.

The market is all too happy to kill the ducks if it means more, cheaper eggs today.

Which is, as the adage goes, why we can't have the good things.

[curiousgal]

> Most employees may have bills to pay, and will follow the money.

It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality. I am not shaming people for wanting more money of course, but after a certain threshold, framing it as an external necessity is dishonest.

[romwell]

>It always rubs me the wrong way when people justify going for more money as "having bills to pay". No they don't, this makes it seems as if they're down on their luck and have to hustle to pay bills which is far from reality.

What reality do you live in?

I'm a software engineer with Google on my resume (among others); my wife is a software engineer in the chipmaking industry; we both have PhDs and work in Silicon Valley, and have no children.

We work because we have bills to pay. We can't afford to not work. Our largest expenses are still housing, groceries, transportation, medical, etc. - i.e., bills.

We are paying a mortgage on a 3B townhouse, which is also our home office, and where my mother-in-law is living too as a war refugee from Kyiv, Ukraine. I'm helping my mother with her bills too (she's renting a studio in San Diego).

When I don't work, our savings start draining.

It would be nice to get to the point where paying the bills is not something I ever think about. But we haven't reached that threshold.

Neither have most of our friends (also engineers with PhDs). I haven't spoken to my friend in OpenAI in a while, so I hope they've crossed that threshold; but it's not something I know for sure.

[mlrtime]

The problem is that you are equating "bills to pay" as living paycheck to paycheck at the minimum level.

It is a metaphor that they are still working class. You can earn 500k-1M/year in salary and be working class. Your monthly expenses may be > than your salary and you need it to keep working to get at the same QOL.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is absurd and totally out of touch with reality

I live in an exurb of DC, in one of the highest cost of living areas with one of the highest median income in the world.

I have 3 kids who are all in middle and early high school (the most expensive time) and a mortgage and literally just did the math on what my MINIMUM income would need to be in order to maintain a extremely comfortable lifestyle and it’s between $80-100k a year.

Anyone making more than ~100k a year isn’t living paycheck to paycheck unless they are spending way more than their means - which is actually most people

[AndrewKemendo]

Yeah we agree here, but the problem lies with the team

If you hire people who want to cash out then you’ll get people who prioritize prospects for cashing out

Set another way they did not focus on the theoretical public mission enough that it was core to the every day being of the organization much like it is for Medicins San Frontiers etc.

[insane_dreamer]

Most of the people they hired were to work for OpenAI.com which was a pure profit-driven tech company just like any other (and funded by Microsoft). Those who joined the original OpenAI (including its independent board members) were driven by different motivations more in line with research and discovery.

[AndrewKemendo]

This is my point

In a political direct action context a really effective way to take over an organization from the inside is called “salting.”

I believe that’s what Altman very effectively did and while a few people called it out at the time, Altman was able to realign the org by amplifying and then exploiting everyones greed.

[xwolfi]

Medecins Sans Frontieres

[vdddv]

Médecins Sans Frontières