I don’t have a strong opinion on the events of the past several days. But a lot of the behavior I’ve seen on twitter from Open AI employees, some led by Sam, feels very cult like: posting in all lower case, the heart emojis, rumors of employees calling each other in the middle of the night to pressure people to sign letters supporting Sam.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.
I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.
I found those posts extremely weird, the emojis and lowercase tweets and screenshots of Notes. I would imagine people who were/are in charge of a company on the fast track to being worth hundreds of billions / trillion USD would be a bit more serious, but here they are, quoting each other tweets with heart emojis.
I've talked to OpenAI recruiters. I personally don't like Sama from what I've heard/read, but I would still consider working there due to Ilya and Karpathy.
However, I absolutely would have been livid at the board and wanted Sama to come back if I was an employee, simply because I would have joined being aligned with the 'commercialize and make money' side, and not the other.
So I think a lot of OpenAI employees probably don't care if Sama is CEO vs someone else, as long as they get to ship and get paid. The board firing sam wasn't just a 'let's get a new CEO' it was a pivot from 'ship and make $$$'.
All lowercase signals casual aloofness; it says the situation doesn't meet your bar for formality. It's like Zuckerberg wearing a hoodie when meeting with Wall Street types.
People are reading way too much into this, some people just prefer the look of all-lowercase. It's not like this is some super-unique choice to Sam / OAI, it's all over the internet.
The absolute uniformity was a bit disconcerting to be honest, but I can also see it being just a great display of comradery. I'm still unsure about how to feel about the thing with it mostly resolved.
Many aides in the new administration assigned to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, discovered Monday that their computer keyboards were missing the "W" key — a critical problem given their boss' name is George W. Bush, and he is often referred to simply as "W," to distinguish him from his presidential dad.
There isn’t necessarily anything wrong of this behavior. It is good to like your coworkers, but something about the manipulative nature of it triggers an “ick” feeling that I can’t really put into words.
I’ve also spent very little time in the Bay Area, but from afar, there does seem to be something in the DNA that makes people there more susceptible to cult like behavior.