Some breaking news: An employer does not owe you an explanation. You exchange money for labor. If anyone thinks for a second that they are essential or that anyone would prioritize them over the company I think they are delusional. OpenAI is a brand (at least in tech) with large recognition and they will be fine.
If ~91% of the employees leave OpenAI, they will not be fine. That is delusional.
also if I learned anything over the years is that "threatening to quit" != "quitting".
Maybe, but being told they can freely jump ship to the new team at Microsoft, alongside the fact that their upcoming shares are most definitely going to lose most of their value as a result of losing key talent and pissing off their main compute provider certainly sweeten the deal
If the entire workforce of the company is credibly threatening to quit, and a competitor is publicly and credibly offering them jobs, then what the employer “owes” them in some cosmic sense no longer matters. I think the OpenAI employees are likely to get an explanation and/or a resignation from the board, whether you think the board “owes” them that or not.
We're seeing some odd bedfellows here, between the C-levels and VCs in closed door meetings and employees acting collectively. Normally these groups would be at odds, but today they're pulling together. Life is strange.
It's really hard to understand now and we will probably learn way more details once things cool down.
An employment is a contract which both parties enter into willingly. Termination of contract deserves some level of empathetic glad handling, however minimal. It's just game theory - if you plan to hire again, you have to be gracious while firing someone because word gets around.
If I were Microsoft I’d also look at making it easy to get investment from folks leaving soon after the acquisition through their investment arm.
Here's an example of some of their work: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Microsoft+Research+four+color+theo...
Literally a random math problem, basically nothing to do with Microsoft on the surface ... except that the scientist working on it happened to prove the theorum using a very, very robust algorithm and then wrote a proof program on top of it to prove the program was correct. The underlying parts of that proof program eventually went on to become the thing that validates graphics drivers on Windows ... 7 and beyond? My memory is fuzzy about "how it ended up being useful at Microsoft" part.
But yeah, MSR does random stuff.
I would guess that most of the people working at openai could get a job anywhere.
