Instances in history in which private companies (or any individual humans) have intentionally turned down huge profits and power are the exception, not the rule.
OpenAI wasn’t a private company (ie for-profit) at the time of the OP grant though.
Is that not what Altman is referring to when he talks about vested equity? My understanding was employees had no other form of equity besides PPUs, in which case he’s talking non-misleadingly about the non-narrow case of vested PPUs, ie the thing people were alarmed about, right?
What do you mean by pseudo-equity?
Did OpenAI have the for-profit element at that time?
Sure, but you weren’t providing reasons to not believe the argument, or reasons why your interpretation is at least as implausible
Zvi has already addressed this - arguing that if (D) was equivalent to ‘has a similar cost to >=$500m in harm’, then there would be no need for (B) and (C) detailing specific harms, you could just have a version of (D) that mentions the $500m, indicating that that’s not a sufficient condition. I find that fairly persuasive, though it would be good to hear a lawyer’s perspective
Why does that mean you shouldn’t post it?
I think calling this a strategic meaning is not that helpful. I would say the issue is that “isolated” is underspecified. It’s not like there was a fully fleshed out account that was then backtracked on, it’s more like: what was the isolation? were they isolated from literally everyone who wasn’t Kat, Emerson or Drew, or were they isolated /pushed to isolate more than is healthy from people they didn’t need to have their ‘career face’ on for? We now know the latter was meant, but either was plausible.
This quote doesn’t say anything about the board member/s being people who are researching AI safety though - it’s Nathan’s friends who are in AI safety research not the board members.
I agree that based on this quote, it could have very well been just a subset of the board. But I believe Nathan’s wife works for CEA (and he’s previously MCed an EAG), and Tasha is (or was?) on the board of EVF US, and so idk, if it’s Tasha he spoke to and the “multiple people” was just her and Helen, I would have expected a rather different description of events/vibe. E.g. something like ‘I googled who was on the board and realised that two of them were EAs, so I reached out to discuss’. I mean maybe that is closer to what happened and it’s just being obfuscated, either way is confusing to me tbh.
Btw, by “out of date” do you mean relative to now, or to when the events took place? From what I can see, the tweet thread, the substack post and the podcast were all published the same day - Nov 22nd 2023. The link I provided is just 80k excerpting the original podcast.
Noting that while Sam describes the provision as being about “about potential equity cancellation”, the actual wording says ‘shall be cancelled’ not ‘may be cancelled’, as per this tweet from Kelsey Piper: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1791584341669396560