Follow-up: Why is only some fraction on Twitter?
This is almost certainly a confounder, as is often the case when discussing reactions on Twitter vs reactions in the population.
Literally the literal definition of 'selection bias' dude, like, the pure unadulterated definition of it.
If the CEO of my company got shitcanned and then he/she and the board were feuding?
... I'd talk to my colleagues and friends privately, and not go anywhere near the dumpster fire publicly. If I felt strongly, hell, turn in my resignation. But 100% "no comment" in public.
But people in AI/learning community are very active on twitter. I don't know every AI researcher on OpenAIs payroll. But the fact that most active researchers (looking at the list of OpenAI paper authors, and tbh the people I know, as a researcher in this space) are on twitter.
Of course, OpenAI as a cloud-platform is DoA if Sam leaves, and that's a catastrophic business hit to take. It is a very bold decision. Whether it was a stupid one, time will tell.
On twitter != 'active on twitter'
There's a biiiiiig difference between being 'on twitter' and what I shall refer to kindly as terminally online behaviour aka 'very active on twitter.'
Work is work. If you start being emotional about it, it's a bad, not good, thing.
You just need to temper that before you start swearing oaths of fealty on twitter; because that's giving real Jim Jones vibes which isn't a good thing.
It doesn't matter if it's large, unless the "very active on twitter" group is large enough to be the majority.
The point is that there may be (arguably very likely) a trait AI researchers active on Twitter have in common which differentiates them from the population therefore introducing bias.
It could be that the 30% (made up) of OpenAI researchers who are active on Twitter are startup/business/financially oriented and therefore align with Sam Altman. This doesn't say as much about the other 70% as you think.
Seems like a bit of a commercial risk there if the CEO can 'make' a third of the company down tools.
I have no idea what the actual proportion is, nor how investors feel about this right now.
The true proportion of researchers who actively voice their political positions on twitter is probably much smaller and almost certainly a biased sample.