From the article:
“““
It turns out there’s a very clear reason for [why no one who had once worked at OpenAI was talking]. I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.
If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.
”””
[0]: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2024/5/17/24158478/openai...
It takes a man of real principle to stand up against that and tell them to keep their money if they can't speak ill of a potentially toxic work environment.
Incidentally, that's what Grigory Perelman, the mathematician that rejected the Fields Medal and the $1M prize that came with it, did.
It wasn't a matter of an NDA either; it was a move to make his message heard (TL;DR: "publish or perish" rat race that the academia has become is antithetical to good science).
He was (and still is) widely misunderstood in that move, but I hope people would see it more clearly now.
The enshittification processes of academic and corporate structures are not entirely dissimilar, after all, as money is at the core of corrupting either.
This is the kind of thing a cult demands of its followers, or an authoritarian government demands of its citizens. I don't know why people would think it's okay for a business to demand this from its employees.
In the OpenAI case, the gesture of "forgoing millions of dollars" directly makes you able to do something you couldn't - speak about OpenAI publicly. In the Grigory Perelman case, obviously the message was far less clear to most people (I personally have heard of him turning down the money before and know the broad strokes of his story, but had no idea that that was the reason).
This should not be legal.
Perfect! So it's so incredibly overreaching that any judge in California would deem the entire NDA unenforceable..
Either that or, in your effort to overstate a point, you exaggerated in a way that undermines the point you were trying to make.
1. If he didn't turn down the money, you wouldn't have heard of him at all;
2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.
3. On a very basic level, it's very easy to understand that there's gotta be something wrong with the award if a deserving recipient turns it down. What exactly is wrong is left as an exercise to the reader — as you'd expect of a mathematician like Perelman.
Quote (from [1]):
From the few public statements made by Perelman and close colleagues, it seems he had become disillusioned with the entire field of mathematics. He was the purest of the purists, consumed with his love for mathematics, and completely uninterested in academic politics, with its relentless jockeying for position and squabbling over credit. He denounced most of his colleagues as conformists. When he opted to quit professional mathematics altogether, he offered this confusing rationale: “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice. Either to make some ugly thing or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”*
This explanation is confusing only to someone who has never tried to get a tenured position in academia.
Perelman was one of the few people to not only give the finger to the soul-crushing, dehumanizing system, but to also call it out in a way that stung.
He wasn't the only one; but the only other person I can think of is Alexander Grothendiek [2], who went as far as declaring that publishing any of his work would be against his will.
Incidentally, both are of Russian-Jewish origin/roots, and almost certainly autistic.
I find their views very understandable and relatable, but then again, I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).
[1] https://nautil.us/purest-of-the-purists-the-puzzling-case-of...
I think this is probably not true.
> 2. You're not the intended audience of Grigory's message, nor are you in position to influence, change, or address the problems he was highlighting. The people who are heard the message loud and clear.
This is a great point and you're probably right.
> I'm also an autistic Jew from Odessa with a math PhD who left academia (the list of similarities ends there, sadly).
Really? What do you do nowadays?
(I glanced at your bio and website and you seem to be doing interesting things, I've also dabbled in Computational Geometry and 3d printing.)
Perelman provided a proof of the Poincare Conjecture, which had stumped mathematicians for a century.
It was also one of the seven Millenium problems https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems/, and as of 2024, the only one to be solved.
Andrew Wiles became pretty well known after proving Fermat's last theorem, despite there not being an financial reward.
Granted, we're not on a forum where most people go, so I shouldn't have said "you" in that case.