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Sam Altman Slams Meta's AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'
by spenvo
Sam vs Zuck... tough choice. I'm rooting for neither. Sam is cleverly using words here to make it seem like OpenAI are 'the good guys' but the truth is that they're just as nasty and power/money hungry as the rest.
Big picture, I'll always believe we dodged a huge bullet in that "AI" got big in a nearly fully "open-source," maybe even "post open-source" world. The fact that Meta is, for now, one of the good guys in this space (purely strategically and unintentionally) is fortunate and almost funny.
Oh, they're actually the bad guys, just folks haven't thought far enough ahead to realise it yet.
OK, lay it on us.
It’s not unreasonable given the mountain of evidence of their past behaviour to just assume they are always the “bad guy”.
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Well at least they're doing it For Great Justice then.
> bad guys
You imply there are some good guys.
What company?
AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.
Dont make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Mark Zuckerberg. He didnt open source anything because he's a "good guy", he's just commoditizing the complement.
The "good guy" is a competitive environment that would render Meta's AI offerings to be irrelevant right now if it didnt open source.
The price tag on this stuff, in human capital, data, and hardware, is high enough to preclude that sort of “perfect competition” environment.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
they did say "accidentally". I find that people doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is often the best case outcome.
>he's just commoditizing the complement
That's a cool smaht phrase but help me understand, for which Meta products are LLMs a complement?
A continuous stream of monetizable live user data?
The entire point of Meta owning everything is that it wants as much of your data stream as it can get, so it can then sell more ad products derived from that.
If much of that data begins going off-Meta, because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products, that's a huge loss to Meta.
Sorry, I don't follow.
>because someone else has better LLMs and builds them into products
If that were true they wouldn't be trying to create the best LLM and give it for free.
(Disclaimer: I don't think Zuck is doing this out of the good of his heart, obv. but I don't see the connection with the complements and whatnot)
Oh, absolutely -- I definitely meant that in the least complimentary way possible :). In a way, it's just the triumph of the ideals of "open source," -- sharing is better for everyone, even Zuck, selfishly.
Your ability to use a lesser version of this AI on your own hardware will not save you from the myriad ways it will be used to prey on you.
And an inability to do so would not have saved you either.
Most of Meta's models have not been released as open source. Llama was a fluke, and it helps to commoditize your compliment when you're not the market leader.
There is no good or open AI company of scale yet, and there may never be.
A few that contribute to the commons are Deep Seek and Black Forest Labs. But they don't have the same breadth and budget as the hyperscalers.
Llama is not open source. It is at best weights available. The license explicitly limits what kind of things you are allowed to use the outputs of the models for.
Which, given what it was trained on, is utterly ridiculous.
That's not true, the llama that's open source is pretty much exactly what's used internally
Can someone make an honest argument for how OpenAI staff are missionaries, after the coup?
I'd be very happy to be convinced that supporting the coup was the right move for true-believer missionaries.
(Edit: It's an honest and obvious question, and I think that the joke responses risk burying or discouraging honest answers.)
That is just an act of corpo-ceo bulshitting employees and press about high moral standards, mission, etc. Don't trust any of his words.
Anytime someone tells you to be in it for the mission, you are expendable and underpaid.
I don't at all disagree with you, but at the kind of money you'd be making at an org like OAI, it's easy to envision there being a ceiling, past which the additional financial compensation doesn't necessarily matter that much.
The problem with the argument is that most places saying this are paying more like a sub-basement, not that there can't genuinely be more important things.
That said, Sam Altman is also a guy who stuck nondisparagement terms into their equity agreement... and in that same vein, framing poaching as "someone has broken into our home" reads like cult language.
That could be genuine words. Mission is to be expendable and make them rich.
Don't forget about the mission during next round of layoffs and record high quarterly profits.
Totally agree.
Well said.
Man, you are on a mission, to enable manumission!
yeah, I used to work in the medical tech space, they love to tell you how much you should be in it for the mission and that's why your pay is 1/3 what you could make at FAANG... of course, when it came to our sick customers, they need to pay market rates.
Yes, especially not his
Missionary (from wikipedia):
A missionary is a member of a religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary
Post coup, they are both for-profit entities.
So the difference seems to be that when meta releases its models (like bibles), it is promoting its faith more openly than openai, which interposes itself as an intermediary.
Honest answer*:
I think building super intelligence for the company that owns and will deploy the super intelligence in service of tech's original sin (the algorithmic feed) is a 100x worse than whatever OpenAI is doing, save maybe OpenAI's defense contract, which I have no details about.
Meta will try to buoy this by open-sourcing it, which, good for them, but I don't think it's enough. If Meta wants to save itself, it should re-align its business model away from the feeds.
In that way, as a missionary chasing super intelligence, I'd prefer OpenAI.
*because I don't have an emotional connection to OpenAI's changing corporate structure away from being a non-profit:
As a thought exercise, OpenAI can partner to apply the technology to:
- online gambling
- kids gambling
- algorithmic advertising
Are these any better ? All of these are of course money wells and a logical move for a for-profit IMHO.
And they can of course also integrate into a Meta competitor's algorithmic feeds as well, putting them at the same level as Meta in that regard.
All in all, I'm not seeing them having any moral high ground, even purely hypotheticaly.
Wait if an online gambling company uses OpenAI API then hosts it all on AWS, somehow OpenAI is more morally culpable than AWS? Why?
I saw the discussion as whether OpenAI is on a better moral ground than Meta, so this was my angle.
On where the moral burden lies in your example, I'd argue we should follow the money and see what has the most impact on that online gambling company's bottom line.
Inherently that could have the most impact on what happens when that company succeeds: if those become OpenAI's biggest clients, it wouldn't be surprising that they put more and more weight in being well suited for online gambling companies.
Does AWS get specially impacted by hosting online gambling services ? I honestly don't expect them to, not more than community sites or concert ticket sellers.
There is no world in which online gambling beats other back-office automation in pure revenue terms. I'm comfortable saying that OpenAI would probably have to spend more money policing to make sure their API's aren't used by gambling companies than they'd make off of them. Either way, these are all imagined horrors, so it is difficult to judge.
I am judging the two companies for what they are, not what they could be. And as it is, there is no more damaging technology than Meta's various algorithmic feeds.
> There is no world in which online gambling beats other back-office automation in pure revenue terms.
Apple's revenue is massively from in-app purchases, which are mainly games, and online betting also entered the picture. We had Tim Cook on the stand explain that they need that money and can't let Epic open that gate.
I think we're already there in some form or another, the question would be whether OpenAI has any angle for touching that pie (I'd argue no, but they have talented people)
> I am judging the two companies for what they are, not what they could be
Thing is, AI is mostly nothing right now. We're only discussing it because it of its potential.
My point exactly. The App Store has no play in back office automation so the comparison doesn’t make sense. AFAICT, OpenAI is already making Billions on back office automation. I just came from a doctors visit where the she was using some medical grade ChatGPT wrapper to transcribe my medical conversation meanwhile I fight with instagram for the attention of my family members.
AI is already here [1]. Could there be better owners of super intelligence? Sure. Is OpenAI better than Meta. 100%
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/06/09/openai-hits-10-billion-i...
If you have "superintelligence" and it's used to fine-tune a corporate product that preexisted it, you don't have superintelligence.
I'm not very informed about the coup -- but doesn't it just depend on what side most of the employees sat/sit on? I don't know how much of the coup was just egos or really an argument about philosophy that the rank and file care about. But I think this would be the argument.
There was a petition with a startlingly high percentage of employees signing it, but no telling how many of them felt pressured to to keep their job.
They didn't need pressuring. There was enough money involved that was at risk without Sam that they did what they thought was the best way to protect their nest eggs.
The thing where dozens of them simultaneously posted “OpenAI is nothing without its people” on Twitter during the coup was so creepy, like actual Jonestown vibes. In an environment like that, there’s no way there wasn’t immense pressure to fall into line.
That seems like kind of an uncharitable take when it can otherwise be explained as collective political action. I’d see the point if it were some repeated ritual but if they just posted something on Twitter one time then it sounds more like an attempt to speak more loudly with a collective voice.
I'd bet 100 quatloos that your comment will not have honest arguments below. You can't nurture missionaries in an exploitative environment.
Eh? Plenty of cults like Jehivahs Witnesses that are exploitive as hell.
Not to mention, missionaries are exploitative. They're trying to harvest souls for God or (failing the appearance of God to accept their bounty) to expand the influence of their earthbound church.
The end result of missionary activity is often something like https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang... .
Bottom line, "But... but I'm like a missionary!" isn't my go-to argument when I'm trying to convince people that my own motives are purer than my rival's.
An honest argument is that cults often have missionaries.
100% agree. You are hearing the dictator claim righteousness.
This is just a CEO gaslighting his employees to "think of the mission" instead of paying up
No different than "we are a family"
But “we are family”
I got all my sisters with me.
> “I have never been more confident in our research roadmap,” he wrote. “We are making an unprecedented bet on compute, but I love that we are doing it and I'm confident we will make good use of it. Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does, and I'm confident we can fix the problems.”
tldr. knife fights in the hallways over the remaining life boats.
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They didn't mean it as a pun, but understanding it as a pun helps understand the situation.
In religions, missionaries are those people who spread the word of god (gospel) as their mission in life for a reward in the afterlife. Obviously, mercenaries are paid armies who are in it for the money and any other spoils of war (sex, goods, landholdings, etc.)
So I guess he's trying to frame it as them being missionaries for an Open and accepting and free Artificial Intelligence and framing Meta as the guys who are only in it for the money and other less savory reasons. Obviously, only true disciples would believe such framing.
english is my first language : they mean that Sam Altman's people are preaching a righteous future for AI, or something vague like that.
Close. A missionary is what the sex position was named after.
Specifically, Catholic missionaries indoctrinating indigenous cultures into their church's imaginary sexual hangups. All other positions were considered sinful.
Again, not a label I'd self-apply if I wanted to take the high road.
Pretty telling that OpenAI only now feels like it has to reevaluate compensation for researchers while just weeks ago it spent $6.5 billion to hire Jony Ive. Maybe he can build your superintelligence for you.
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Just looked it up, looks like they bought or merged with a company he worked at or owned part of, at a valuation of 6.5 billion. Not sure about the details, e.g.like how much of that he gets
Do I "poach" a stock when I offer more money for it than the last transaction value? "Poaching" employees is just price discovery by market forces. Sounds healthy to me. Meta is being the good guys for once.
I poached 3 baconators and the last 2 frosties away from an elderly couple at wendys last night and oh boy was I discovering some market forces this morning
The elderly couple showed up with baseball bats?
Sounds like some tariffs should be applied as as well considering there's now a trade imbalance!
You must be new here. No joking allowed.
AFAIU, that is basically true? Isn't it in the guidelines somewhere? Sarcasm or (exclusive-or!) really good humor get a pass in practice.
See.
I can fully believe one can be funny in a way that isn’t validated or understood, or even perceived as humorous. I’m not sure HN is a good bellwether for comedic potential.
Why does this feel like the "Friendship Ended With Musadir" meme?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/friendship-ended-with-mudasir
Does he have the same conviction when people from other companies decide to join OpenAI?
It's only bad when other people do it.
"Apostates who turned to darkness" vs "Converts who saw the light".
The game theoretic aspect of this is quite interesting. If Meta will make OpenAI's model improvements open source, then the value of every poached employee will be worth significantly less as time goes on. That means it's in the employees best interest to leave first, if their goal is to maximize their income.
Open source could also be a bait and switch.
ie - Zuck has no intention to keep opening up the models he creates. Thus, he knows he can spend the money to get the talent. Because he has every intention to make it back.
Zuck has the best or the second best distribution on the planet.
If he neutralizes the tech advantage of other companies his chances of winning rise.
Allegedly they were offered 100m just in the first year. I think they will be fine
That was immediately proven to be false, both by Meta leadership and the poached researchers themselves. Sam Altman just pulled the number out of his ass in an interview.
That's my point. The ones that left early got a large sum of money. The ones that leave later will get less. That would incentivize people to be the first to leave.
> OpenAI is the only answer for those looking to build artificial general intelligence
Let’s assume for a moment that OpenAI is the only company that can build AGI (specious claim), then the question I would have for Sam Altman: what is OpenAI’s plan once that milestone is reached, given his other argument:
> And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way,” he added. “Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be.
If building AGI is OpenAI’s only goal (unlike other companies), will OpenAI cease to exist once mission is accomplished or will a new mission be devised?
OpenAI’s only goal isn’t building AGI. It is to build it first and make money off it.
Exactly! The Microsoft-OpenAI agreement states that AGI is whatever makes them 100 billion in profits. Nothing in there about anything intelligence related.
>The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
Is there even a point to money post AGI?
Something tells me food and water supplies, weapons and private security forces aren't going to be paid for in OAI compute credits.
Not the real thing, no.
The profit cap was supposed to be for first to acheive AGI being end game, and would ensure redistribution (though with apparently some kind of Altman tax through early World Coin ownership stake). When they realized they wouldn't reach AGI with current funding and they were so close to $100 billion market cap they couldn't entice new investors on $100 billion in profits, why didn't they set it to, say, $10 trillion instead of infinity? Because they are missionaries?
A leaked email from Ilya early on even said they never planned to open source stuff long term, it was just to entice researchers at the beginning.
Whole company is founded on lies and Altman was even fired from YC over self detailing or something in I think a deleted YC blog post if I remember right.
Nope AGI is not the end goal - https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
> OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.
IMO, AGI is already a very nebulous term. Superintelligence seems even more hand-wavy. It might be useful to define and understand limits of "intelligence" first.
I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.
I work at OAI, but I'm speaking for myself here. Sam talks to the company, sometimes via slack, more often in company-wide meetings, all the time. Way more than any other CEO I have worked for. This leaked message is one part of a long, continuing conversation within the company.
The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.
What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.
I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are. It certainly has humbled my own reactions to news. (In this particular instance I don't think there's so much right and wrong but more that I think if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different.)
Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168
The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps.
Until the tide turns.
Worse: employees are often actively deceived by management. Their “close relationship” is akin to that of a farmer and his herd. Convinced they’re “on the inside” they’re often blind to the truth that’s obvious from the outside.
Or simply they don’t see the whole picture because they’re not customers or business partners.
I’ve seen Oracle employees befuddled to hear negative opinions about their beloved workplace! “I never had to deal with the licensing department!”
Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..."
Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.
> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.
This is so true. And not confined to HN.
> Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168
Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;)
Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.
Open weights is unobjectionable. You do get a lot.
It's nice to also know what the training data is, and it's even nicer to be aware of how it's fine-tuned etc., but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.
There are ten measures by which a model can/should be open:
1. The model code (pytorch, whatever)
2. The pre-training code
3. The fine-tuning code
4. The inference code
5. The raw training data (pre-training + fine-tuning)
6. The processed training data (which might vary across various stages of pre-training and fine-tuning)
7. The resultant weights blob
8. The inference inputs and outputs (which also need a license; see also usage limits like O-RAIL)
9. The research paper(s) (hopefully the model is also described in literature!)
10. The patents (or lack thereof)
A good open model will have nearly all of these made available. A fake "open" model might only give you two of ten.
I've experienced that. Absolutely.
But I've also experienced that the outside perspective, wrong as it may be on nearly all details, can give a dose of realism that's easy to brush aside internally.
I agree with the sentiment.
Having been behind the scenes of HN discussion about a security incident, with accusations flying about incompetent developers, the true story was the lead developers new of the issue, but it was not prioritised by management and pushed down the backlog in place of new (revenue generating) features.
There is plenty of nuance to any situation that can't be known.
No idea if the real story here is better or worse than the public speculation though.
> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.
Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others.
Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN.
Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that
- take an enormous amount of time to learn,
- where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply
- where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly
are much more rarely prone to this phenomenon. It is no coincidence that in the last two points I make comparisons to (natural) languages: it is not easy to bullshit in a live interview that you know some natural language well if the counterpart has at least some basic knowledge of this natural language.
I think its more the site's architecture that promotes this behavior.
In the offline world there is a big social cost to this kind of behavior. Platforms haven't been able to replicate it. Instead they seem to promote and validate it. It feeds the self esteem of these people.
It's hard to have an informed opinion on Algebraic Geometry (requires expertise) and not many people are going to upvote and engage with you about it either. It's a lot easier to have an opinion on tech execs, current events, and tech gossip. Moreover you're much more likely to get replies, upvotes, and other engagement for posting about it.
There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.
> There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.
HN is the digital water cooler. Rumors are a kind of social currency, in the capital sense, in that it can be leveraged and has a time horizon for value of exchange, and in the timeliness/recency biased sense, as hot gossip is a form of information that wants to be free, which in this context means it has more value when shared, and that value is tapped into by doing so.
I totally agree that most articles (pretty much all news/infotainment) is devoid of any information.
At the same time all I need to know about Sam is in the company/"non-profit's" name, which is in itself is now simply a lie.
Sounds like someone is upset they didn't get poached.
This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot.
The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself. He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does).
I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served someone else's interests, even if they personally thought they were doing divine work).
The headline makes it sound like he's angry that Meta is poaching his talent. That's a bad look that makes it seem like you consider your employees to be your property. But he didn't actually say anything like that. I wouldn't consider any of what he said to be "slams," just pretty reasonable discussion of why he thinks they won't do well.
I'd say this is yet another example of bad headlines having negative information content, not leaks.
With no dogs in the fight, the very fact he's talking to his employees about a competitor's hiring practices is noteworthy.
The delivery of the message can be milder and better than how it sounds in the chosen bits, but the overall picture kinda stays the same.
To me, there’s an enormous difference between “they pay well but we’re going to win the race” and “my employees belong to me and they’re stealing my property.”
Notably, I don’t see him condemning Meta’s “poaching” here, just commenting on it. Compare this with, for example, Steve Jobs getting into a fight with Adobe’s CEO about whether they’d recruit each other’s employees or consider them to be off limits.
> I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.
To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.
> The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.
That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).
> What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.
What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.
> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.
This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
> coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true
My profile is trivially connected to my real identity, I am not anonymous here.
> That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).
Not only that, but how can we know if his interpretation or "feelings" about these discussions are accurate? How do we know he isn't looking through rose-tinted glasses like the Neumann believers at WeWork? OP isn't showing the missing discussion, only his interpretation/feelings about it. How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.
> How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.
I agree with that of course.
Comment was deleted :(
Little Miyazaki knock offs posting on the Nazi Hellsite former known as Twitter isn't really helping how the "public" feels about OAI either.
Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible.
Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later?
>if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different
If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well.
SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting him on the interwebs.
Comment was deleted :(
OpenAI's tight spot:
1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of drama; and OpenAI has most of the stink from the initial (valid) grievance of "AI-companies are stealing from artists". The endless hype and FUD cycles, going back to 2022, have worn industry people out, as well as the flip flop on "please regulate us". 6) Its original, core strategic alliance with Microsoft is extremely strained. 7) and, related to #6, its corporate structure is extremely unorthodox and likely needs to change in order to attract more investment, which it must (to train new frontier models). Microsoft would need to sign off on the new structure. 8) Musk is sniping at its heels, especially through legal actions.
Barring a major breakthrough with GPT-5, which I don't see happening, how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company? Maybe the answer is they drop the frontier model aspect of their business? If we are really far from AGI and are instead in a plateau of diminishing returns that may not be a huge deal, because having a 5% better model likely doesn't matter that much to their primary bright spot:
Brand loyalty from the average person to ChatGPT is the best bright spot, and OpenAI successfully eating Google's search market. Their numbers there have been truly massive from the beginning, and are I think the most defensible. Google AI Overviews continue to be completely awful in comparison.
They have majority of the attention and market cap. They have runway. And that part is the most important thing. Others don’t have the users to grand test developments.
I'm not so sure they have runway.
XAI has Elon's fortune to burn, and Spacex to fund it.
Gemini has the ad and search business of Google to fund it.
Meta has the ad revenue of IG+FB+WhatsApp+Messenger.
Whereas OpenAI $10 billion in annual revenue, but low switching costs for both consumers and developers using their APIs.
If you stay at the forefront of frontier models, you need to keep burning money like crazy, that requires raising rounds repeatedly for OpenAI, whereas the tech giants can just use their fortunes doing it.
They definitely have a very valuable brand name even if the switching costs are low. To many people, AI == ChatGPT
> how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company?
I doubt that OpenAI needs or wants to be a sustainable company right now. They can probably continue to drum up hype and investor money for many years. As long as people keep writing them blank checks, why not keep spending them? Best case they invent AGI, worst case they go bankrupt, which is irrelevant since it's not their own money they're risking.
If they can turn ChatGPT into a free cash flow machine, they will be in a much more comfortable position. They have the lever to do so (ads) but haven't shown much interest there yet.
I can't imagine how they will compete if they need to continue burning and needing to raise capital until 2030.
The interest and actions are there now: Hiring Fidji Simo to run "applications" strongly indicates a move to an ad-based business model. Fidji's meteoric rise at Facebook was because she helped land the pivot to the monster business that is mobile ads on Facebook, and she was supposedly tapped as Instacart's CEO because their business potential was on ads for CPGs, more than it was on skimming delivery fees and marked up groceries.
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The biggest problem OAI has is that they don't own a data source. Meta, Google, and X all have existing platforms for sourcing real time data at global scale. OAI has ChatGPT, which gives them some unique data, but it is tiny and very limited compared to what their competitors have.
LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to improve and adapt to current events they need fresh human created data, which requires a mechanism to separate human from AI content, which requires owning a platform where content is created, so that you can deploy surveillance tools to correctly identify human created content.
Good analysis, my counter to it is that OpenAI has one of the leading foundational models, while Meta, despite being a top paying tech company, continued to release sub par models that don't come close to the other big three.
So, what happened? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the culture and/or infra at Meta? If it was just because Zuckerburg bet on the wrong horses to lead their LLM initiatives, what makes us think he got it right this time?
For one thing, all the trade secrets going from openai and anthropic to meta.
OpenAI has no shot without a huge cash infusion and to offer similar packages. Meta opened the door.
hilarious seeing that he views it this way when his company is so very well known for taking (strong arguments say stealing) everything from everyone.
i’m noticing more and more lately that our new monarchs really do have broken thought patterns. they see their own abuse towards others as perfectly ok but hilariously demand people treat them fairly.
small children learn things that these guys struggle to understand.
I think they understand that it's all performative
Sam comes across as an extremely calculating person to me. I'm not suggesting he's necessarily doing this for bad reasons, but it's very clear to me the public facing communications he makes are well considered and likely not fully reflective of his actual views and positions on things, but instead what he believes to be power maximising.
He's very good at creating headlines and getting people talking online. There's no doubt he's good at what he does, but I don't know why anyone takes anything he says seriously.
This interview with Karen Hao is really good (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8enXRDlWguU), she interviews people that have had 1 on 1 meetings with Sam, and they always say he aligned with them on everything to the point where they don't actually know what he believes. He will tailor his opinions to try and weave in trust.
Even more blatantly and directly, "Don't you dare use our model, trained on other people's work, to train yours".
The value of these researchers to meta is surely more than a few billion. Love seeing free markets benefit the world
How do you figure? If you assume that Meta gets the state of the art model, revenue is non-existent, unless they start a premium tier or put ads. Even then, its not clear if they will exceed the money spent on inference and training compute.
It's worth a few billion (easily) to keep people's default time sink as aimlessly playing on FV/IG as opposed to chatting with ChatGPT. Even if that scroll is replaced by chatting with llama as opposed to seeing posts.
I think Meta already has very deep cultural problems.
If you've ever browsed teamblind.com (which I strongly recommend against as I hate that site), you'll see what the people who work at Meta are like.
That's true with every Tech company employees. They all want $1 M TC and work 10 hours / week
You’re describing the management not the employees
The 4% Rule means everybody with $25M is getting $1M per year for zero hours of work per week. Google tells me Sam has $1.7B.
What are they like? since you recommend not browsing this site?
The posts from Meta employees on teamblind are generally cynical, status/wealth-obsessed and mean.
Off topic, but the existence of this teamblind.com site escaped my notice till now.
Is there a particular reason to hate it (aside from it being social media)?
Mainly because it brings out the worst in people. It’s easy to read Blind too much and take on a very cynical, money-driven view of everything in your life, which of course a Blind addict would justify as clear-eyed and pragmatic.
It has obvious pros, but since you asked about the cons —- anonymity brings the worst out of people; TC chasing leads to a reductionist view of people’s values and skills.
For example unlike HN you don’t often do technical discussions on blind, by design. So it is a “meta”-level strategy discussion of the job, then it skews politics, gossips, stock price etc..
This is compounded by it being social media, where negativity can be amplified 5-10x.
I hate teamblind because it makes me feel really negative about our industry.
I actually really like tech - the problems we get to work on, the ever-changing technological landscape, the smart and passionate people, etc, etc. But teamblind is just filled with cynical, wealth-obsessed and mean careerists. It's like the opposite of HN in many ways.
And if you ever wondered where the phrase "TC or GTFO" originated... it's from teamblind.
I looked at it once, seemed full of young men discussing hair loss issues and how to get a girlfriend.
Yeah, yeah, typical rich guy whining when labor makes some gains.
Had he been doing the poaching, he would be saying mercenaries will beat missionaries. Why believe in ceos words at this point
Isn't Meta's open model closer to OpenAI's mission then OpenAI.
Ironically, Altman's statement wasnt all that wrong, in a sense.
He just mixed up who the "Missionaries" and who the "Mercenaries" were.
Two rich kids who have mostly paid-to-win their way into the game are predictably fighting using money because that's all they bring to the table.
At least from the outside, OpenAI's messaging about this seems obnoxiously deluded, maybe some of those employees left because it starts feels like a cult built on foundations of self importance? Or maybe they really do know some things we don't know, but it seems like a lot of people are eager to keep giving them that excuse.
But then again, maybe they have such a menagerie of individuals with their heads in the clouds that they've created something of an echo chamber about the 'pure vision' that only they can manifest.
Yeah it's a tough spot he's found himself in. How do you convince people who know more about this stuff than anybody that you're barreling towards something that's an improbability? It seems that most of them have made their choice to turn more towards reality, the material reality, and register their skill with an organization that holds that in higher regard. I can't blame them, and neither can he, but he also can't help himself when it comes to reiterating the hype. He might be projecting about that 'deep-seated cultural issue' he's prescribing to meta, and lashing out against those who don't accept it.
> I can't blame them, and neither can he
He's certainly trying with statements like this.
To be fair, he's hardly alone. Business is built on dupers and dupees. The duper talks about how important the mission of the business is while taking the value of the labor of the dupee. If he had to work for the money he pays the dupee, he would be a lot less interested in the mission.
I think it’s more of the latter. We’ve already seen others beat them in their own game. Only for them to come back with a new model.
In the end, this is the same back and forth that Apple and Sun shared in the late 90s or Meta and Google in 2014. We could have made non-competes illegal today but we didn’t.
(post employment) Non-competes have been non-enforcable in California since 1872. They became illegal in California last year.
A federal rule would be nice, but the state rule where a lot of the development happens could be sufficient.
Ehh, this take feels ungenerous to me. You don't have to believe a private firm is a holy order for it to benefit from a culture filled with "we believe this specific project is Important" people vs "will work at whatever shop drops the most cash" people.
Mercenaries by definition select for individual dollar outcomes, and its impossible for that not to impact the way they operate in groups, which is generally to the group's detriment unless management is incredibly good at building group-first incentive structures that don't stomp individual outcomes.
That said, mercenary-missionaries are definitely a thing. They're unstoppable forces culturally and economically, and that could be who we're seeing move around here.
In our times, every narcissist sees himself as a saint and a messiah on a mission to save the world, while doing the complete opposite of that. And they get very angry when they see other narcissists trying to do the same.
What’s the profile of these talents like? And what are the skills that are most highly sought after?
Is it the researchers or the system engineers that scale the prototypes? Or other skills/expertise?
I understand the massive anti-OpenAI sentiment here, but OpenAI makes a really great product. ChatGPT and its ecosystem are widely used by millions every day to make them more productive. Losing these employees doesn’t bode well for users.
Meta doesn’t really have a product unless you count the awful “Meta AI” that is baked into their apps. Unless these acquisitions manifest in frontier models getting open sourced, it feels like a gigantic brain drain.
Meta's real AI product is actually even worse than that and insidious: They try to run over companies who are (in contrast) successfully advancing AI with money they made by hooking teens on IG, and then just use the resulting inferior product as a marketing tool.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/WrTKZKG7Ahc -- I would probably take Ari Emanuel's word on this one
“First comes the Missionary, then comes the Mercenary, then comes the Army”
Wonder if that applies here.
I don't know which pedastal Sam is standing on to point finger at others? Who are the missionaries and who are the mercenaries? What part of OpenAI is Open?
Didn't many of the missionaries at OpenAI go to Thinking Machines Lab?
Sam Altman complaining about mercenary behavior from competitors... Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Guess he's unhappy he's not the one being mercenary in this situation.
This is a bad year to talk about missions and ideologies. Just take the money and run
> hinting that the company is evaluating compensation for the entire research organization.
TL ; DR
Some other company paid more and got engineers to join them because the engineers care more about themselves and their families than some annoying guy's vision.
Poaching. Such a nasty word for merely offering and employee a better deal. A place where his work is not underpaid.
Another said: “Yes we’re quirky and weird, but that’s what makes this place a magical cradle of innovation,” wrote one. “OpenAI is weird in the most magical way. We contain multitudes.”
Do we know what numbers we are talking about here. I’ve heard
1. “So much money your grandchildren don’t need to work”
2. 100M
3. Not 100M
So what is it? I’m just curious, I find 100M hard to believe but Zuck is capable of spending a lot.
this open competition for talent is better than that time all the big tech firms were working to actively suppress wages.
We're talking about a few hundred people here, globally. The entire goal is to suppress everyone else's wages to zero.
In any case this is business and in many cases how business operates. Nice try on Sam's part to try and make it like it's a bad thing and everybody is for the good of the purpose.
That didn't work for the American colonies, Portugal and Spain were very focused on being missionaries and were beaten by the Dutch and Brits that just wanted to make money.
90% of the reason Spain and Portugal explored the new world was for wealth (spices, gold/silver, sugar, brazilwood). The rest of the reason was to spread their religion and increase their national power. Missions only popped up 30 years after they first began colonization.
The Dutch, British, and French were initially brought to the new world because they'd heard how rich it was and wanted a piece of the pie. It took them a while to establish a hold because the Spanish defended it so well (incumbents usually win) and also they kept settling frozen wastelands rather than tropical islands.
The religiously persecuted groups (who were in no way state-sponsored) came 120 years after Spain's first forays.
The motive for settling the colonies in New England was emphatically not to make money.
That really depends on the time period. The puritanical core of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was certainly replaced by commercial/trade interests long before their war with the crown.
The idea that the Spanish and Portuguese colonial effort wasn't droven by economic gain above all else is also beyond silly.
How about the Caribbean?
Name the Caribbean nations that were the "winners"?
You've missed my point entirely.
I believe Portuguese got there looking for a shorter route to India (money) and eventually settled the land for gold, silver, brazilwood, diamonds and sugarcane (money).
Nah, they very much wanted to do missionary work and find Preston John, they invested in a lot of shitty missions for absolutely no reason other than to try to convert people to the church.
Conquerors is a great read on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquerors:_How_Portugal_Forge...
And don't get me wrong, they were very successful at filling their pockets with gold, but could have been even more if they were mostly mercenaries like the brits and the dutch.
In what way did the Spanish lose out to the Dutch or the Brits? Did you only think of North America and forget everything south of the rio grande (and a good deal north of it)?
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Missionaries vs mercenaries? Which company is releasing open source models? Please remind me I forgot.
I'm sorry how is the mission of OpenAI any different than their competitors? They are for-profit they offer absurd salaries, etc.
No no no don’t you get it they have this multi entity “non profit” and something something “capped profit” yet everyone is employed by the for profit. But they just want to give AGI for free right
AI as a religion should scare any investor. Where are the products that you can sell for moolah?
Religion delivers a recurring revenue model that isn't taxed and where criminal confessions can't be used in court if made to a high-ranking company officer. It's the perfect business.
The product is a model that takes knowledge and puts it in a form that can act on it without a human doing the acting.
You sell it to people who don't want to pay other people while getting the same productivity.
Religions and cults are actually extremely lucrative.
For many investors the product is the hype.
They have product that they derive revenue from.
The most popular religions are super wealthy and lucrative
Is he comparing working at OpenAI to religion? Is that not a crazy analogy to make? Cult like behavior to say the least. It's also funny the entire business of AI is poaching content from people.
That's rich. Almost as rich as Sam.
So he believes OpenAI is in some kind of moral or humanitarian mission? Is he lying or just delusional?
"Talent" doesn't make a business successful, and paychecks aren't the reason most people switch jobs. This is like Sam announcing to the world "it sucks working for our company, don't come here".
Hmm on the one hand somebody could have unimaginable wealth but on the other hand they could be in a religion started by a former reddit ceo, it is truly an unsolvable riddle
For a group of people who talk incessantly about the value of unrestricted markets, tech bros sure hate having to participate in free labor markets.
Being a missionary for big ideas doesn't mean dick to a creditor.
Capitalists don't like markets, or at least not the markets that we're told capitalism will bring about. Those markets are supposed to increase competition and drive down prices until companies are making just barely enough to survive. What capitalist wants that for himself? He wants decreased competitions and sky high prices for himself, and increased competition and lower prices for his competitors and suppliers.
> Capitalists don't like markets, or at least not the markets that we're told capitalism will bring about.
The "markets" most people learn about are artificial Econ 101 constructions. They're pedagogical tools for explaining elasticity and competition under the assumption that all widgets are equally and infinitely fungible. An assumption which ignores marginal value, individual preferences, innovation and other things that make real markets.
> What capitalist wants that for himself? He wants decreased competitions and sky high prices for himself, and increased competition and lower prices for his competitors and suppliers.
The capitalist wants to be left to trade as he sees fit without state intervention.
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Like the culture of OpenAI where Microsoft threatened to poach the entire staff so they caved?
I like sama and many other folks at OpenAI, but I have to call things how I see them:
"What Meta is doing will, in my opinion, lead to very deep cultural problems. We will have more to share about this soon but it's very important to me we do it fairly and not just for people who Meta happened to target."
Translation from corporate-speak: "We're not as rich as Meta."
"Most importantly of all, I think we have the most special team and culture in the world. We have work to do to improve our culture for sure; we have been through insane hypergrowth. But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does, and I'm confident we can fix the problems."
Translation from corporate-speak: "We're not as rich as Meta."
"And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way." "Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be." "Missionaries will beat mercenaries."
Translation from corporate-speak: "I am high as a kite." (All companies building AGI claim to be doing it in a good way.)
The perfect corollary is that Altman is as mercenary, if not more, than Zuckerberg, given all the power grabs he did in OpenAI. Even the "Open" in OpenAI is a joke.
He just has less options because OpenAI is not as rich as Meta.
> "But we have the core right in a way that I don't think anyone else quite does"
Translation from corpospeak: "I think my pivot to for-profit is very clever and unique" :)
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Said the guy whose life mission seems to be to convert a non-profit into a for-profit entity.
look around - CA - missionaries have the best real estate. And another related note on connection between strong promotion of devotion to ideas and it is being a good business - the Abrahamic monotheism was a result of the successful marketing campaign "only the donations made here are donations to the real god" of that Temple back then against several other competing ones. (Curiously that the current historic stage of AI, on the cusp, be it 3 or 30 years, of emergence of AGI is somewhat close to that point in history back then. Thus in particular a flood of messiahs and doom sayers would only increase.)
> the Abrahamic monotheism was a result of the successful marketing campaign
I thought it was because everyone was accepted, technically equal, and sins were seen as something inherent and forgivable (at least with Christianity) whereas paganism and polythiesms can tend towards rewarding those with greater resources (who can afford to sacrifice an entire bull every religious cycle), thereby creating a form of religious inequality. At least that was one of the somewhat compelling arguments I heard that described the spread of Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
In short: "Liars prosper in the short term."
They can prosper longer than you can stay liquid or even alive :)
That depends on the regulatory environment and the degree of market monopolization.
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Side note: I'm noticing more and more of these simple, hyperbolic headlines specifically of statements that public figures make. A hallmark of the event being reported is a public figure making a statement that will surely have little to no effect whatsoever.
Calling these statements "slamming" (a specific word I see with curious frequency) is so riling to me because they are so impotent but are described with such violent and decisive language.
Often it's a politician, usually liberal, and their statement is such an ineffectual waste of time, and outwardly it appears wasting time is most of what they do. I consider myself slightly left of center, so seeing "my group" dither and waste time rather than organize and do real work frustrates me greatly. Especially so since we are provided with such contrast from right of center where there is so much decisive action happening at every moment.
I know it's to feed ranking algorithms, which causes me even more irritation. Watching the brain rot get worse in real time...
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"Do Not Be Explicitly Useful"—Strategic Uselessness as Liability Buffer
This is a deliberate obfuscation pattern. If the model is ever consistently useful at a high-risk task (e.g., legal advice, medical interpretation, financial strategy), it triggers legal, regulatory, and reputational red flags. a. Utility → Responsibility
If a system is predictably effective, users will reasonably rely on it.
And reliance implies accountability. Courts, regulators, and the public treat consistent output as an implied service, not just a stochastic parrot.
This is where AI providers get scared: being too good makes you an unlicensed practitioner or liable agent.
b. Avoid “Known Use Cases”
Some companies will actively scrub capabilities once they’re discovered to work “too well.”
For instance:
A model that reliably interprets radiology scans might have that capability turned off.
A model that can write compelling legal motions will start refusing prompts that look too paralegal-ish or insert nonsense case law citation.
I think we see this a lot from ChatGPT. It's constantly getting worse in real world uses while exceeding at benchmarks. They're likely, and probably forced, to cheat on benchmarks by using "leaked" data.
I hope xAI wins. I think Sam's self-portrayal as a missionary has a lot of irony - I see him as the ultimate mercenary.
It's always challenging to judge based entirely on public perceptions, but at some point public evidence adds up. The board firing, getting maybe fired from YC (disputed), people leaving to start anthropic because of him, people stating they don't want him in charge of AGI. All the other execs leaving. His lying in congress, his lying to the board, his general affect just seems off - not in an aspie way, but in some dishonest way. Yeah it's subjective, but it's a point and it's different from Zuckerberg, Musk etc. who come across as earnest. Even PG said if dropped on an island of cannibals you'd come back and Sam would be king.
I'm rooting for basically any of the other (American) players in the game to win.
At least Zuck is paying something close to the value these people might generate instead of having them sign hostile agreements to claw back their equity and then feigning ignorance. If NBA all stars get 100M$+ contracts, it's not crazy for a John Carmack type to command the same or more - the hard part is being able to identify the talent, not justify the value created by the leverage of the correct talent (which is huge).
Couldn't think of a worse steward of AI than Meta/Zuck (not a fan of OpenAI either). One of the most insidious companies out there.
Sad to see Nat Friedman go there. He struck me as "one of the good ones" who was keen to use tech for positive change. I don't think that is achievable at Meta
But if they give you tens of millions of reasons to go there . . .
For Sam to seemingly claim that Meta is hiring mercenaries while OpenAI is hiring missionaries seems a bit counter to OpenAI's mission of having closed weight models vs an open weights at Meta.
I could definitely see those who are 'missionaries' wanting to give it away. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agreed
Crafted by Rajat
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