Leopold Aschenbrenner: commitment

Transcript context

…You were one of like eight people or something? Not that many people. I think the two most senior people who didn’t sign were Andrej and Jan, who have both since left. On the letter, by Monday morning when it was circulating, I thought it was probably appropriate for the board to resign because they had lost too much credibility and trust with the employees. But I thought the letter had issues. It didn’t call for an independent board, which is a basic of corporate governance. In other discussions, I pressed leadership for OpenAI to abide by its public commitments. I raised tough questions about whether it was consistent with the OpenAI mission and the national interest to partner with authoritarian dictatorships to build the core infrastructure for AGI. It’s a free country. That’s what I love about it. We talked about it. They have no obligation to keep me on staff. It would have been reasonable for them to come to me and say, "we’re taking the company in a different direction. We disagree with your point of view. We don’t trust you to toe the company line anymore. Thank you so much for your work at OpenAI, but it’s time to part ways." That would have made sense. We had started diverging on important issues. I came in very excited and aligned with OpenAI, but that changed over time. That would have been a very amicable way to part ways. It’s a shame how it went down. All that being said, I really want to emphasize that there are a lot of incredible people at OpenAI, and it was an incredible privilege to work with them. Overall, I’m extremely grateful for my time there. Now there’s been reporting about an NDA that former employees have to sign to access their vested equity. Did you sign such an NDA?…

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