OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

This article is pretty clearly clickbait.

If you have a team of burners, jokingly burning an effigy of the thing you are committed to combatting isn't a "spiritual" action as much a nod to Burning Man.

At one point I worked in an open office where the sales team would cheer and throw a Nerf football to each other when they'd make a sale.

It'd be weird as shit to write an article on that behavior claiming that the sales team at that company was suddenly adopting professional sports practices.

If you want to know what's actually going on behind closed doors there, this The Atlantic piece is excellent and in part comes from an upcoming book by one of the authors whose been researching that very topic.

The TLDR is that rapidly growing a product that's become an unexpected success while trying to stay committed to long term research goals is a giant mess.

OpenAI employees don't really exist, everything that has been going on is just a rogue AI fucking with us!

what is happening over there?

The world told them that their shit don't stink, and they believed it.

Both can be nuts

the AI told him to burn effigies, is that it

Honestly, I believe it.

I have worked at an amazon warehouse. Bezos was never referred to as anything but Jeff and every day during the stretches we would be told how impressed Jeff was with how well we were doing.

At Costco, we would have daily meetings. At least twice a month the assistant manager would interject to remind everybody that they had once had lunch with the original CEO. There was also this strange creation myth of how the company was able to dominate the grocery industry within less time than everybody else. It involved the CEO inventing a new way to filet a Chinook salmon or something like that.

Cult behavior is surprisingly strong within corporate America.

Usually a good idea to take early reporting with a grain of salt. Thorough investigation to get to sound conclusions takes a long-ass time, where drama, rumors and propaganda are much, much faster.

I mean, it's clearly a meltdown of some sort, but going to need some more corroboration here to really know wtf is actually going on. Not anonymous corroboration either, ideally.

It could be worse, and tech startups like this can have some weird practices. One company I worked at literally burned tech debt. They wrote it down and burned it. (It never really fixed the core problems either. Imagine that.)

Tech startups can be a little cultish at times. I have seen super healthy cult behavior and also super weird cult behavior. Motivating younger engineers can be a challenge, so if it works, whatever. (I never cared about that kind of stuff as long as I got free food.)

As long as nothing turns religious or harmful, I don't care. Good engineers can be some very unique people and most likely have some kind of underlying mental disorder. (I am absolutely not being derogatory! Without a doubt, I am in that category of engineer as well, but I am much older and restrained these days.)

Effigy, eh? Yeah, nothing burns like an effigy.

"Always use a pink pipette tip holder to bang the glass so your polyacrylamide gel spreads evenly."

• the postdoc Janae at my lab in the '90s

Behind the Bastards has a pretty good episode on him, pretty sure Aleister Crowley shows up.

Well that was a hell of a ride.