“OpenAI Employees Really, Really Did Not Want to Go Work for Microsoft”, 2023-12-06 ():
At one point late last month, Microsoft promised to hire Sam Altman and the rest of OpenAI’s staff.
No one really wanted to join Microsoft, current and former OpenAI employees told Business Insider.
Abandoning OpenAI would have meant losing out on lucrative pay, equity, and a rich tender offer.
…Pressure to sign: Given the absence of interest in joining Microsoft, many OpenAI employees “felt pressured” to sign the open letter, the employee admitted. The letter itself was drafted by a group of longtime staffers who have the most clout and money at stake with years of industry standing and equity built up, as well as higher pay. They began calling other staffers late on Sunday night, urging them to sign, the employee explained.
…This was an audacious bluff and most staffers had no real interest in working for Microsoft, several current and former employees told Business Insider…Some Microsoft insiders told BI that hiring everyone from OpenAI was seen internally as a last resort. And for at least some of those OpenAI employees, there’s relief that they don’t actually have to go work for Microsoft. “It was sort of a bluff that ultimately worked”, explained one former employee who’s still in touch with current staffers. This person, and others who spoke with BI, asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters. One current OpenAI employee admitted that, despite nearly everyone on staff signing up to follow Altman out the door, “No one wanted to go to Microsoft.” This person called the company “the biggest and slowest” of all the major tech companies—the exact opposite of how OpenAI employees see their startup…“We all left these big corporations to move fast and build exciting things”, the employee said. “The bureaucracy of something as big as Microsoft is soul crushing.” While OpenAI staffers would have followed through with their threat and joined Microsoft, they probably would have left at the first opportunity for other AI startups such as Anthropic, Hugging Face, and Cohere, the employee added…Another former OpenAI employee agreed, saying people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”…“Even though we have a partnership with Microsoft, internally, we have no respect for their talent bar”, the current OpenAI employee told BI. “It rubbed people the wrong way to entertain being managed by them.”
…A laughable idea: Microsoft agreed to hire all OpenAI employees at their same level of compensation, but this was only a verbal agreement in the heat of the moment. Another OpenAI employee openly laughed at the idea that Microsoft would have paid departing staffers for the equity they would have lost by following Altman.
A scheduled tender offer, which was about to let employees sell their existing vested equity to outside investors, would have been canceled. All that equity would have been worth “nothing”, this employee said. The former OpenAI employee estimated that, of the hundreds of people who signed the letter saying they would leave, “probably 70% of the folks on that list were like, ‘Hey, can we, you know, have this tender go through?’”