It's the only reasonable choice you can make. As an employee with stock options you do not want to get trashed on Hackernews because this affects your income directly if you try to conduct a secondary share sale or plan to hold until IPO.
Once the IPO is done, and the lockup period is expired, then a lot of employees are planning to sell their shares. But until that, even if the product is behind competitors there is no way you can admit it without putting your money at risk.
I know HN commenters like to see themselves as contrarians, as do I sometimes, but man… this seems like a serious stretch to assume such malicious intent that an employee of the world’s top AI name would astroturf a random HN thread about a picture on a blog.
I’m fairly comfortable taking this OpenAI employee’s comment at face value.
Frankly, I don’t think a HN thread will make a difference to his financial situation, anyway…