alt Hacker NewsKokotajlo in particular is notable for being the guy who quit OpenAI in 2024 in protest of their policy of requiring researchers to abide by a non-disparagement agreement to retain their equity. In the end OpenAI caved and changed their policy, but if he was lying all along to inflate the value of his shares, it would have been quite a 4d chess move of him to gamble the shares themselves on doing so.
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MadxX79 • yesterday at 8:20 PM
Isn't it just that he left way before gpt-5, then? At that point a sufficiently naive person could have believed that scaling was going to lead to AGI, but that sort of optimism died after he was already an outsider.
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Not quite.
Kokotajlo quit because he didn't think OpenAI would be good stewards of AGI (non-disparagement wasn't in the picture yet). As part of his exit OpenAI asked him to sign a non-disparagement as a condition of keeping his equity. He refused and gave up his equity.
To the best of my knowledge he lost that equity permanently and no longer has any stake in OpenAI (even if this episode later led to an outcry against OpenAI causing them to remove the non-disparagement agreement from future exits).