Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.

I think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO").

(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)

talent poaching is something pretty common in tech, google knows something like this can and will happen, so does openAI

also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions

Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.

i dont keep up on this stuff so maybe i am missing some context.

should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?

What a crazy take lol. Even by HN's standard this is crazy. First of all the idea that an employee should be loyal is bad enough. And the following statements are only getting worse. Leaving Google empty-handed? How do you think corporations work? Google chose to publish their research results, not him.

Oh no, he wasn't loyal to the soulless trillion dollar mega corp :( what a terrible person

> Well in terms of employers loyalty

I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.

What are you talking about?

The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai

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