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Well, my point is that it's already largely irrelevant what they do. Many of their talented engineers have moved on to other companies, some new startups and some already-established ones. The interesting new models and products are not being produced by OpenAI so much any more.
I wouldn't be surprised if "safety alignment" is one of the reasons, too. There are a lot of folks in tech who really just want to build neat things and it feels oppressive to be in a company that's likely to lock away the things they build if they turn out to be too neat.
When did this happen? I know some of the leadership departed but I hadn’t heard of it from the rank and file.
I’m not saying necessarily that you’re wrong; definitely it seems like something has changed between the days of GPT-3 and GPT-4 up until the present day. I just hadn’t heard of it.
I’m not sure this is true for AI. Some of the people who are most worried about AI safety are the AI engineers. I have some impression that OpenAI’s safety focus was why so many people liked working for them, back when they were doing groundbreaking work.
AI engineers are not a unitary group with opinions all aligned. Some of them really like money too. Or just want to build something that changes the world.
I don't know of a specific "when" where a bunch of engineers left OpenAI all at once. I've just seen a lot of articles over the past year with some variation of " is a startup founded by former OpenAI engineers." There might have been a surge when Altman was briefly ousted, but that was brief enough that I wouldn't expect a visible spike on the graph.