This is actually pretty surprising to me, since a financially motivated person would normally wait until a better deal, and just collect their paycheck in the meantime.

There's also no guarantee that Altman will really start a new company, or be able to collect funding to hire everyone quickly. I wonder if these people are just very loyal to Sam.

Or they could be loyal to the e/acc cult.

> This is actually pretty surprising to me, since a financially motivated person would normally wait until a better deal, and just collect their paycheck in the meantime.

I imagine you need to signal that you want in on the deal by departing. Get founder equity.

Even if he had started a new company, there was no way a dozen employees were getting founder equity for showing loyalty

This. Very accurate. At the end of they day this is a battle between academics and capitalists and what they stand for. We generally know how this typically goes…

I don't see many academics indulge in sensationalist doomsaying. That's the real difference here. SETI wouldn't and couldn't seek grants by proposing to contact murderous aliens.

I think academics have a general faith in goodwill of intelligence.Benevolence may be a convergent phenomenon. Maybe the mechanisms of reason themselves require empathy and goodness

Huh? There's plenty of AI doomerism amongst academics, see Bengio, Hinton, etc...

Hinton makes cliched statements as if he's not given much thought to safety but feels obliged for whatever reason

The capitalists run it into the ground while the academics stand around confused asking each other what happened?

How do you know that? Maybe they wanted to ship AI products at an unprecedented speed at the most prestigious AI company in the world.