On December 7, Beijing time, at the end of last month, when the farce of the OpenAI board of directors to remove CEO Sam Altman (Sam Altman) entered a critical juncture, OpenAI employees issued a joint letter, threatening to resign collectively and follow Altman to join Microsoft.However, this is not what they really think.
Multiple current and former OpenAI employees said in interviews that this was just a bold bluff they came up with and that most employees didn't want to actually work for Microsoft. One current OpenAI employee admitted that "no one really wants to go to Microsoft," despite nearly all employees signing an open letter threatening to follow Altman out. He said that of all the major tech companies, Microsoft is "big and slow," which is the opposite of OpenAI employees' view of their startup as "small and fast."
The employee admitted,Many OpenAI employees signed the open letter "under pressure".The letter was drafted by a group of the most influential senior employees, and at stake is the industry status and equity they have accumulated over the years, as well as higher pay. The employee revealed that these veteran employees began calling other employees on Sunday night to urge them to sign the open letter.
“We’ve all chosen to leave these big companies in order to break things, move fast, and build exciting things,” the employee said."The bureaucracy of a large company like Microsoft is suffocating."
He added that even if OpenAI employees made good on their threats to join Microsoft, they would likely leave at the first opportunity for other AI startups such as Anthropic, hugsFace and Cohere.