I’m wondering if this might have stemmed from A) OpenAI making it a nightmare for him, B) feeling despondent about the case, or C) personal things unrelated to the lawsuit. Kind of like what happened with the Boeing whistleblower after he had been fighting them for years and Boeing retaliated against him and got away with it. I don’t know if we’ll ever know though.
I think there might also be a bit of d) OpenAI has weird nerds defending the honour of their AIfu.
Imagine whistleblowing about unethical behaviour and than have thousands of nerds need to argue about how that what you did technically isnt whistleblowing.
In any case, I think we have to acknowledge that companies are capable of turning a whistleblower’s life into hell without ever physically laying a hand on them.
Yeah, it’s always a combination of factors and I have no doubt the stress didn’t help, but the idea that OpenAI would put a hit on some guy no one’s heard of over his opinions on copyright infringement is laughable. Let’s not do that.
I’m guessing it went like “we will make sure that you’ll never be able to land another job in this expertise”
He quit the job in August and didn’t find another one yet
