I'm wondering how the employees can move to a company doing essentially the exact same thing without any violation of privileged information from their old jobs.

The only thing I can assume is that there's nothing particularly proprietary about anything OpenAI has done, its just an issue of scale. But if that's the case, it would make them not that valuable, as anyone willing to invest enough to reach that same scale using the same non proprietary techniques would be just as good.

or am I missing something?