The Lost Reading Items of Ilya Sutskever's AI Reading List

In a lot of big coporat-ey places, there is a very restrictive retention policy due to legal reasons.

If your stated IT policy is that "all mail is automatically deleted after 3 months" then that reduces your risk to discovery procedures. And since it is a published, global policy, you cannot be held in contempt of court of prosecuted for destruction of evidence.

I actually have a very hard time believing that a court is going to find that a company that only retains emails for three months isn't doing something like engaging in spoliation.

The Hacker News link he references (which seems to quote Carmack from personal communication) says Meta, not OpenAI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34646759

Author here, good catch! Thanks for pointing this out, I added a note with a correction now.

On the flip side I have never worked at a company that did not have retention policy. This includes startups and large corporate companies. Retention policies are pretty common.