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rvnx

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Companies are not your friend who you need to be loyal to. There's a reason noncompetes are illegal in California.

Think of it like if this:

Novo Nordisk hired you to find a cure for obesity.

- This is your full time job, and this is what you are paid for. The company also invests in a lab, in machines, in other employees, etc, so all of you together can figure out.

You find Wegovy, and poof, you run away with the recipe and sell the product on your own.

- Yes, you just scammed your boss, you made him believe that you were working for him, but actually you were using the company resources to your sole benefit.

It's not about loyalty, it's about integrity.

It's the same type of people whom you hire and pay to develop a platform, and then they steal the code, and never deliver this platform to you. Terrible business practices, but isn't it how Facebook happened too ?

This is not at all what happened. They did deliver, in the form of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, which Google made public. They took nothing from Google that wasn't already public.

Unless you think that employees are like indentured servants, and Novo Nordisk owns not only Wegovy but the people who work on it.

The original traitorous eight who left Shockley to found Fairchild semiconductor are what literally gave Silicon Valley its name. You want to keep valuable employees, you got to treat them really well. Given the number of tech giants coming out of silicon valley, there's something to that being a cornerstone of its culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

You do realize Google received a patent on the transformer right?

I think it becomes somewhat more defensible when considering that the alternative was operatiny Google's policy (before the advent of competition) of "these models would bring unknown dangers in the hands of the public, we shouldn't release them until we better understand the implications" (or perhaps more selfishly "these effectively nullify all our detectors of generated text, if released they would instantly lose us the war on SEO").

(recall that OpenAI thought GPT-2 was too powerful to release for approximately tantamount reasons)

talent poaching is something pretty common in tech, google knows something like this can and will happen, so does openAI

also "empty handed" is just unnecesarily dramatic, he left all the knwoledge base he helped build, that's google's IP and is worth m(b?)illions

Not sure what kind of take is that in the light of so many layoffs done by companies despite making profits. It was at-will employment, its over and people moved on. If there is/was any wrong doing then the companies have enough resources to pursue individuals.

i dont keep up on this stuff so maybe i am missing some context.

should he have been obligated to stay at google for the rest of his career?

Google essentially (but not exactly) aqui-hired Shazeer from character.ai in a deal that cost them $2.7B, with Shazeer personally making something in the region of $1B from it. Presumably there was some sort of retention period specified in the contract (you are not going to pay $2.7B to hire someone, then let them leave with no penalty the next day), but in the event Shazeer only stayed for 22 months before now leaving. Maybe he paid some penalty for leaving, but if so presumably more than compensated for by OpenAI.

What a crazy take lol. Even by HN's standard this is crazy. First of all the idea that an employee should be loyal is bad enough. And the following statements are only getting worse. Leaving Google empty-handed? How do you think corporations work? Google chose to publish their research results, not him.

Oh no, he wasn't loyal to the soulless trillion dollar mega corp :( what a terrible person

> Well in terms of employers loyalty

I have no dog in this race as I'm not fond of either OpenAI or Google.... but employees not being loyal to their big tech employers is a wild thing to be concerned about in 2026 when year after year many large tech companies (Google very prominently among them) continually post record profits and still lay people off by the thousands.

What are you talking about?

The Attention is all you need paper has Google logo, not character.ai

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