Everyone works for money unless you are refusing to take your salary.

Lots of people working for AI labs have other AI labs they could work for, so their decisions will be made based on differences of remuneration, expected work/role, location, and employer culture/mission.

The claim above is that OpenAI loses to other labs on most of the metrics (obviously depends on the person) and so many researchers have gone there based on higher compensation.

Not what the phrase means, when you decide to take a vastly less lucrative offer you’re working for something other than money.

How many people do that out of the working population?

Millions take a noticeable pay cut, it suppress wages in many fields.

It’s one of the reasons so many CEO’s hype up their impact. SpaceX would’ve needed far higher compensation if engineers weren’t enthusiastic about space etc.

Probably most people working for non-profits or any level of government.

Arguably anyone who's working in a something they're "passionate" about.

Well - only if they had alternatives.

Obviously this is not the case, and you're deliberately choosing to misunderstand the point.

> OpenAI had a very public departure from being for-good to being for-money last year...

Were they ever “for good”? With Sam “let’s scam people for their retinas in exchange for crypto” Altman as CEO? I sincerely question that.

There was never a shift, the mask just fell off and they stopped pretending as much.

It was originally called "open" and run as a not-for-profit and a lot of people joined - and even joined the board - on that understanding.

I'm not sure that's an answer to the question of whether or not it was ever for good

It’s not like tech companies have a playbook for becoming “sticky” in peoples’ lives and businesses by bait and switch.

They still call it “open” by the way. Every other nonprofit is paying equivalent salaries and has published polemics about essentially world takeover, right?

Who would have believed it in the first place? Not I.

There are options other than money and virtue signaling for why you'd work a given job.

Some people might just like working with competent people, doing work near the forefront of their field, while still being in an environment where their work is shipped to a massively growing user base.

Even getting 1 of those 3 is not a guarantee in most jobs.

While your other comment stands, there is no separating yourself with the moral impetus of who you're working for.

If your boss is building a bomb to destroy a major city but you just want to work on hard technical problems and make good money at it, it doesn’t absolve you of your actions.

I don't see how this counter to my point.

If you worked at OpenAI post "GPT-3 is too dangerous to open source, but also we're going to keep going", you are probably someone who more concerned the optics of working on something good or world changing.

And realistically most people I know well enough who work at Open AI and wouldn't claim the talent, or the shipping culture, or something similar are people who love the idea of being able to say they're going to solve all humanity's problems with "GPT 999, Guaranteed Societal Upheaval Edition."

> There are options other than money and virtue signaling for why you'd work a given job.

Doing good normally isn't for virtue signaling.

Working at a employer that says they're doing good isn't the same as actually doing good.

Especially when said employer is doing cartoonishly villainous stuff like bragging how they'll need to build a doomsday bunker to protect their employees from all from the great evi... er good, their ultimate goal would foist upon the wider world.

Good point. I was thinking the "actually doing good". Absolutely there's a lot of empty corporate virtue signalling, and also some individuals like that. But there's still individuals who genuinely want to actually do good.