How much do you think that your decisions affect Google’s stock price? Yes maybe more AI means a higher price, but on the margin how much will you be pushing that relative to a replacement AI person? And mostly the stock price fluctuates on stuff like how well the ads business is doing, macro factors, and I guess occasionally whether we gave a bad demo.
It feels to me like the incentive is just so diffuse that I wouldn’t worry about it much.
Your idea of just donating extra gains also seems fine.
As I said in the dialogue, I think as a safety engineer, especially as someone who might end up close to the literal or metaphorical “stop button”, the effect here seems to me to be potentially quite large, especially in aggregate.
FWIW as an executive working on safety at Google, I basically never consider my normal working activities in light of what they would do to Google’s stock price.
The exception is around public communication. There I’m very careful because it’s asymmetrical—I could potentially cause a pr disaster that would affect the stock, but I don’t see how I could give a talk that’s so good that it helps it.
Maybe a plug pulling situation would be different, but I also think it’s basically impossible for it to be a unilateral situation, and if we’re in such a moment, I hardly think any damage would be contained to Google’s stock price, versus say the market as a whole.
Hmm, I do think that is something that seems pretty likely to change, I think?
I expect safety researchers to be consulted quite a bit on regulations that will affect Google pretty heavily and i.e. any given high-level safety researcher currently has a decent chance to testify in front of congress, and like, I would want them to feel comfortable taking actions that definitely would have a large effect on the Google stock price (like saying that Google’s AGI program should be shut down completely, or nationalized, or Google should be held liable for some damages caused by its AI systems).
OpenAI employees currently seem like they can’t/won’t say public critical statements about OpenAI because of equity considerations. This seems like a situation where it is important not to have your public communication affected by thinking about stock prices.
I would be very unhappy if a non disparagement agreement were sprung on me when I left the company. And I would be very reluctant to sign one entering any company.
Fair enough! But perhaps disparaging enough things could affect the value of equity, though probably by less than refusing to sign a non-disparagement agreement and not getting your vested PPUs.
Does that make you reconsider whether having the equity might give you action-altering (and, particularly, speech-altering) incentives?
How much do you think that your decisions affect Google’s stock price? Yes maybe more AI means a higher price, but on the margin how much will you be pushing that relative to a replacement AI person? And mostly the stock price fluctuates on stuff like how well the ads business is doing, macro factors, and I guess occasionally whether we gave a bad demo.
It feels to me like the incentive is just so diffuse that I wouldn’t worry about it much.
Your idea of just donating extra gains also seems fine.
As I said in the dialogue, I think as a safety engineer, especially as someone who might end up close to the literal or metaphorical “stop button”, the effect here seems to me to be potentially quite large, especially in aggregate.
FWIW as an executive working on safety at Google, I basically never consider my normal working activities in light of what they would do to Google’s stock price.
The exception is around public communication. There I’m very careful because it’s asymmetrical—I could potentially cause a pr disaster that would affect the stock, but I don’t see how I could give a talk that’s so good that it helps it.
Maybe a plug pulling situation would be different, but I also think it’s basically impossible for it to be a unilateral situation, and if we’re in such a moment, I hardly think any damage would be contained to Google’s stock price, versus say the market as a whole.
Hmm, I do think that is something that seems pretty likely to change, I think?
I expect safety researchers to be consulted quite a bit on regulations that will affect Google pretty heavily and i.e. any given high-level safety researcher currently has a decent chance to testify in front of congress, and like, I would want them to feel comfortable taking actions that definitely would have a large effect on the Google stock price (like saying that Google’s AGI program should be shut down completely, or nationalized, or Google should be held liable for some damages caused by its AI systems).
OpenAI employees currently seem like they can’t/won’t say public critical statements about OpenAI because of equity considerations. This seems like a situation where it is important not to have your public communication affected by thinking about stock prices.
Does this change your thinking any?
I would be very unhappy if a non disparagement agreement were sprung on me when I left the company. And I would be very reluctant to sign one entering any company.
Luckily we don’t have those at Google Deepmind.
Fair enough! But perhaps disparaging enough things could affect the value of equity, though probably by less than refusing to sign a non-disparagement agreement and not getting your vested PPUs.
Does that make you reconsider whether having the equity might give you action-altering (and, particularly, speech-altering) incentives?