You're not a founder, you're a gig worker
Let’s break it down:
• OpenAI researchers helped build the most valuable model IP on the planet. They got six figures and a mission patch. Microsoft got the exclusive license. Sam got a multi-billion-dollar for-profit arm and total control.
• Zuck shows up and offers those same researchers $100M+ to switch stories. No nonprofit halo, no saving humanity. Just compute, comp, and “build God with us.”
• Sam cries foul. Why? Because the myth breaks: 1 that you’re part of a meritocracy 2 that you’re “on the journey” 3 that it’s about ideals, not exits.
Meanwhile…
• Scale AI workers in the Philippines were getting ghosted on pay while tagging data for $2/hr. Alexandr Wang becomes a billionaire. Meta buys half the company. Lays off 200. Wang walks into a new gig.
• Anthropic and OpenAI staff who helped push frontier alignment? They watched their orgs raise at $15–80B valuations and get nothing unless they were on the secret early cap table.
• Google DeepMind researchers? They’ve shipped more papers than any other lab. Most of them will retire with zero startup upside, while Google repackages their work as “Gemini.”
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What happened?
Tech work used to come with a story: “You’re an owner. You’re early. You’ll make it.”
But that’s done. Today’s tech worker is pre-union labor in a zero-equity gig economy with a gold badge.
You’re just in time labor for capital-scale compute. And you’re still being told you’re a chosen one.
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Who wins?
• Founders who lock the cap table before Series B
• VCs with double-digit preferences
• Corporates like Microsoft and Meta, who now own the model stacks and the labor
Everyone else? You’re a smart mercenary with branding issues.
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Zuck isn’t the villain here in fact he’s briefly rebalancing things.
Sam’s mad because the theater curtain fell—and half the cast walked off stage for a better
8 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 20.2 ms ] threadZuck isn't paying $200m per employee he's spending $200m on marketing and the droves of talent that will come and work for far less on the promise of a big pay out and prestige...
The only thing that has changed is the phrasing of the headlines.
Start a business. Otherwise, acknowledge that you are trading economic upside for safety.
I do understand the frustration, especially if you have been affected personally, but it's just the way the world works. Starting a company isn't easy either, and as I'm finding out requires a completely different skillset.
I suppose the Harley-Davidson salesman told you that the motorbike would get you all the women too.
Investment is always about risk, and being a early-stage employee of a startup was always a matter of buying your shares with labour rather than capital, but the payoff was always a risky proposition.
Nothing in your post is special about AI. The only difference is the out of pocket valuations that a company releases a product and immediately it’s 50B before demonstrating any ability to run or manage a business, generate profit, etc.
The view that “we must distribute Google+NVIDIA+OpenAI+Meta+Microsoft market cap to the AI researchers who paved the way for the GPT papers” is noble maybe, but doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense
For the rest of the industry, the capital (Meta's 5 GW data center etc.) and operational ($200/month subscriptions for developer tools) are super troubling; however I can't help but observe that the practical impact on my day-to-day so far (with LLMs for search and programming assistants like LLM autocomplete and Claude) has been majorly positive.