_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Greg Brockman interview [video]
greazy wrote 22 hours 36 min ago:
Its really telling the example of personal AI/AGI given was booking
tickets to a show.
portly wrote 1 day ago:
Does everyone at OpenAI vocal fry like that?
intev wrote 1 day ago:
If anyone else doesn't want to listen to the whole thing:
(HTM) [1]: https://apecast.app/podcast/the-knowledge-project/episode/open...
photochemsyn wrote 1 day ago:
Obviously OpenAI betrayed their stated mandate by going to the largely
closed-source API-access business model, which is the one that
Anthropic, Google, and xAI also adopted, i.e. the high-margin hosted
model businesses, while DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and
Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open
weight models.
I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint:
theyâre building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US
corporation might like having some of its employees making core
contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The
payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a
great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business
world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the
compiler and extract rents for access.
The thing about infrastructure is this: you donât get a direct
financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which
make other economic activity possible) unless you have some
ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how
the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). Thatâs all
the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on
systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as
inputs.
At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a
steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it
would be good for their reputation.
bix6 wrote 1 day ago:
I just donât understand why a non-profit was allowed to do this. Does
this not set a precedent that non-profit doesnât actually mean
anything? You can just use a favorable structure until itâs time to
enrich yourself.
mattmaroon wrote 1 day ago:
Most nonprofits donât have a mission that would benefit from a
transition or a trillion dollar product to sell. There would be no
real way to profit they wanted to.
granzymes wrote 1 day ago:
I think it would be helpful for you to clarify which part of the
chain you found objectionable:
- in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a Delaware nonprofit
- in 2017, OpenAI discovered the scaling laws and realized they
needed far more compute (and thus money) than they had initially
anticipated
- that discovery precipitated a series of negotiations between the
founders on how to restructure OpenAI to raise more money for
compute, ultimately resulting in Muskâs departure when the other
founders would not give him control
- in 2018, OpenAI attempted to dramatically increase its fundraising
despite Elon ending his contributions, but raised only $50M of its
$100M goal
- in 2019, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary in order to
attract funding from commercial entities
- the nonprofit hired an independent assessor to value its IP, and
then transferred that IP to the for-profit for fair value (around $60
million in 2019)
- the OpenAI nonprofit received a right to 100x capped return on its
IP investment, or $6B, once the for-profit began making a profit. The
nonprofit also received the right to the residual profit after all
future investors reached their caps
- in 2019, OpenAIâs capped-profit received $1B in investment from
Microsoft. OpenAI later received $2B from Microsoft in 2021 and $10B
in 2023 as compute scaling continued
- Microsoft received a cap of 20x on its $1B investment, and 6x on
its $2B and $10B investments, for a total of $92B target redemption
- in 2025, OpenAIâs for-profit entity recapitalized from a
capped-profit entity with residuals flowing to the nonprofit to a
traditional public benefit corporation with traditional equity
- in exchange for the residual (and 100x profit cap on the original
$60M transfer) the nonprofit received a 26% equity stake in the
for-profit. That stake is currently valued at around $200B
All of the above is from the record in Musk v. Altman, thanks to
which we now have all the details. The upshot for the nonprofit is
that it transferred IP worth around $60M in 2019 for rights to $6B in
future profit, and then ended up with $200B in equity after the
recapitalization. I see a lot of people in this thread assuming that
the nonprofit no longer exists, which is not true.
55555 wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks for listing all this out. I took issue with it in theory,
but now that I see it written out, I don't find any of it
objectionable. People act we though the nonprofit doesn't exist
anymore.
overgard wrote 1 day ago:
I find it unsettling that a company who wants to eradicate the
middle class's ability to make a living, possibly bring about the
singularity (I don't think they'll accomplish it, but they want
to), and are actively creating one of the most massive bubbles
we've ever seen is somehow a "public benefit" company. Absolutely
nothing they're doing is to the public's benefit.
bwhiting2356 wrote 1 day ago:
How can something be both a bubble and also eradicate the middle
class's ability to make a living? There are reasonable people
making the case for both of these things, that investment in AI
will fall flat and that AI will be too powerful. Coalition forces
are pushing them together into an anti-AI camp, but there's a
contradiction. Is it too powerful or not powerful enough?
mannanj wrote 1 day ago:
It can represent a few peoples interests, who aren't middle
class, and eradicate the middle class. AI can fall flat in its
affect and benefit for most people, while helping a few people.
It can thusly be powerful for a few people, and not powerful
enough for most people. (I feel we may see special models that
most people will never access, while a few get those most
powerful models).
Did that answer your questions and address the contradictions?
bwhiting2356 wrote 1 day ago:
The parent comment referred to AI as a bubble, and what
you're describing I would not call a bubble.
mannanj wrote 18 hours 12 min ago:
You would not, and I would say what I am saying doesn't
support nor deny a bubble's existence. I think that would
be an error in thinking to conclude what I said supports
bubbles.
senordevnyc wrote 1 day ago:
This is super valuable, thank you so much. It makes it clear just
how misinformed 99% of HN seems to be when ranting about how Altman
perpetrated the greatest theft in history or some such bullshit
(conveniently always failing to mention that he holds NO equity in
OpenAI, despite how easy it would have been for him to do so).
Appreciated!
bix6 wrote 1 day ago:
The whole process has been a circus but I found the AG waiver
rather frustrating. Nothing like negotiating with a charity to get
an IOU that itâll be charitable.
(HTM) [1]: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bo...
dooglius wrote 1 day ago:
The objectional part would be:
- in 2019, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary in order to
attract funding from commercial entities
Particularly if it creates a conflict of interest for anyone making
decisions on behalf of the nonprofit
az226 wrote 22 hours 30 min ago:
100% disagree.
- in 2025, OpenAIâs for-profit entity recapitalized from a
capped-profit entity with residuals flowing to the nonprofit to a
traditional public benefit corporation with traditional equity
This is the egregious part. Before full for profit conversion it
was worth $300B. Then after $850B.
A true fiduciary would set an auction and that would set the
price for for profit valuation. And then all existing investors
would keep the value of their positions, but would be diluted
because capped profit is worth much less than unlimited profit
and residuals.
But, they sold it to themselves for a bargain basement price. The
nonprofit lost out on $300B or so. Maybe more.
It was not an armâs length transaction. It was self-dealing.
senordevnyc wrote 15 hours 41 min ago:
I may not be fully understanding it, but if the value went from
$300B to $850B because of the conversion, then you canât
claim that the additional value was stolen from the nonprofit.
As long as the entity was unconverted, there was a limit to
what the market would value it at. Is this off?
granzymes wrote 1 day ago:
I'm curious why you think that creating a for-profit subsidiary
is objectionable, since it is extremely common for large
nonprofits. A good example for this forum would be Mozilla, but
many more were mentioned during the trial.
Also curious what conflicts of interest you have in mind.
dooglius wrote 1 day ago:
Just because other organizations do it doesn't make it not
objectionable, and there have been many threads on HN
criticizing Mozilla's structure along similar lines.
In this case, my understanding is that e.g. Altman is on the
nonprofit board and also makes big $$$ from the for-profit,
which seems like a pretty big conflict of interest.
granzymes wrote 1 day ago:
HN is of course not a monolith, but from my recollection most
of the frustration and criticism w/r/t Mozilla is about its
product strategy and executive team, not its corporate
structure. Some other examples of nonprofits with for-profit
subsidiaries include National Geographic, the AARP, and most
research universities.
On Altman, the trial showed that Altman does not have any
equity in the for-profit. He does have some indirect exposure
through his investments in YC, since YC has a small position
in OpenAI.
az226 wrote 22 hours 29 min ago:
He tried to get 11% equity but the trial made that
impossible.
senordevnyc wrote 15 hours 39 min ago:
Source?
93po wrote 1 day ago:
worse than that is the $60 million sale price, which was
comically and absurdly low. Elon himself said he was willing to
buy it for significantly more than that and the fact that it
wasn't able to go to the highest bidder just shows that it was
bullshit
granzymes wrote 1 day ago:
Elon's purchase offer was in 2025, after the success of ChatGPT
showed that OpenAI's IP (much if not most of it developed after
2019) could be commercially valuable. I think it is also
debatable whether Elon's purchase offer was in good faith.
It was not clear in 2019 that OpenAI's IP would ultimately be
worth billions. That was well before the current AI boom.
tyre wrote 1 day ago:
Wait, no, not at all. A non-profit shouldnât have to take the
highest bidder regardless. The whole _point_ of a non-profit is
to act beyond purely short-term financial gains.
âElon buying this doesnât align with the missionâ is a
completely normal, reasonable, and healthy response for most
non-profits.
Whatâs great is that we donât need to speculate about a
counter factual. He did end up building a chatbot! Whose
defining differentiating feature is revenge porn.
achierius wrote 1 day ago:
But the decision is still subject to heavy scrutiny; in fact,
more than with normal for profit corporations. It does not
seem like the board acted in the best interests of the
nonprofit here, they acted in their own.
senordevnyc wrote 15 hours 38 min ago:
How did the board personally benefit?
beering wrote 1 day ago:
The OpenAI non-profit is now one of the biggest non-profits in
dollar-denominated assets. If the goal was to make the non-profit
really big and well-funded then that seems on track. But not clear
to me what it would do to advance its mission.
senordevnyc wrote 1 day ago:
They seem to think they need trillions in investment to reach
AGI. Putting aside whether reaching AGI is feasible, it seems
pretty clear how this move enables them to advance their mission,
at least in their eyes.
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
Non profits have always been able to have for profit subsidiaries,
owned by the non profit.
wrsh07 wrote 1 day ago:
IKEA is a famous example, although they sequenced things in a way
many commenters here would probably be fine with
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_Foundation
throwup238 wrote 1 day ago:
Other examples include Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla
Corporation, the latter of which pays taxes on the money it gets
from Google for default search engine placement, and the
Smithsonian gift shop, which is a common pattern for museums all
over the country. Novo Nordisk is another example, maker of
Ozempic, and itâs the richest foundation in the world because
it spun off a for-profit that then went public.
IRS requires nonprofits to pay taxes on âunrelated business
incomeâ and spinning it off to a for-profit subsidiary is the
least risky way of managing that revenue.
outside1234 wrote 1 day ago:
It should not surprise you to learn that Greg Brockman is a Trumper
and major donor.
It should also not surprise you that the Epstein files have not been
released.
Everything is possible and not possible in a corrupted system.
NDlurker wrote 1 day ago:
He's from North Dakota, just like Doug Burgum. Lot of Trump
cultists in ND
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
This case was the first of its kind and it was never tested if OpenAI
breached their charitable mission and the case was dismissed due to
the statute of limitations.
Other than researchers, nobody from big tech would ever see
themselves wanting to work at a charity / non-profit. The moment the
VCs came into the picture then all the grifters poured in and AGI
meant IPO.
> You can just use a favorable structure until itâs time to enrich
yourself.
Maybe that diary was made out of teflon.
p1esk wrote 1 day ago:
Other than researchers
Are you saying researchers are less interested in quality of life
than other people? If this was true, frontier labs wouldnât need
to offer 7 digit compensation packages to their researchers.
pluc wrote 1 day ago:
There's a lot of things these days that you can't do that are being
done.
stingraycharles wrote 1 day ago:
And this is by far one of the more innocent, unfortunately.
pessimizer wrote 1 day ago:
Nonprofit doesn't mean anything, since people can just route the
profits into salaries. It's just another legacy regulation that may
have once once had a societally-constructive purpose that wealthy
people just use as one of the array of financial tools to help
implement their latest scams. IMO, here are no legitimate nonprofits.
Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits.
Governments fund them with tax money in order to lobby themselves for
legislation that financially benefits individuals in government and
their donors. Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the
government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish
functions that belong in government.
They should all be either reformed so that their internal bylaws and
compensation are strictly regulated or probably preferably, they
should simply be destroyed. If you only pay taxes on your profits
(and we get rid of legal vehicles to hide profits) and your employees
are obligated to pay taxes on their incomes, there's no need for a
nonprofit status. If nonprofits want to engage in business (religions
included), let them pay taxes. If they engage in charity, they won't
have anything to tax.
bickfordb wrote 1 day ago:
One reform I would make would be to limit tax breaks to actual
charitable activity within an organization, instead of a blanket
tax break to the whole organization. For example if a
Church/Hospital runs a soup kitchen and homeless shelter, those
resources should be tax free, but maybe the rest of their
activities shouldn't be by default.
Another reform I would make would be around independent governance
and removing donor control of charities to reduce the number of
sham Rich Guy foundations.
tyre wrote 1 day ago:
> Another reform I would make would be around independent
governance and removing donor control of charities to reduce the
number of sham Rich Guy foundations.
This one is tough. I mean, look at the Clinton Foundation. One
reason to believe that $1 there is more effective than somewhere
else is _because_ the Clintonâs are closely involved.
Of course, you get massive donations there because people want to
influence the Clintons and/or _through_ the Clintons. Would those
people / states donate otherwise? Would they donate to _better_
organizations? Maybe! Maybe not!
* Also Iâm not saying the Clinton Foundation is more/less
effective. Youâre almost certainly better donating to
GiveDirectly, but itâs not on its face ridiculous to think that
they, specifically, could effect a _different_ type of change
than others would have access to/influence over.
gottorf wrote 1 day ago:
> Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits
To expand, there are two major problems with nonprofits in Western
nations these days:
1. Governments use them as a way to do things that they themselves
are not allowed to do ("it's private charities that do this!",
ignoring the fact that the charities get >90% of their revenue from
government grants)
2. Like you mentioned, the government grants to nonprofit back to
politicians' campaign funds pipeline. Utterly egregious.
> Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government
to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions
that belong in government
I wasn't aware of this being a big concern; more the other way
around, like in my point 1.
siliconc0w wrote 1 day ago:
Most startups don't actually make profits and nonprofits can't give
equity so it's not really a favorable structure.
Gud wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs a favourable structure in many cases.
Not everything is a business.
OpenAI wasnât, until it was.
wolvoleo wrote 1 day ago:
I don't think it would have killed openai. It would have fixed it.
outside1234 wrote 1 day ago:
The winners get to write history.
moogly wrote 1 day ago:
So Anthropic and Google? I only hear "ChatGPT" used as an invective
these days.
koolba wrote 1 day ago:
Especially when they pick which history be in the corpus for the
next LLM.
booleandilemma wrote 1 day ago:
If only we should have been so lucky.
quantum_state wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs a matter of fact that OpenAI betrayed its origin.
wrsh07 wrote 1 day ago:
I think of it more as a parable about how effective 'tying yourself
to the mast' actually is
The founders of OpenAI naively^ thought "this will make sure that we
don't have too much power if we succeed"
But it didn't work. What lesson should we learn?^^
^ please grant this for the sake of argument
^^ I have other models that I prefer to explain what happened, but I
think this one is the most interesting
jordemort wrote 1 day ago:
too bad, eh
PunchTornado wrote 1 day ago:
isn't this the friend of scam altman? who cares of what he has to say?
mikkkee wrote 1 day ago:
not sure why but this episode feels v boring
perhaps because he didn't share anything unexpected / unknown
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
I found it more interesting than I thought because I thought it'd all
be stuff I knew but a lot was new to me.
throwaway_2494 wrote 1 day ago:
I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had
code listings in them.
Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM
vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had
discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was
insider baseball of computer companies.
I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like
techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or
Deborah...?
mark_l_watson wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
Pardon the almost 50 year old nostalgia, but I got so much out of
manually typing in code from old BYTE Magazine and other articles.
paradox460 wrote 1 day ago:
I remember when wired changed editors. After Chris Anderson left it
became "gq but we talk about iPhones"
cmrdporcupine wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and
I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the
world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do
with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the
absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue
that the technology enabled.
This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but
the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond
imagination.
There's a whole generation of people whose association with the
engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their
interest in the other side of things.
I too miss old Byte magazine days.
avaer wrote 1 day ago:
What gets me is back in the day when I said I was into tech I got
shat on for being a nerd. Now I get shit on for destroying the
world. And because I don't care about whose company is dating who
(I'd rather be coding), people call me out of touch with "tech".
I feel myself going insane when I think about it too much.
mattmaroon wrote 1 day ago:
I looked it up, MSFTâs market cap in 2005 was $278 billion and
would be like $450 billion in todayâs dollars.
OpenAI will IPO soon AI probably more like a trillion.
Crazy.
andai wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting. So, the actual concern now for the average person is
... which narcissist is steering the apocalypse? Yeah, that's
slightly more engaging than RAM prices.
globalnode wrote 21 hours 46 min ago:
Replying so I can save this comment :)
ethbr1 wrote 1 day ago:
This happened when business types realized technology could be
enormously profitable (~PC era).
Then inevitably, tech news turned into business news.
myst wrote 1 day ago:
What do you get if you drop a teaspoon of business into a barrel
of X? A barrel of business.
throwaway_2494 wrote 1 day ago:
And anytime programmers start to discuss anything in detail,
you know just when it's getting interesting: "Can we take this
'offline'..."
See also this song:
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMVuRGw_a5A
FeteCommuniste wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe a little extreme but I love it.
throw6999 wrote 1 day ago:
Sky net from future protected itself.
stuaxo wrote 1 day ago:
Thankful for the mention of "AGI" in the first lines as I can bail out
from reading the rest.
Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction
machines together.
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure people are saying AGI is glueing text machines.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction
machines together.
K don't think it would be that simple either, but for now we simply
don't know.
I would like to think that what I consider my intelligence will
always be distinguishable from a cleverly built harness wrapped
around text prediction, but I can't say for sure that's guaranteed.
grey-area wrote 1 day ago:
Yes we do know. Weâve fully explored the possibilities of LLMs
and they are nowhere.
The latest efforts like agents are clearly showing the limitations
and are nowhere near AGI.
Weâve now reached the buzzwords and bullshit stage of the bubble
where they cast around for problems shaped like the solution.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Oh this bubble started in the buzzword and bullshit stage, no
argument there. I'm just not sure how you can be so certain LLMs
will have no place if a system we'd consider AGI, most inventions
do require a long list of failures and tweaks before it finally
works.
dboreham wrote 1 day ago:
How do you know that?
_wire_ wrote 1 day ago:
Shannon Got AI This Far. Kolmogorov Shows Where It Stops - Vishal
Misra [1] This article explains what's missing in terms of two
kinds of complexity that oppose: Shannon complexity vs. Kolmogorov
complexity.
It introduces the opposition by an example of driving the value of
pi as decimal number, which has no pattern and high complexity, and
a formula for deriving pi that does have a pattern with low
complexity, then observing that mind can work from the patternless
high-complexity back to the patterned low-complexity without prior
examples, while AI can't.
LLMs encode and retrieve patterns in the training data, and doing
so can connect data to the terminology of known principle, but mind
can observe inconsistencies in data and to reason from first
principles to resolve the inconsistency.
The distinction between these two modes can seem blurry as AI can
traverse the patterns of the known in ways that are
extraordinarily revealing, but it's not structured to reason about
the unknown.
Inference is not sufficient for reason.
For example, a conventional algorithm can search for patterns in
text at a scale many orders of magnitude beyond a mind's capacity,
and this can be very revealing, but to do so this algorithm need
not read the text with comprehension.
Regarding the question: can genAI be enhanced to reason? The answer
is assumed to be "no", due to the categorical opposition of the two
kinds of complexity and the lack of understanding of structures
within genAI to handle the reasoning.
Read the article, which includes other examples including a jump
from Newtonian to Einstein physics in the history of astronomy, and
a noodling on how to talk about the edge of the unknowable in AI.
(HTM) [1]: https://medium.com/@vishalmisra/shannon-got-ai-this-far-ko...
dannersy wrote 1 day ago:
Because then we already have it, and if we do, it is pretty
underwhelming.
kaashif wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
So maybe we do have it, and it is underwhelming? Or it's not
underwhelming and we just got used to it.
Using that as an argument to say we don't have AGI doesn't really
make sense.
Regardless of whether we do or don't have AGI, until I actually
see the economy-ending job losses, I won't believe it.
ImPostingOnHN wrote 1 day ago:
so are most humans
dannersy wrote 1 day ago:
Okay?
ImPostingOnHN wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
And?
emp17344 wrote 1 day ago:
Some folks are absolutely giddy about using AI as a cudgel to
dehumanize others. Those people are idiots.
jonstewart wrote 1 day ago:
Point of order: Anthropic is the most important AI company now.
tim333 wrote 1 day ago:
People discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research
was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis
of the other AI companies.
tyre wrote 1 day ago:
If anything, the amount of original and foundational research at
Google is a black mark against their position now. They blew a hell
of a lead.
Iâm willing to discount what they did almost a decade ago
(âAttention is All You Needâ was 2017) in an industry that
moves this quickly. The execution of an Anthropic matters more now.
borski wrote 1 day ago:
Short term, thatâs definitely true. Long term, Iâm not so
sure.
CuriouslyC wrote 1 day ago:
Anthropic is the most hyped AI company now. Their models aren't the
best, but their marketing sure is.
sumedh wrote 1 day ago:
> Their models aren't the best
the market has spoken, for coding they are the best.
7thpower wrote 1 day ago:
Can you please define what âbestâ is and why the market is a
measure for it.
sumedh wrote 1 day ago:
Money is the most honest transaction, if people are paying
money to anthropic it means its solving their pain. Its the
same reason OpenAI and others are copying Anthropic.
CuriouslyC wrote 1 day ago:
This is some late-stage capitalist cope. Money goes to the
person who can hoodwink people into thinking their product
will do something they care about, not the person with the
product that actually does something people want. There are a
litany of examples of people swearing up and down by products
that have been scientifically proven to __DO NOTHING__. The
correlation between popularity and quality is tenuous AT
BEST.
sumedh wrote 20 hours 1 min ago:
> Money goes to the person who can hoodwink people into
thinking their product will do something they care about
So Google, MS, FB, OpenAI could not "hoodwink" people?
CuriouslyC wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
MS is hoodwinking people all day long brother, just not
in AI.
CuriouslyC wrote 1 day ago:
The market has spoken: McDonald's makes the best hamburgers.
outside1234 wrote 1 day ago:
It really does feel like OpenAI has lost their leadership. I
havenât used a model of theirs, let alone an app, in months.
batu1509 wrote 1 day ago:
building products on top of their api makes these drama weekends
terrifying. really makes you realize how fragile your whole stack is
when a board decides to act up.
jeffrallen wrote 1 day ago:
Or when sociopaths are in charge, and the board tries to fix that,
but other sociopaths work together to overrule the board. (And wtf is
that anyway, overriding the board? Why do we even have boards of
directors if rich, powerful assholes can just do whatever they want?)
sumedh wrote 1 day ago:
> and the board tries to fix that
The board didnt have the maturity to fix that.
YetAnotherNick wrote 1 day ago:
Why can't someone ask what happened in Ilya's mind. Firing Sam and then
signing the solidarity letter of Sam to leave OpenAI if was fired.
Other than that, all other information seems kind of just going over
the surface.
krackers wrote 1 day ago:
>what happened in Ilya's mind
I thought Ronan Farrow's investigate essay answered that pretty
satisfactorily?
(HTM) [1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...
wdr1 wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
It's paywalled. Could you recap for us?
krackers wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
[1] - it's worth a read, summarizing his writing would be a
disservice
(HTM) [1]: https://archive.is/c7YNw
baobabKoodaa wrote 17 min ago:
Infinite recaptcha loop
cma wrote 1 day ago:
Part of the counter was Microsoft was going to try and hire everyone
individually, compensating for the lost stock appreciation, without
the org itself, if they went through with maintaining the firing. I
think that could have been much harder to pull off, but maybe they
made them believe it was an inevitable outcome.
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, that, please! I also never understood why the board resigned
after ousting Sam...
tyre wrote 1 day ago:
Because they lost and crumbled. They were unbelievably outmatched
by Sam (a world-class manipulator) and Satya (the money behind
OpenAI and himself a political genius.)
They were outmaneuvered, panicked, and folded.
Did they have to? No. But in the moment they thought they were on
the precipice of nuking a deca-billion dollar company, their
lifeâs greatest work, and a generational company.
Itâs hard to stand against what they did. Unsurprising they
couldnât.
paulddraper wrote 11 hours 17 min ago:
> Itâs hard to stand against what they did.
Itâs still unclear at what happened, to make Sam unfit to be
the CEO.
YetAnotherNick wrote 1 day ago:
Then they should have made the position clear to the public, or
at the very least have some communication with the employees.
It's not hard to say that they were against Sam for some
particular reason, if they are firing him. At least if the reason
is good that might have given them some credibility.
And why did Ilya become Sam lover after 2 days?
maplethorpe wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
> Then they should have made the position clear to the public
From what I understand, their legal counsel advised them not to
speak publicly. Being inexperienced in this sort of political
game, they thought they were doing the right thing.
rfv6723 wrote 1 day ago:
The employees are on Sam's side. Employees works for money and
Sam brought money in.
YetAnotherNick wrote 1 day ago:
This is so obviously wrong I don't know how this theory got
popular. OpenAI had everything from compute to brand name to
contracts. Sam wasn't the reason the money was coming,
employees and OpenAI were. Even if Sam bought them money,
board could still tell the reason of firing Sam rather than
keeping it a secret.
And why did Ilya flip? He doesn't have much to gain by being
in non profit when he could get more money elsewhere.
Recursing wrote 23 hours 26 min ago:
At the time gwern alleged it was because of Brockman's wife
(HTM) [1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/...
Keyframe wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
Wow, emotions and all. These people should never be
anywhere near dangerous technology such as advanced AI.
Luckily, neither of them seem to be anymore since openAI
lost its leading (technical) edge to other companies.
sourcecodeplz wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
People are people, same everywhere, emotions and all.
pjmlp wrote 1 day ago:
Unfortunately they survived, not going to spend time with this.
From my point of view they are yet another big tech bros company.
jorisw wrote 1 day ago:
About as empty a comment as ever
pjmlp wrote 19 hours 57 min ago:
Nah, a comment about a point of view, naturally doesn't land with
AI bros.
cold_harbor wrote 1 day ago:
what's wild is they accidentally solved it â pretraining IS
unsupervised learning at scale, RLHF IS reinforcement learning. they
just didnt know the recipe yet
jmalicki wrote 1 day ago:
pretraining isn't unsupervised, it is self-supervised - meaning it is
moderately more scale limited.
cold_harbor wrote 1 day ago:
fair point â OpenAI's original plan literally said "solve
unsupervised learning". the self-supervised distinction wasnt
really standard til after BERT/GPT popularized it
jmalicki wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's an extremely important distinction because self
supervised learning has real inherent reward signals. Something
like clustering does not.
sigbottle wrote 1 day ago:
What would unsupervised mean, would unsupervised be something like
alphago playing against itself trillions of times?
Whereas self-supervised, allows learning without explicit
annotation of data ; but it doesn't matter if the models already
trained on the entire Internet, and it's not like a game where it
can come up with effectively new training data for itself?
jmalicki wrote 1 day ago:
Unsupervised is basically clustering. Alphago is RL - winning or
losing a game is a form of supervision.
Unsupervised is something where there is no intrinsic reward
signal. In pre training, predicting the next token and seeing
that it matches is a reward signal, hence it is self supervised.
optimalsolver wrote 1 day ago:
>So many people were trying to sign the petition at once that it
actually crashed Google Docs
I still wonder how much peer pressure was behind that. Like, what if
you think Sam is a scumbag and you're glad he's gone, but people are
waving this petition in your face. What would you do? It would be
really bad for you if the emperor returned and you were one of the few
who didn't sign it.
Also, going by this video, the first order of business for an AGI
should be finding a cure for hair loss.
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
Nioxin shampoo generally works.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do
anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned
in the description?
> Greg explains how the original Napa offsite produced the three-step
technical plan OpenAI has followed for a decade and the real reason
OpenAI had to abandon its pure nonprofit structure
What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they
couldn't achieve their original goals?
tcp_handshaker wrote 1 day ago:
>> What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they
couldn't achieve their original goals?
Because they were still downloading from Anna's Archive and the
lawyers were in panic?
jstummbillig wrote 1 day ago:
Granola notes are a 1 Minute read:
(HTM) [1]: https://notes.granola.ai/d/2c35c84f-6eb4-497a-8419-294d92141...
siva7 wrote 1 day ago:
> Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do
anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned
in the description?
I know HN is built around mostly not reading the articles linked but
how about you click on the link and surprise, there is already
exactly another link providing what you're asking for.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
You mean the transcript that is behind a account/paywall? Or is
there some other link I'm missing?
monkey_monkey wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently we're all expected to somehow know that "Granola
notes" is a summary of the conversation.
siva7 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, you're missing the link at the end of the article for free.
applfanboysbgon wrote 1 day ago:
> What was the technical plan
"1. Solve reinforcement learning
2. Solve unsupervised learning
3. Gradually learn more complicated 'things'"
That three point list is verbatim the extent of the technical plan
mentioned.
> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original
goals?
Paraphrasing, "we needed more money for compute and didn't think we
could get enough as a non-profit". Brockman's diary might be a
stronger indicator of the real real reason, though.
armchairhacker wrote 1 day ago:
What was the real real reason?
I imagine if they stayed nonprofit, they wouldâve survived, but
not convinced investors to give them enough $$$ and datacenters to
stay the most popular (above Google).
greatgib wrote 1 day ago:
I can easily guess also that at the beginning they were more
thinking like a research project that they could create something
but would like quantum computing today, not really of real world
used.
And one things started to become real, they realized the
financing potential of the thing, that they were seated on a gold
mine and would be stupid of them to create that and not profit
much more of it.
Lerc wrote 1 day ago:
If they stayed small and 100% non-profit, would the influence or
value of the non profit be more, or less, than it is today?
I think the non-profit has around 25% ownership of something that
is around a trillion dollars of on-paper money.
I guess we will see what things are still worth when the crazy
days come to an end.
orra wrote 1 day ago:
> I think the non-profit has around 25% ownership of something
that is around a trillion dollars of on-paper money.
But the purpose of a non profit is not to maximise profit in a
for profit investment.
How well is non profit doing at furthering its goals? It
formerly had the purpose of âsafelyâ ensuring artificial
intelligence benefits all of humanity. It looks like it gave up
on that so its staff could be incredibly rich.
Lerc wrote 1 day ago:
Do you not think money provides some ability to achieve
goals? Fund raising is an integral part of most
non-profits.
But you ignored the part about influence, would an OpenAI
that did not scale up and had no world beating models have
much of a say in how AI gets developed
This is not to say that I think they are doing everything
right, but I see people bitter that they didn't take the path
towards forgotten irrelivance.
What would you reccommend that they should have done that
would still lead to them being relevant to the world
development of AI?
tedivm wrote 1 day ago:
Frankly the non-profit has failed. OpenAI is one of the least
open of the AI companies (Anthropic is a bit worse). If it
wasn't for the labs in China the dream of an actual open ai
system would be dead.
azinman2 wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like people donât give OpenAI enough credit for
the early papers they did publish. Those are what showed
the way that everyone else has built on.
wahnfrieden wrote 1 day ago:
To get rich of course
coalstartprob wrote 1 day ago:
the real real reason being gdb wanting to be a billionaire ;)
cma wrote 1 day ago:
Unsupervised
dave1010uk wrote 1 day ago:
1. Solve reinforcement learning.
2. solve unsupervised learning.
3. gradually tackle more complicated things.
> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original
goals?
I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit.
The answer is that they needed more money.
arvid-lind wrote 1 day ago:
> The answer is that they needed more money.
isn't it still an odd choice for a nonprofit? it's hard to imagine
a world without OpenAI and ChatGPT now, but at some point they
decided being the best is most important. and presumably most
profitable, since why just need a little more money?
mycall wrote 1 day ago:
Don't all nonprofits need more money to improve their
sustainment?
nativeit wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe, but somehow I doubt the American Heart Association is
planning to open a chain of pork barbecue restaurants to
support its mission against heart disease.
gizajob wrote 1 day ago:
Trivial to imagine everyone switching to Anthropic or Google or
on-device LLMs.
embedding-shape wrote 1 day ago:
Huh, I guess ML people weren't aware of "divide and conquer" that
has been successfully employed in software engineering since
basically forever?
> I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a
non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.
Ugh, that was more boring than even I expected, thanks a lot for
saving me the time though, seems avoiding watching the full thing
was worth it.
adastra22 wrote 1 day ago:
Not that they wanted more money personally, but that they needed
more money for compute.
peterdsharpe wrote 1 day ago:
"Financially, what will take me to $1B?" -Greg Brockman, August
2017
bblb wrote 1 day ago:
[1] 00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI
00:02:40 Building the Founding Team
00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI
00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit
00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI
00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction
00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI
00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing
00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI
00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya
00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return
00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI
00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting
00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget
00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic?
00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI?
00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?
00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI
00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First?
00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from
U.S?
00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute
00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers
00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization
00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve
00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models
00:53:05 Data Centers in Space?
01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like?
01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship
01:04:44 AI and Job Loss
01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In
01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc
H8crilA wrote 1 day ago:
As far as Brockman account of the past goes, there's also his personal
diary which was made public as a part of that lawsuit by Musk. Includes
for example the line: "Financially what will take me to $1B?". BTW, if
you don't know, Musk lost it because he filed too late, lol.
thenthenthen wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
Tres Comas!
nba456_ wrote 1 day ago:
If his entire personal diary got exposed and that's the worst that's
in it, good for him.
tcp_handshaker wrote 1 day ago:
What about stealing 12 million books of copyrighted human culture,
at massive scale, and then enclosing the value created inside
proprietary, investor-backed systems? Something wrong with that?
What happens if you go tomorrow, downtown San Francisco, and leave
a bookstore with one book without paying?
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime"
- Honoré de Balzac
nl wrote 1 day ago:
Learning is not theft.
root-parent wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
That will not hold on court.
mannanj wrote 1 day ago:
Oh and by the way, their employee got murdered who was testified
to speak at a hearing about copyright.
and that murderee's mom is publically resentful against and
tweets anti-sam Altman content regularly. It tells me that
founder Altman has clearly not demonstrated proper empathy,
sympathy or repaired what should be an emotional easy case of
delivering to the mom whatever she needs for her peace (or maybe
he's actually guilty of complicit in crimes).
spudlyo wrote 1 day ago:
Won't somebody please think of the copyright holders!?
estearum wrote 1 day ago:
"This material is valuable enough for me to steal, but not
valuable enough to care about there being an incentive to
create in the first place!"
Totally makes sense /s
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
> What about stealing 12 million books
Who's missing the books? 12 million books is a rather large
warehouse!
I thought HN was in the "information wants to be free" camp...
jappgar wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
LLM weights deserve to be free
globalnode wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
haha, thanks for my daily.
watwut wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
Those books are not free for us, aren't they? This argument
would meant one iota sense if the outcome was free information
or free access to books.
Instead, overall outcome is more centralization, formerly
accessible resources of information hard to find and starved.
tasuki wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
> Those books are not free for us, aren't they?
The library card is really cheap tho.
giantfrog wrote 1 day ago:
I think there might be a difference between âIâm violating
copyright law to enjoy a work of artâ and âIâm violating
copyright law on a global, species-wide scale to create a
trillion dollar company and enrich myself.â Maybe you can
argue the former is wrong but thereâs no way itâs
equivalent to the latter.
estearum wrote 1 day ago:
HN isn't a person and "information" doesn't have anything
resembling desires
ralph84 wrote 1 day ago:
> enclosing the value created inside proprietary, investor-backed
systems
What do you think copyright does. Human culture is owned by
humanity, not Disney or the New York Times.
estearum wrote 1 day ago:
It creates an incentive to create new things and share it with
the world, duh.
Do you ask the same question about why we patent drugs?
ralph84 wrote 1 day ago:
Walt Disney died 60 years ago. We don't need to incentivize
him to do anything.
estearum wrote 1 day ago:
Are you arguing that copyright lasts too long or that
copyright shouldn't exist?
Your prior comment, "human culture is owned by humanity",
sure sounds like the latter.
nl wrote 1 day ago:
I think copyright is a valid incentive.
I don't think reading books (whether by human or by
machine) is copyright infringement.
I think that attaining books that are still under
copyright by downloading a pirate torrent is wrong.
I think a machine reading those books by borrowing them
from a public library is fine.
I think copyright holders restricting their books from
being in a public library is just as wrong as
downloading a pirated copy.
I think deliberately reproducing a copyrighted book is
wrong, but the infringement is by the person who did
that, not by the person who built a tool which can
incidentally be used for that.
temp8830 wrote 1 day ago:
Even though the founders of OpenAI are not exactly someone you'd
root for, comparisons to theft are silly.
By that token it would be illegal to go into a library, read a
book, and actually remember what was in it. Except in this case
the reader is a robot.
LLMs are such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws
don't really make sense. Wait! Put the pitchfork down! I know,
I know, stealing is stealing, and OpenAI founders are slimy. But
what about derivative works? Why is a human making a hip-hop
track allowed to sample, and a robot is not? Again, LLMs are
such a fundamentally different thing that existing laws don't
really make sense.
It's actually surprising in retrospect that nobody did this
sooner. Even back in the 80s books about computers would gush
about how a computer has enough memory to store an entire
library's worth of books. It's just that someone finally figured
out how to put an index on it.
Where I agree: given that this is basically the sum of all
humanity's knowledge, the company should have been a non-profit.
It was a non-profit. And then greed won.
mannanj wrote 1 day ago:
If they illegally pirated books, i.e. downloading pdfs. thats
illegal and piracy by no other name. If any of us do it, it's
called pirating, why are you being disingenuous and saying it's
not theft when a company does it?
overgard wrote 1 day ago:
There are a lot of things that are fine individually that are
extremely problematic at scale. Like "reading a book" vs
"ingesting all the books and art that ever existed into a
plagiarism machine"
jcheng wrote 1 day ago:
I think you make a good point but the use of samples in hip hop
doesnât support it; those samples need to be licensed.
temp8830 wrote 16 hours 13 min ago:
This is very much untrue, and the debate about exactly how
much sampling constitutes fair use has gone one for many
years and court cases.
_zoltan_ wrote 1 day ago:
Worse? There is nothing wrong with wanting 1B. Anybody who said
they wouldn't want it is lying.
root-parent wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
Do you understand the kind of self-absorbed asshole you have to
be, to seriously write in your diary, what do I need to do, to
have wealth equal to the GDP of the Solomon Islands or the
Seychelles? :-)
_zoltan_ wrote 13 hours 22 min ago:
No. And I disagree with you. You don't have to be an asshole.
I remember when having 10k was a goal. Then it become having
100k.
It's the same after. Once you have 1M, you'd like 2, 5, 10.
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
Thereâs nothing wrong or strange about aspiring to be a
billionaire but writing about it in your diary like a hormonal
teen girl reading fairy tales is a bad look.
Itâs also difficult to take people seriously if they only care
about money or, in Altmanâs case, power. Single minded
obsessiveness about these sorts of things tends to render people
intellectually dishonest by definition.
rozap wrote 1 day ago:
Every billionaire is a policy failure. It's not a question of
equity, the issue is that no one human should be that powerful.
It's very obvious that its leading to the US's rather quick and
colorful decline. A small cohort of very powerful people are
moving elections and policy to enrich themselves, everyone else
be damned.
ToValueFunfetti wrote 1 day ago:
Even assuming all of this is true, nothing you've said means
it's wrong to want a billion dollars. As described, your issue
is with the system that makes it possible to get it.
sumeno wrote 1 day ago:
I would be a billionaire for about 5 minutes because I'd spend
95% of it making the lives of others better and still have enough
left over that neither me nor any of my immediate family ever has
to work again instead of hoarding it like the monsters who end up
actually having a billion dollars.
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
What is the point of your comment? It is hard for me to read it
in another way than "I am very virtuous", which might be true
(well done you!) but usually isn't a thing people post about
themselves in a discussion forum...
sumeno wrote 1 day ago:
It's a direct response to the person I was replying to,
that's how posts work.
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
The person you were replying to said:
> There is nothing wrong with wanting 1B. Anybody who said
they wouldn't want it is lying.
You said:
> I'd spend 95% of it making the lives of others better
Again, well done you. And... I don't think that's a counter
example? Being this virtuous, wouldn't you love to give
away a billion? Wouldn't you enjoy it very much? You could
write comments about it and people would upvote you!
sumeno wrote 1 day ago:
I do not want a billion dollars, there is no ethical way
to get a billion dollars. If I accidentally had a billion
dollars I would get rid of the billion dollars as quickly
as possible.
The op thinks that I, as well as most of the other
responses to them, are liars
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
> there is no ethical way to get a billion dollars.
I don't buy that at all. One ethical way is to marry
someone random who later becomes a billionnaire.
Another is to eg create Bitcoin. And I suspect there
are ethical ways to create a business that earns a
whole lot of money.
What unethical things did Yvon Chouinard do to get his
billions? Chuck Feeney? What about Mackenzie Scott
(formerly Bezos)? Hansjörg Wyss? Craig Newmark of
Craigslist?
sumeno wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
Regardless of what else they did, they hoarded enough
wealth to live hundreds of lifetime without ever
wanting for anything while there are people on this
planet who are starving, homeless, or can't afford
basic medical care.
Being a billionaire itself is unethical. They are
excessively greedy to the point of evil. If they
weren't they would have stopped hoarding wealth
hundreds of millions of dollars sooner.
If I had enough food to feed a hundred thousand
people for the rest of their lives, more than anyone
could ever eat in thousands of lifetimes, and I kept
hoarding more and more food while people were
starving you would ask what the fuck is wrong with
me, there's no way I'll ever need all that food. I
would rightly be called obsessive, greedy, and a
sociopath. Add one layer of abstraction and we hold
these monsters up as heroes.
tasuki wrote 17 hours 30 min ago:
- Yvon Chouinard said he "didn't drive Lexuses".
Yes he was a billionnaire, but he lived a simple
life, and his net worth was tied in the stock of
the company. He has since given most of it away.
- Mackenzie Bezos gave away $26 billion, more than
half of her net worth, in the past 6 years. I'm
sure she'll continue.
It's not exactly easy to spend so much money
_meaningfully_. "Giving it away" sounds simple, but
really it's a lot of hard work.
You seem extremely attached to your point of view
that all the billionnaires are bad people and that
you're a good person. I have a negative visceral
reaction to people who loudly proclaim their own
moral superiority. I don't think all the
billionnaires are that bad, and tbh I have trouble
believing you're such good a person. How much have
you given to charity?
sumeno wrote 17 hours 3 min ago:
I haven't said anything about my own morality
other than that I don't want a billion dollars.
If you really want to know, I give away more than
10% of my income every year to charity. In just
the past decade I've given away about 20% of my
net worth, and I'm not even close to set for
life. That's more than all but a few billionaires
will give away in their lifetimes, and I promise
you that I need that 20% much more than any
billionaire needs 90% of theirs. If I lose my job
I'm fucked, if they never make another dollar
they can live thousands of lifetimes without
changing their standard of living in any
meaningful way.
Does that make me a good person? No.
It absolutely makes them bad people though.
Giving away money doesn't make you a good person,
but hoarding it makes you a bad person.
nativeit wrote 1 day ago:
That level of personal wealth is inherently immoral and doesnât
*ever* happen without exploitation.
jesterson wrote 1 day ago:
I wouldnât want. I have enough. Not everyone is wanting money.
But it is not the point. The point is, when you take high moral
ground and talk about bug problems to help humanity, and then
your own diary exposes you as avaricious simpleton, the whole
high moral ground crumbles. And you expose yourself as another
grifter.
Thatâs what happened to Brockman. Although smart people could
see these qualities in altman, brockman etcetera way before that
happened
p1esk wrote 1 day ago:
Why can't I want both earning 1B and do good things for the
world? Unless his diary directly contradicts what he has said
in public (like "I don't care about money"), I see zero moral
issues here.
jesterson wrote 1 day ago:
Because goal of earning 1B and doing good for the world are
goals having very little overlap.
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
> The point is, when you take high moral ground and talk about
bug problems to help humanity, and then your own diary exposes
you as avaricious simpleton, the whole high moral ground
crumbles. And you expose yourself as another grifter.
Unfortunately, this is now 90% of this space and it is now full
of grifters which was not the case in 2010.
In the case of OpenAI, there were less grifters and they were
dormant in 2016 and many were exposed in 2023 when Sam was
fired and rehired afterwards and most of them infiltrated the
company after 2023.
In 10 years time, after this upcoming financial crash, you will
hear some of the former-employees after 2023 admitting that
they were part of the grift and were never interested in AI in
the first place.
"OpenAI was nothing without its people" except only if it meant
getting a mansion or a yacht for the benefit of
h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ themselves.
jesterson wrote 1 day ago:
Agree. Just that I see the number much north of 90%. You must
be a very optimistic person.
exfalso wrote 1 day ago:
Nonsense. What the hell would you do with 1B? Give it to
charities maybe. Maybe set up an investment where dividends are
paid to charity. Running out of ideas
_zoltan_ wrote 1 day ago:
Set up a nice investment vehicle with maybe 400m so I can get
1.6m in dividends a year which would be better enough to
comfortably travel the world, have a private chef, someone who
organized travel so I don't have to..
A nice 12 person yacht on the Mediterranean is 400k eur for 2
weeks (with staff) so I'd realize it's not enough and invest
the rest so I could get comfy.
Along the way help friends and family, pay off mortgages,
usually good stuff.
It's not that hard to spend 4% a year of that.
exfalso wrote 1 day ago:
What's the point of that? That sounds like the most boring
life. You want to rot away on a yacht? Private chef? Are you
kidding?
Help family? Sure, although you don't need that much money
for that. Friends? Ehh not very smart, just think about the
changes in the friendships' authenticity.
_zoltan_ wrote 1 day ago:
Rot away? See the world. It's such a big place.
Private chef, absolutely. Like some people rot away
managing Linux as a desktop or putting together 3D printers
instead of buying one that works and using a Mac, I enjoy
food.
snihalani wrote 1 day ago:
I am not sure the benefit comes from doing it. I find the
optionality & the social security attractive
fnord77 wrote 1 day ago:
I'd finally feel financially secure
rvz wrote 1 day ago:
Really?
If anything less than $1B isn't enough then it is never
enough. $1B is the new $100M thanks to ongoing currency
debasement.
Also, there is something called "taxes" which is what makes
anyone who has millions or billions to want even more money
and the IRS will still come after you anywhere in the world.
Otherwise they have to renounce their citizenship and move to
a tax haven.
_zoltan_ wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not in the US, so I don't care about the IRS.
Tax wise at this level there are very tax efficient
vehicles available.
jesterson wrote 1 day ago:
There are a lot of greedy people thinking everyone would die
for a bullion. They couldnât comprehend another way of
thinking due to narrow mindset
fragmede wrote 1 day ago:
You've run out of ideas already? Try harder!
What charities? Why? How much, to which ones? How involved with
those charities are you going to be? What dent in history are
you going to make with that billion? With or without your name
attached. Build housing, cure cancer, feed the hungry, buy this
simulator
(HTM) [1]: https://www.1940airterminal.org/news/liquidation-of-si...
sureglymop wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
I could be wrong but I think you could get started with all
of that with a fraction of $1B.
Sure there is leisure and entertainment but if you want to
use it to do something meaningful, with only 24 hours in a
day you'll probably have much more money than time to use it
well.
On the other hand 1B is really an arbitrary choice of number,
so I think the reason he would choose this specific number
definitely has more to do with arbitrary reasons (class,
status), perhaps subconciously.
Personally I don't agree with the parent that everyone wants
that much money. I think I can safely say not only am I
content with much less but I also don't ever want to have the
responsibility of having to manage that. Though I'm already
saying that from a place of privilege where I don't need to
worry about survival.
Furthermore, a lot of money almost certainly places you in an
outlier group where normal laws and rights as formulated by
humans don't apply the same. Assuming everyone has some
empathy and sense of justice/righteousness, that should make
them intrinsically not want to be in that group.
exfalso wrote 1 day ago:
My point was that there isn't anything I could do with that
money, and neither can the vast majority of people in the
world. So I would immediately try to pass it on to people who
have better use for it
Wishing for 1B is completely nonsensical if you understand
what kind of money that is.
codechicago277 wrote 1 day ago:
Completely missing the other costs associated with any of
these things. If money was enough to âfeed the hungryâ
Musk or Gates would have already done it. The real problem is
systemic injustice, like governments stealing foreign aid
thatâs meant to go to the poor. Money canât always solve
these.
Time is more valuable than money and unless you have tons of
time and space that simulator is just an expensive
paperweight.
Angostura wrote 1 day ago:
Perhaps the commenter would just like to lead a contented
life without having to bother with all of that
gizajob wrote 1 day ago:
Didnât even buy a Yacht or a Warhol yet.
applfanboysbgon wrote 1 day ago:
I'm curious what you're writing in your diary that's worse than
blatantly admitting to fraud of this scale. He publicly misled
people about OpenAI's "mission" as a nonprofit, while seeking to
enrich himself to the tune of $1 billion(!!!) dollars.
Also, his entire diary was not in fact made public. The attorneys
only quoted the parts that were relevant to the case, which
pertained to OpenAI's transition from non-profit.
siva7 wrote 1 day ago:
How about wiping out an entire civilization? Not even necessary
to hide this thought in your diary if you have enough power. I've
seen today - in fact any day of this year - much worse things
than his diary thoughts.
creato wrote 1 day ago:
Even if you think this this is what OpenAI is doing, they
surely don't think that. So why would he write that in his
diary?
applfanboysbgon wrote 1 day ago:
Well, gee. When you put it like that, Hitler existed, so really
we can't fault anybody for anything short of orchestrating the
genocide of 12 million people.
wahnfrieden wrote 1 day ago:
Musk engineered the deaths of 14 million people
(HTM) [1]: https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-r...
kvgr wrote 1 day ago:
The quote is "could lead to 14 million additional deaths by
2030" and i dont like musk. But this is big difference.
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah bro, the US pulling foreign aid is directly causative
of somebody starving to death.
lol
gambiting wrote 1 day ago:
I mean.....it takes only a very cursory look over the
programmes that USAid provided to see that it's more than
likely?
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
That isnât how causation works.
By your logic you could argue that if anybody on this
planet starves to death then Americans can be blamed
and âengineered itâ, since they had the economic
means to prevent it. Youâre essentially trying to
argue that inaction is a positive act, which it is not
as a matter of logic and law universally.
Your logic is laughable on its face, obviously.
Americans have no more duty to look after non-Americans
than anybody else.
gambiting wrote 1 day ago:
If I provide cancer drugs to someone, and then
suddenly stop, am I to blame for them dying of
cancer? That doesn't imply that I have a moral duty
to provide the drugs. But if I am providing them and
then withdraw them, then there is some responsibility
on my part?
>>Youâre essentially trying to argue that inaction
is a positive act
You've assumed I have a certain position then argue
against it, not against what I actually said.
>>Your logic is laughable on its face, obviously
HN has a higher level of discussion than this
avazhi wrote 1 day ago:
Unilateral voluntary foreign aid is not in any way
analogous to medical care that creates strict legal
obligations when the doctor-patient relationship
commences.
Kinrany wrote 1 day ago:
How did the diary end up in the court files in the first place?
layer8 wrote 1 day ago:
OpenAI themselves submitted the diary as evidence back in
October.
secondcoming wrote 1 day ago:
legal discovery process?
arvid-lind wrote 1 day ago:
there's even an episode of The Office where this happens.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3GbCByGltU&t=214s
bmitc wrote 1 day ago:
So firing a grifter means it would kill the company? Doesn't that mean
the company is grifting? If no one else can possibly lead the
supposedly the most important company, with billions/trillions (?) of
so called value, do you have a good company and product?
Or do I forget that this guy sleeps with an Ayn Rand doll tucked under
his arms?
zemvpferreira wrote 1 day ago:
Not a fan of Altman but the devil you know is a powerful argument. If
you believe a CEO/Founder to be a grifter-position at its core (fake
it till you make it etc etc), retaining the best grifter you can find
is the optimal play.
okr wrote 1 day ago:
ChatGPT or CoPilot were awesome products at the time. I do not use
them anymore these days. But to me it felt never like i was abused.
And Investment into companies is what it is, a risk. But the results
remain forever, whoever wins.
(DIR) <- back to front page