[HN Gopher] OpenAI sold its soul for $1B (2021)
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OpenAI sold its soul for $1B (2021)
Author : georgehill
Score : 158 points
Date : 2023-03-15 16:59 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onezero.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onezero.medium.com)
| ratg13 wrote:
| The author seems to be of the opinion that AI should not be given
| to the general public and be kept in some sort of walled garden
| with tightly controlled supervised access.
|
| I can't help but wonder how much time he thinks can realistically
| be bought with these type of restrictions .. and also wonder if
| he's changed his mind at all since this was written.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Funnily enough OpenAI also believes the same.
| lacker wrote:
| The name "OpenAI" still really bugs me. But it seems likely that
| turning into a for-profit corporation was critical to OpenAI's
| subsequent success.
|
| It let them raise enough money to pay for top-tier
| infrastructure. It also gave them access to stock options, to pay
| for recruiting a top-tier research and engineering team. I don't
| think we would have GPT-4 and the OpenAI API if they hadn't
| turned into a for-profit company.
|
| And honestly, compare what OpenAI has done for AI research to the
| impact of any nonprofit. What nonprofit has done the most for AI
| research? Stanford? MIT? I'm not sure what the top AI achievement
| from any nonprofit is, in the modern era. It's like nonprofits
| can do a good job of kickstarting a field (AlexNet, early
| PyTorch), but once enough money and attention goes into it, they
| have to hand the baton to for-profit companies.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| The problem with for-profit is that it informs priorities and
| incentives, usually not in the direction of societal benefit.
| That's why the phrase "selling one's soul" is being applied.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Well, Adam Smith argued that companies following selfish
| priorities and benefits _is_ in the direction of societal
| benefit. (As long as all externalities like environmental
| pollution are priced in, but that isn 't really relevant for
| OpenAI.)
|
| It's really the bedrock of modern economics. Invisible hand
| of the market and all that.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Yes, the guy that hated landlords and considered rent
| seeking immoral would love the enclosure of the commons of
| all human knowledge and rent seeking on their imaginary IP
| rights.
| pmarreck wrote:
| It's not a "for-profit" (at least strictly, unless you are
| intentionally muddying the waters to support your argument).
| It's "capped-profit": https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/openai-
| shifts-from-nonprof...
| orra wrote:
| The cap is so high as to be meaningless. It's for profit.
| blueboo wrote:
| I wonder: What's the cap, and how does it imply behaviour
| that differs from that of a for-profit?...
| tangjurine wrote:
| Capped at 100x profit from investment...
| kulikalov wrote:
| It seems like most fundamental researches were published by
| Google, not openai. Transformers architecture is also designed
| by Google...
|
| These are superficial observations, so feel free to correct me
| if I'm wrong.
|
| Also, they bought ai.com recently if that makes you feel better
| :) maybe they will drop the "open" part of their name soon.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| It would probably be too expensive now to rebrand themselves
| due to confusion. Honestly maybe they should have called
| themselves netai or alphaai
| [deleted]
| donkeydoug wrote:
| idk, 'DarkMoneyAI' has a ring to it :)
| ccorda wrote:
| A few comments have noted that it's common for non-profits own
| for-profits (Mozilla Foundation, college endowments, etc).
|
| What seems different here is that rather than funneling profits
| up to the non-profit, the intent seems to be to make payouts to
| fellow board members and employees:
|
| > Only a minority of board members are allowed to hold financial
| stakes in the partnership at one time. Furthermore, only board
| members without such stakes can vote on decisions where the
| interests of limited partners and OpenAI Nonprofit's mission may
| conflict--including any decisions about making payouts to
| investors and employees. [1]
|
| IANAL, but has anyone seen this sort of arrangement before?
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
| lacker wrote:
| Every for-profit pays its employees, right? I don't think the
| fact that they make these payments is unusual, they're just
| making it clear that partners with a stake in the for-profit
| recuse themselves when the nonprofit is approving these
| payouts. It's similar to a company CEO not voting when the
| board approves their own pay package, even though they're a
| board member.
| ccorda wrote:
| I agree that payments on their own (e.g. salary, bonuses)
| don't seem counter to the non-profit's interest. But what if
| we're talking about 100B of equity -- equity that otherwise
| would have gone to the parent non-profit?
| [deleted]
| praveen9920 wrote:
| It is interesting to see news about Docker ( opensource fuelling
| the for-profit company ) and openai ( non-profit research
| converted to for-profile company ) together on HN.
|
| One of them has failed to capitalize on the user adoption to
| generate revenues and struggling, while the other one was touted
| as a "selling their soul" for making a lot of money to fuel their
| research ( and profits too )
|
| The longevity of a company definitely depends on the money that
| is poured into it. Doing it in a sustainable way, without relying
| on regular "donations" ( remember Wikipedia's campaigns ) or
| "raising series of capital" ( from VCs) is very important.
|
| There must be a better business model for balancing between these
| without getting "corrupted" or "evil"
| JohnFen wrote:
| > the other one was touted as a "selling their soul" for making
| a lot of money to fuel their research ( and profits too )
|
| I don't think that's a correct characterization of the
| criticism about Open AI. The criticism is more about it doing a
| bait-and-switch.
| fatjokes wrote:
| "It's not about money. It's about a whole shit load of money."
| standardly wrote:
| A rebrand to AiCorp sounds pretty dystopian
| madamelic wrote:
| https://archive.is/qGvyr
| JohnFen wrote:
| Exactly this. This is when I stopped thinking of Open AI as a
| potentially positive force.
| rvz wrote:
| They have just become another Silicon Valley VC scam, when they
| bait and switched to a for-profit and pretends to care about
| 'AI safety' whilst simultaneously creating excuses to close the
| AI model with competition fear-mongering without building in
| detectors or watermarks.
|
| Thanks to Microsoft, they are no better than DeepMind. 'AI
| ethics' at Microsoft was recently eliminated, telling you their
| real intentions with AI. Henceforth:
|
| >> What are OpenAI's real intentions now? Are they tied to
| Microsoft's interests so much that they've forgotten their
| original purpose for "the betterment of humanity?"
|
| Not just forgotten, but an abandonment and a classic motte-and-
| bailey retreat for 'Open' AI's original mission. At this point,
| they need to be disrupted with 'Open AI' alternatives that are
| open-source and surpasses OpenAI's offerings, rendering them
| obsolete.
| elforce002 wrote:
| No lies were told. It'll be difficult to trust any other
| platform like that anymore. Microsoft is really despicable
| cornering the dev market (github, killed atom in favor of
| vscode, etc...). I'm glad I switched to apple after +20 years
| using windows products.
|
| OpenAI, on the other hand, will basically destroy any
| openness from companies. Now, it'll be every company for
| itself.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| It's not true that there is no longer anyone working on AI
| ethics at Microsoft as I understand it. Rather, Microsoft had
| more than one team working on AI safety and dismantled one of
| them. There is still a large "Office of Responsible AI". It
| seems like internal reorganization but was reported as an
| abandonment of AI safety.
| clircle wrote:
| War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Open is closed
| visarga wrote:
| There are multiple ways of being open. Open as in open source,
| and open as in you can already play with GPT-4 while Google
| keeps people waiting for PaLM. There's also open like the LLaMA
| "release". If the model is not excellent (see BLOOM) it doesn't
| really matter it is open.
|
| You can be sure that the API-only access to GPT3 had a major
| impact on AI in the last 2 years - what projects people worked
| on, what studies were being made. Even dataset construction for
| other models. GPT-3 is an excellent data labeller.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _OpenAI Sold its Soul for $1B_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28416997 - Sept 2021 (86
| comments)
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > To summarize: The company "in charge" of protecting us from
| harmful AIs decided to let people use a system capable of
| engaging in disinformation and dangerous biases so they could pay
| for their costly maintenance. It doesn't sound very "value-for-
| everyone" to me.
|
| Ever since the AI hype started this year, one thing that's always
| really bugged me is talk about "safety" around AI. Everyone is so
| worried about AI's ability to write fake news and how "dangerous"
| that can be while forgetting that I can go on fiver, pay someone
| in India, China, etc. to pump me out article after article of
| fake news for pennies on the dollar.
|
| Also I hate the talk of "oh wow look how harmful the AI is, it
| made a naughty joke". I think of harm as being mugged, being
| beaten up, being shot. Harm is not some AI program telling a joke
| that could potentially offend someone.
|
| All you end up with is an AI that is so kneecapped that it's
| barely useful outside of a select number of use cases. Can't
| write an article because it might be fake news, can't write an
| essay because it might be an assignment, can't solve that
| homework assignment because you might be cheating, I can't ask it
| to tell me a joke because the joke might be offensive.
| tariqali34 wrote:
| > Ever since the AI hype started this year, one thing that's
| always really bugged me is talk about "safety" around AI.
| Everyone is so worried about AI's ability to write fake news
| and how "dangerous" that can be while forgetting that I can go
| on fiver, pay someone in India, China, etc. to pump me out
| article after article of fake news for pennies on the dollar.
|
| It's as if these people don't even remember that India, China,
| etc. even exist in the first place. Which is incredibly
| foolish. If you care about "safety" and you only focus your ire
| on tech companies that base themselves in the largest economy
| in the world (according to nominal GDP), then you shouldn't be
| surprised if the rest of the world produces different AI
| algorithms that may have different definitions of "safe" -
| assuming that they're even remotely "safe" to begin with. And
| yes, I assume that the rest of the world will build AI models
| of their own, if only to avoid dependence on the United States.
| Baidu already plan to launch "Ernie Bot" soon.
|
| Which means that when this happens...
|
| >All you end up with is an AI that is so kneecapped that it's
| barely useful outside of a select number of use cases.
|
| It won't even stop harmful content from being produced. The
| "fake news producer" will just go to Fiverr and pay someone in
| India, China, etc. to use prompt engineering skills to
| manipulate native AI models to pump out article after article
| of fake news for pennies on the dollar. Or the "fake news
| producer" will just cut out all the intermediaries and just
| directly use the AI models.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, there is far more at stake then you're giving it credit
| for. Yea, you can go to India and get someone to write some
| bullshit, that is far different than having a OAI/Microsoft
| service telling some kid to neck themselves.
|
| So ya, you're focusing on the low hanging fruit of 'wokeness
| bot' when the issue of trustworthy and safe model output is an
| absolutely huge problem that could affect everyone and we have
| no really good solutions on solving it at this point.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > that is far different than having a OAI/Microsoft service
| telling some kid to neck themselves
|
| Ok I see what you are saying. I feel like with AI/GPT, we
| would almost have to change the concept of a "company being
| responsible for it's software". Up until now, most software
| has an X number of inputs and a Y number of outputs (click
| "get new mail" in Gmail, new messages arrive for example).
|
| But what happens when the software you design can accept and
| return billions of possible parameters? There is simply no
| way of determining what the output is or could be and that's
| fundamental to the software.
|
| The example I think of in my head is a user opening MS Word,
| typing out "F* YOU" and then sending a screenshot to
| Microsoft telling them "How could your software offend me
| like this?". Now obviously this is different than GPT but it
| follows the same rough rule of "billions of possible inputs,
| billions of possible outputs"
| pixl97 wrote:
| >But what happens when the software you design can accept
| and return billions of possible parameters? There is simply
| no way of determining what the output is
|
| Welcome to the trillion dollar AI safety question and the
| reason some experts are deeply concerned that we'll solve
| general intelligence long before we're ready to deal with
| the outcome of what general intelligence can do.
|
| This is why we talk about the AI alignment issue.
| GPT-3/GPT-4 without a RLHF in front of it is mostly a weird
| alien that doesn't behave in a generally useful manner.
| This is why Chat/BingGPT took off recently because we put a
| pretend human mask in front of the monster. But behind that
| mask is the internet, jumbled up and thrown in a neural
| network blender. Unless they did a lot of filtering, there
| is also all the things that we'd consider generally bad,
| like if for example your teacher started telling your kids
| the proper method of smoking crack.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > There is simply no way of determining what the output is
| or could be and that's fundamental to the software.
|
| I would argue that releasing a product that has the
| potential to do harm and that you can't predict the
| behavior of is radically irresponsible and should not be
| done.
|
| > The example I think of in my head is a user opening MS
| Word, typing out "F* YOU" and then sending a screenshot to
| Microsoft telling them "How could your software offend me
| like this?".
|
| That's not even remotely comparable, because MS word didn't
| create the output. The user did.
| evo_9 wrote:
| Terrible, right? Don't use it!
|
| Me: goes right back to using it (cause it's priced right and I
| personally think they deserve every penny they earn)z
| Jensson wrote:
| It is good to recognize that they are as evil as every other
| big corp. I still use Windows, Google, buy from Amazon etc, but
| I recognize that those companies maybe aren't a force for good.
| OpenAI said they would be different but turned out that they
| weren't, and to inform people that they changed we need
| articles like this.
| credit_guy wrote:
| I would too. I'd sell my soul even for a mere $100 million. Where
| I firmly draw the line is $10 million. Just try and test me and
| you'll see.
| jsnk wrote:
| I had forgotten that OpenAI started as a non-profit. Elon Musk
| gave $100 million for a non-profit cause, and even he doesn't
| know how OpenAI became a for-profit company. I am not sure about
| the legality, but this transition seems like a unethical rug pull
| against the early contributors.
|
| https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1636047019893481474
| quadcore wrote:
| Admitedly, this is somewhat an hilarious tweet.
| dekhn wrote:
| He fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be "non-
| profit" (or is being intentionally disingenous; it's hard to
| tell with him). It doesn't mean you can't make a profit.
| indymike wrote:
| Not-for-profits can also vote to sell themselves if their
| bylaws don't prohibit it.
| gumby wrote:
| > I am not sure about the legality
|
| non-profits can own for-profit businesses. They generally
| invest their endowments in...the stock market, and owning a
| whole company is just that at a larger scale.
|
| A well known example is Usenix taking its networking sideline
| and turned it into the company UUnet which let Rick Adams
| become a billionaire (for a while). I actually considered this
| scandalous and still do, but it was all legally above board. It
| ended up ensnarled in the Worldcom fraud, which felt like
| poetic justice to me.
| [deleted]
| HervalFreire wrote:
| Makes sense. I'd sell my soul for much less, as would most of
| you. If they didn't sell their soul, that would be more of a
| surprise.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| Sathoshi Nakamoto's soul remains intact.
| no_wizard wrote:
| one day those coins will be sold, I think, and we'll see if
| bitcoin can go beyond Sathoshi
| HervalFreire wrote:
| He probably died. That's the most likely explanation.
| LanceH wrote:
| Another explanation is that he has a lot more bitcoin
| outside the large stack and moving the big stack would
| crash the market as a whole.
| HappySweeney wrote:
| How many anonymous whales are there?
| LanceH wrote:
| How much is a whale? Not everyone needs to be a
| billionaire. He could have a couple million anonymously,
| and a nice full time job, and be under the radar.
|
| I want to believe this, rather than he lost the key or
| that it's that other guy who has chosen not to be
| anonymous.
| ProAm wrote:
| > as would most of you.
|
| I think we are okay with selling of the soul, it was the
| rhetoric that they were good, honest, and open before hand.
| This comes across as just another VC marketing pitch where
| greed underlies everything in the end. That is where the
| sourness comes from.
|
| Call it a pivot.
| FpUser wrote:
| "Do no evil"
| amelius wrote:
| If anyone was still thinking about companies as saints, then
| this is a good moment to reconsider that. (This also applies to
| the Apple folks here).
| FredPret wrote:
| Apple fan here - I have no illusions about them being a
| saint. I like that their profit motive aligns with my
| interests. Charge me a lot for quality and simplicity.
|
| Google makes money not from selling me a good product, but by
| selling my information, and Microsoft seems determined to
| confuse and frustrate, profiting from lockin rather than
| quality.
|
| Yes, I'm concerned that Apple is selling ads.
| amelius wrote:
| The alignment between their profit and your interests
| ceases to exist the moment they separate you from your
| money, and you become trapped in their ecosystem.
| visarga wrote:
| By removing audio jacks from everything Apple is not my
| friend. I had to buy special hardware to fix their spartan
| tablet to play MIDI music - how do you get audio out
| without lag when the input is required for connecting to
| the keyboard? Certainly not from the jack output.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > By removing audio jacks from everything Apple is not my
| friend.
|
| I agree that this was a terrible decision (although as a
| non-Apple user, I wouldn't care except that so many non-
| Apple companies followed Apple's lead here).
|
| But to be fair, that's a product design decision, not
| really one with moral implications.
| hansoolo wrote:
| And most definitely not from Bluetooth
| politelemon wrote:
| > I like that their profit motive aligns with my interests.
|
| It's a common expression I see around here, but you do not
| know their profit motives. You only know their marketing
| and hold a perception of them. They are not the same thing,
| there cannot be alignment.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This is a strawman of Apple fans - the reasoning behind
| liking Apple is that, in theory, your incentives and their
| incentives align in a way that can never be true of e.g.
| Google. Apple makes money by making hardware/software that is
| worth the price premium, Google makes money by making me a
| more desirable target for advertisers.
| mr90210 wrote:
| Or probably they wouldn't have survived given how much resource
| they need to operate.
|
| If they were not called OpenAI probably such blog posts would
| be written.
|
| Given how much ahead they are, they can safely rename the
| company if they wish to do so.
| IYasha wrote:
| They had soul??
| flangola7 wrote:
| Open source AI development is possibly the worst idea in history.
| Yes, let's just put a demon summoning circle in every household.
| squarefoot wrote:
| That might be still a bit less evil than letting a single
| private company control it.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Part of the reason we're still here is because nukes are only
| controlled by a small number of powerful but mostly rational
| actors. If you give everyone nukes then Terrorist Timmy and
| Dumbass David will push the button 30 seconds after they get
| a hold of it.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA1sNLL6yg4
| squarefoot wrote:
| That's a valid point, but the assumption should be that
| Timmy and David can't afford today the tools and facilities
| to build nukes as much as they won't have enough power to
| do anything harmful with an AI. At least for a while,
| hopefully.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Wow somebody "AI safety/ethics" actually said the quiet part
| out loud! That they are so superstitious, ignorant, and
| cowardly that they equate language models with demons. What is
| up next, declaring reading and writing demonic?
| flangola7 wrote:
| It's literally a quote from Elon Musk right before he dumped
| in $100M to help OpenAI start.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/26/elon-musk-compares-
| buildin...
|
| Maybe avoid flying off the handle before you've done so much
| as a Google search?
| JohnFen wrote:
| If demon-summoning circles are going to be a thing that exists,
| I'd much rather have them in every household than have them
| used exclusively by the rich and powerful.
|
| But more than that, I'd rather they not be used by either
| group.
| khana wrote:
| [dead]
| aj7 wrote:
| "However, not long after, they decided to share the model after
| finding "no strong evidence of misuse."
|
| What about mal-use?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| would GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 exist right now if they didn't?
|
| I'm not one to hold up progress just so people can collect
| paychecks for a couple more months.
| visarga wrote:
| Their excuse is that scaling AI required scaling the money. And
| they realised this long ago. So they had to go commercial or give
| up the top spot.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| > Oren Etzioni, director of the Allen Institute for AI, also
| received the news with skepticism. "I disagree with the notion
| that a nonprofit can't compete. [...] If bigger and better funded
| was always better, then IBM would still be number one."
|
| So, fine, I accept this story is as old as dirt: well-funded
| startup wants money and power; plays in a zero-sum game against
| other well-funded companies; sells product with lovely,
| benevolent marketing copy.
|
| Still I find this comparison unconvincing. IBM is not number one
| because they lost to better-capitalized (on the right product)
| competitors.
|
| So, precisely which non-profit unseated IBM? Which non-profit is
| a disruptive tech leader with a global workforce? I really want
| it to be true, but it needs to actually be demonstrably true.
| whatshisface wrote:
| There are so few (almost no) attempts at starting nonprofits to
| do the kinds of things that compete with IBM, that they could
| have a greater success rate than startups and we still wouldn't
| have any evidence one way or the other.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| That's a fair point, and obviously the funding model doesn't
| incentivize the creation of those types of organizations. I
| guess I remain skeptical (cynical?) that it could be
| successful.
|
| As perhaps one counter example, I'm currently decked out in
| Patagonia gear. Not a tech company, of course. And so maybe
| the bigger question is - does the audience (customer) care
| about how its product is funded and built?
|
| I argue they should, but do they? I see little evidence
| that's the case. (See an extreme case: Meta.)
| pharmakom wrote:
| > If bigger and better funded was always better, then IBM would
| still be number one
|
| Weak reasoning. Maybe being bigger and better funded is a
| necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
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