[HN Gopher] Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mi...
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Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 239 points
Date : 2024-12-27 12:57 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Surely these couldn't be the exact incentives that the founders
| (from a distance) predicted would exert themselves on the project
| as its economic value increased, right?
| yalogin wrote:
| Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This
| scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me.
| They clearly want to be a for profit company, is this the threat
| of Elon talking?
| llamaimperative wrote:
| It's a really idiosyncratic and very subtle, intelligent,
| calculated imperative called "want yacht."
| causal wrote:
| Want yacht before world realizes they've run out of ideas
| yalogin wrote:
| Ha actually like elon showed his peers recently, its "want
| countries" rather than "want yacht"
| jprete wrote:
| I think it's entirely a legal dodge to pretend that they aren't
| gutting the non-profit mission.
| aimazon wrote:
| If AGI were in reach, why would something so human as money
| matter to these people? The choice to transition to a more
| pocket-lining structure is surely a vote of no-confidence in
| reaching AGI anytime soon.
| jasfi wrote:
| The only proof is in benchmarks and carefully selected demos.
| What we have is enough AI to do some interesting things, and
| that's good enough for now. AGI is a fuzzy goal that keeps the
| AI companies working at an incredible pace.
| llm_trw wrote:
| Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite
| infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above
| human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more
| expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it.
|
| I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how
| smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base
| models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely
| open question. It's still the case that no one has build an
| interactive system that _really_ scales - even the startups and
| off the record conversations I've had with people in these
| companies say that they are still using python across a single
| data center.
|
| AGI is now no longer a dream but a question of if we want to:
|
| 1). Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep
| going like it's Fallout.
|
| 2). Wait and hope that Moore's law keeps applying to GPUs until
| the cost of something like o3 drops to something affordable, in
| both dollar terms and watts.
| apsec112 wrote:
| We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a
| robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This
| isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of
| labor hours.)
| layer8 wrote:
| Not that I necessarily disagree on the conclusion, but why
| should percentage of labor hours constitute a measure for
| general intelligence?
| llm_trw wrote:
| AGI isn't until it meets some arbitrary criteria you made
| up. When it does it's the next arbitrary criteria that you
| just made up.
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| > Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep
| going like it's Fallout
|
| Nuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than
| solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery
| storage) in many or most parts of the world.
|
| Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has
| about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had
| in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. "market share") but in absolute
| numbers.
|
| If you want energy generation cheap and fast, invest in
| renewables.
| llm_trw wrote:
| And yet when data enters need power all day every day
| nuclear is the only solution. Even Bill Gates stop selling
| solar when it wasn't for the poors who probably don't need
| hot water every day anyway.
| Keyframe wrote:
| The more I look the more I think it's ever so more out of reach
| and if there's a chance at it, OpenAI doesn't seem to be the
| one that will deliver it.
|
| To extrapolate, (of LLMs and GenAI) the more I see use of and
| how it's used the more it shows severe upwards limits, even
| though the introduction of those tools has been phenomenal.
|
| On business side, OpenAI lost key personnel and seemingly the
| plot as well.
|
| I think we've all been drinking a bit too much on the hype of
| it all. It'll al;l settle down into wonderful set of (new)
| tools, but not on AGI. Few more (AI) winters down the road,
| maybe..
| ben_w wrote:
| Every letter of "AGI" means different things to different
| people, and the thing as a whole sometimes means things not
| found in any of the letters.
|
| We had what I, personally, would count as a "general-purpose
| AI" already with the original release of ChatGPT... but that
| made me realise that "generality" is a continuum not a boolean,
| as it definitely became more general-purpose with multiple
| modalities, sound and vision not just text, being added. And
| it's still not "done" yet: while it's more general across
| academic fields than any human, there's still plenty that most
| humans can do easily that these models can't -- and not just
| counting letters, until recently they also couldn't (control a
| hand to) tie shoelaces*.
|
| There's also the question of "what even is intelligence?",
| where for some questions it just matters what the capabilities
| are, and for other questions it matters how well it can learn
| from limited examples: where you have lots of examples,
| ChatGPT-type models can be economically transformative**; where
| you don't, the same models * _really suck_ *.
|
| (I've also seen loads of arguments about how much "artificial"
| counts, but this is more about if the origin of the training
| data makes them fundamentally unethical for copyright reasons).
|
| * 2024, September 12, uses both transformer and diffusion
| models: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-
| robot-dext...
|
| ** the original OpenAI definition of AGI: "by which we mean
| highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most
| economically valuable work" -- found on
| https://openai.com/charter/ at time of writing
| abecedarius wrote:
| I believe e.g. Ilya Sutskever believed AGI is in reach at the
| founding, and was in earnest about the reasons for the
| nonprofit. AFAICT the founders who still think that way all
| left.
|
| It's not that the remainder want nonprofit ownership, it's that
| they can't legally just jettison it, they need a story how
| altering the deal is good actually.
| qoez wrote:
| "Why we've decided to activate our stock maximizing AIs despite
| it buying nothing but paperclip manufacturing companies because
| reaching AGI is in humanitys best interest no matter the costs"
| lucianbr wrote:
| "It would be against our fiduciary duty to not build the
| torment nexus."
| keiferski wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing it in this article or elsewhere on the website,
| but _how_ exactly is OpenAI's vision of making AGI going to
| "benefit humanity as as a whole"?
|
| I'm not asking to be snarky or imply any hidden meaning...I just
| don't see how they plan on getting from A to B.
|
| From this recent press release the answer seems to be: _make
| ChatGPT really good and offer it for free to people to use._
| Which is a reasonable answer, I suppose, but not exactly one that
| matches the highfalutin language being used around AGI.
| rewsiffer wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
| causal wrote:
| > Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need
| conventional equity and less structural bespokeness
|
| Well you see the AGI can only benefit humanity if it is funded
| via traditional equity... Investors WANT to give their money
| but the horrendous lack of ownership is defeating their
| goodwill
| latexr wrote:
| > but _how_ exactly is OpenAI's vision of making AGI going to
| "benefit humanity as as a whole"?
|
| Considering their definition of AGI is "makes a lot of money",
| it's not going to--and was never designed to--benefit anyone
| else.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQUCpeJG1Y
|
| What else could we have expected from someone who made yet
| another cryptocurrency scam?
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
|
| https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
|
| Sam Altman doesn't give a rat's ass about improving humanity,
| he cares about personal profit.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
| mapt wrote:
| The seasoned advice from experts is that AGI could very
| easily END humanity as a whole. But they need to pay their
| mortgage right now, and uhh... if we don't do it our
| competitors will.
|
| We're basically betting our species' future on these guys
| failing, because for a short period of time there's a massive
| amount of shareholder value to be made.
| darkhorse222 wrote:
| Isn't the idea that AGI could replace a bunch of labor
| allowing us to help more poor and increase net positive
| vibes or just have more leisure time?
|
| Obviously the way our economy and society are structured
| that's not what will happen, but I don't think that has
| much to do with tools and their tendency to increase our
| efficiency and output.
|
| Put another way, there are powerful benefits from AGI that
| we will squander because our system sucks. That is not a
| critique against AGI, that is a critique of our system and
| will continue to show up. It's already a huge point of
| conversation in our collective dialogue.
| tux3 wrote:
| Once OpenAI becomes fabulously rich, the world will surely be
| transformed, and then the benefits of all this concentration of
| power will simply trickle down.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Everything else aside, fabulous riches not guaranteed.
| ben_w wrote:
| The path between A and B has enough tangled branches that I'm
| reminded of childhood maze puzzles where you have to find which
| entrance even gets to the right goal and not the bad outcomes.
|
| The most positive take is: they want to build a general-purpose
| AI, to allow fully automated luxury for all; to built with care
| to ensure it can only be used for positive human flourishing
| and cannot (easily or at all) be used for nefarious purposes by
| someone who wants to sow chaos or take over the world; and to
| do so in public so that the rest of us can prepare for it
| rather than wake up one day to a world that is alien to us.
|
| Given the mental image I have here is of a maze, you may well
| guess that I don't expect this to go smoothly -- I think the
| origin in Silicon Valley and startup culture means OpenAI,
| quite naturally, has a bias towards optimism and to the idea
| that economic growth and tech is a good thing by default. I
| think all of this is only really tempered by the memetic
| popularity of Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the extent to which his
| fears are taken seriously, and his fears are focussed more on
| existential threat of an optimising agent that does the
| optimising faster than we do, not on any of the transitional
| dynamics going from the current economy to whatever a "humans
| need not apply" economy looks like.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > an optimising agent that does the optimising faster than we
| do
|
| I still don't understand this. What does it mean in practice?
| ben_w wrote:
| Example:
|
| Covid does not hate you, nor does it love you, it simply
| follows an optimisation algorithm -- that of genetic
| evolution -- for the maximum reproductive success, and does
| so without regard to the damage it causes your body while
| it consumes you for parts.
|
| Covid is pretty stupid, it's just a virus.
|
| And yet: I've heard the mutation rate is 3.8 x 10e-6 /
| nucleotide / cycle, and at about 30,000 base pairs and 10e9
| to 1e11 virons in an infected person, so that's ~1e8-1e10
| mutations per reproductive cycle in an infected person, and
| that the replication cycle duration is about 10 hours. Such
| mutations are both how it got to harm us in the first
| place, why vaccination isn't once-and-done, and this logic
| also applies to all the other diseases in the world
| (including bacterial ones, which is why people are worried
| about bacterial resistance).
|
| As an existence proof, Covid shows how an agent going off
| and doing its own thing, if it does it well enough, doesn't
| even need to be smart to kill a percentage point or so of
| the human species * _by accident_ *.
|
| The _hope_ is that AI will be smart enough that we can tell
| it: humans (and the things we value) are not an allowed
| source of parts. The danger happens well before it 's that
| smart... and that even when it is that smart, we may well
| not be smart enough to describe all the things we value,
| accurately, and without bugs/loopholes in our descriptions.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| This is a description of the singularity arising from a
| fast intelligence takeoff.
| gmerc wrote:
| Well The Information reports that AGi really just means 100B
| profit for Microsoft and friends. So...
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the "for profit cap" for Microsoft is
| something like a trillion dollars in return. 100x return cap
| at $10 billion invested. It basically prevents Microsoft from
| becoming a world super power with a military and nuclear
| weapons but not much else, especially considering they will
| reinvest a lot of their money for even more returns over time
| ergonaught wrote:
| Their charter defines AGI as "highly autonomous systems that
| outperform humans at most economically valuable work", and
| their intent is to ""directly build safe and beneficial AGI" or
| "[aid] others to achieve this".
|
| They don't address benefits beyond the wide-scale automation of
| economically-valuable work, and as those benefits require
| significant revisions to social structures it's probably
| appropriate that they keep their mouth shut on the subject.
| gregw2 wrote:
| The questions quickly arise: Safe... for whom, and
| beneficial... for whom?
| ksynwa wrote:
| I'm woefully uneducated but I think it's a red herring. It does
| not matter what their vision of AGI is if they are just going
| to be peddling LLMs as a service to customers.
| meiraleal wrote:
| Does anybody else here also think openai lost it? This year was
| all about drama and no real breakthrough while competitors caught
| up without the drama.
| rasengan wrote:
| While there are issues that Mr. Musk must address, I don't think
| this is one of them.
|
| Demonizing someone who helped you is an awful thing to do. If he
| gave 1/3 of the initial funding, he helped a lot.
| bogtog wrote:
| > A non-profit structure seemed fitting, and we raised
| donations in various forms including cash ($137M, less than a
| third of which was from Elon)
|
| Saying "less than" is peculiar phrasing for such a substantial
| amount, but maybe some people believe Elon initially funded
| about all of it
| jprete wrote:
| It's plausible that, without Musk's less-than-a-third, nobody
| else would have put in any serious money.
| threeseed wrote:
| It's not even remotely plausible.
|
| Sam Altman is one of the most well connected people in
| Silicon Valley.
|
| And investors like Reid Hoffman aren't having their lives
| being dictated by Musk.
| rasengan wrote:
| Mr. Altman is without a doubt well connected and a good
| guy.
|
| However, Mr. Musk is continually called out by OpenAI in
| the public and OpenAI has quite the megaphone.
| ben_w wrote:
| > However, Mr. Musk is continually called out by OpenAI
| in the public and OpenAI has quite the megaphone.
|
| From what I see, this is mainly due to Musk complaining
| loudly in public.
|
| And unlike the caving instructor that Musk libelled,
| OpenAI has the means to fight back as an equal.
|
| That said, I don't see anything in this post that I'd
| describe as Musk "being called out".
| soared wrote:
| This article very briefly mentions his name in relation to
| funding but does not demonize him or ask him to address issues?
| rasengan wrote:
| He has been living rent free in their heads, mouths and on
| their blogs for quite some time.
|
| Unfortunately, it's been in a quite negative tone.
|
| If all of this is really for humanity -- then humanity needs
| to shape up, get along and do this together.
| sumedh wrote:
| > If he gave 1/3 of the initial funding, he helped a lot
|
| He didnt just want to help, he wanted to control the company by
| being the CEO.
| corry wrote:
| Whatever other zaniness is going on with Musk/Sam/etc, I can't
| escape the feeling that if I had donated a lot of money to a
| non-profit, and then a few years later that non-profit said
| "SURPRISE, WE'RE NOW FOR PROFIT AND MAKING INVESTORS RICH but
| you're not an investor, you're a donor, so thank-you-and-
| goodbye"... ya, I'd feel miffed too.
|
| If we're a for-profit company with investors and returns etc...
| then those initial donations seem far closer to seed capital
| than a not-for-profit gift. Of course hindsight is 20/20, and I
| can believe that this wasn't always some devious plan but
| rather the natural evolution of the company... but still seems
| inequitable.
|
| As much as Elon's various antics might deserve criticism
| (especially post-election) he seems to be in the right here? Or
| am I missing something?
| gary_0 wrote:
| I believe they offered Elon shares in return for the initial
| donation, and he turned them down because he didn't want a
| few billion worth of OpenAI, he wanted total executive
| control.
|
| But we're all kind of arguing over which demon is poking the
| other the hardest with their pitchfork, here.
| az226 wrote:
| "Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware
| Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with ordinary shares of
| stock...The non-profit's significant interest in the existing
| for-profit would take the form of shares in the PBC at a fair
| valuation determined by independent financial advisors."
|
| The details here matter and is bs. What should take place is
| this, OpenAI creates a new for profit entity (PBC, or whatever
| structure). That company sets an auction for 5-10% of the shares.
| This yields the valuation. The new company acquires the old
| company with equity, using the last valuation. So say $30b is
| raised for 10%, means $300B.
|
| So the $160B becomes like 53% and then 63% with the 10% offer. So
| the non-profit keeps 37% plus whatever it owns of the current for
| profit entity.
|
| Auction means the price is fair and arms-length, not trust me bro
| advisors that rug pull valuations.
|
| I believe on this path, Elon Musk has a strong claim to get a
| significant portion of the equity owned by the non-profit, given
| his sizable investment when a contemporaneous valuation of the
| company would have been small.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Elon Musk strong claim to get a significant portion of the
| equity owned by the non-profit, given his sizable investment
| when a contemporaneous valuation of the company would have been
| small_
|
| Sorry, what's the path to this? Musk's 'investment' was in the
| form of a donation, which means he legally has no more claim to
| the value of the nonprofit than anyone else.
| sobellian wrote:
| So there's really no legal recourse if a 501c3 markets itself
| as a research institute / OSS developer, collects $130MM, and
| then uses those donations to seed a venture-backed company
| with closed IP in which the donors get no equity? One that
| even competes with some of the donors?
| jefftk wrote:
| There is recourse, in that a 501c3 is limited in what it
| can do with it's assets: it must use them to advance its
| charitable purpose. In this case the OpenAI board will
| attempt to make the case that this approach, with partial
| ownership of a public benefit company, is what's best for
| their mission.
|
| If donors got equity in the PBC or the owned PBC avoided
| competing with donor owned companies this would not be
| consistent with the non-profit's mission, and would not be
| compliant with 501c3 restrictions.
| sobellian wrote:
| Right, I pointed out the competition to show that the
| donors are suffering actual damages from the
| restructuring. I don't think any of the critics here
| seriously expect the PBC model to fulfill the nonprofit's
| stated mission in any case.
|
| This is not just an issue for the change that OpenAI is
| contemplating _right now_ , but also the capped for-
| profit change that happened years ago. If that's found to
| be improper, I'm curious if that entitles the donors to
| any kind of compensation.
|
| ETA: looking into this, I found the following precedent
| (https://www.techpolicy.press/questioning-openais-
| nonprofit-s...).
|
| > A historic precedent for this is when Blue Cross' at
| the time nonprofit health insurers converted into for-
| profit enterprises. California Blue Cross converted into
| what's now Anthem. They tried to put a small amount of
| money into a nonprofit purpose. The California Attorney
| General intervened and they ultimately paid out about $3
| billion into ongoing significant health charitable
| foundations in California. That's a good model for what
| might happen here.
|
| So my guess is there's no compensation for any of the
| donors, but OpenAI may in the end be forced to give some
| money to an open, nonprofit AI research lab (do these
| exist?). IANAL so that's a low-confidence guess.
|
| Still, that makes me so queasy. I would never donate to a
| YC-backed nonprofit if this is how it can go, and I say
| that as a YC alum.
| az226 wrote:
| The argument was because they've converted the nonprofit to a
| for profit, which enriches the employees and investors and
| doesn't serve the nonprofit or its mission, the nonprofit was
| only so in disguise and should be viewed as having been a for
| profit all along. So the donation should be viewed as an
| investment.
| rvz wrote:
| > A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most
| economically valuable work.
|
| That is not the _real_ definition of AGI. The real "definition"
| can mean anything at this point and in their leaked report from
| the Information [0] they have defined it as _" returning $100
| billion or so in profits"_
|
| In other words raise more money until they reach AGI. This non-
| profit conversion to for-profit is looking like a complete scam
| from the original mission [1] when they started out:
|
| > Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is
| most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a
| need to generate financial return. Since our research is free
| from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive
| human impact.
|
| "AGI" at this point is a meaningless term abused to fleece
| investors to raise billions for the displacement of jobs either
| way which that will "benefit humanity" with no replacement or
| alternative for those lost jobs.
|
| This is a total scam.
|
| [0] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/26/24329618/openai-
| microsof...
|
| [1] https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Yeah IMO they should be required to dissolve the company and
| re-form it as for-profit. And pay any back-taxes their non-
| profit status exempted them from in the meantime.
| sanj wrote:
| > Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need
| conventional equity and less structural bespokeness.
|
| This seems exactly backwards. At this scale you can establish as
| much "bespokeness" as you want. The investors want in and will
| sign pretty much anything.
|
| It reminds me of the old joke from Paul Getty:
|
| If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank
| $100 million, that's the bank's problem.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Can they quit this "non profit" larp already? Is this some
| recruiting tactic to attract idealistic engineers or a plan to
| evade taxes, or both? Sam Altman was offering crypto-alms to
| third world people in exchange for scanning their eyeballs. There
| is no altruism here.
| jrmg wrote:
| _Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly
| consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and
| does not enable the non-profit to easily do more than control the
| for-profit._
|
| I kind of thought that was the point of the current structure.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| They referring to the reconstructed board that solely exists to
| rubber stamp every Altman decision as officially great for
| humanity, so what do they care what the board's considerations
| are? They'll go along with literally anything.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| Loyalty can go away.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| humanity benefactor CEOs can get fired out of the blue
| timeon wrote:
| I'm bit tired, is this sarcasm?
| jasode wrote:
| _> I kind of thought that was the point of the current
| structure._
|
| Yes, it is but if we _only stopped the analysis right there_ ,
| we could take pleasure in the fact that Sam Altman checkmated
| himself in his own blog post. _" Dude, the non-profit is
| _supposed_ to control the profit company because that's how you
| formed the companies in the first place! Duh!!!"_
|
| To go beyond that analysis, we have to at least entertain (not
| "agree" but just _entertain_ for analysis) ... what Sam is
| saying:
|
| - the original non-profit and profit structure _was a mistake_
| that was based on what they thought they knew at the time.
| (They thought they could be a "research" firm.)
|
| - having a non-profit control the profit _becomes a moot point_
| if the for-profit company becomes irrelevant in the
| marketplace.
|
| Here is a key paragraph:
|
| _> The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies
| are now investing into AI development show what it will really
| take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again
| need to raise more capital than we'd imagined. Investors want
| to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional
| equity and less structural bespokeness._
|
| In other words, let's suppose the old Friendster social network
| was structured as "non-profit-board-controlling-a-for-profit-
| Friendster" like OpenAI. The ideals of the _" non-profit being
| in control"_ is a moot point when a competitor like Facebook
| makes non-profit-Friendster irrelevant.
|
| Or put another way, pick any hard problem today (self-driving,
| energy discovery, etc) that requires _billions of investment_
| and hypothetically create a new company to compete in that
| space. Would creating that company as a non-profit-controlling-
| the-profit-company confer any market advantage or would it be a
| handicap? It looks like it 's a handicap.
|
| OpenAI is finding it hard to compete for investors' billions in
| the face of Tesla's billions spent on 50000 GPU supercluster,
| Google billions spent on Gemini, Anthropic billions spent on
| Claude, Alibaba's billions, etc. OpenAI doesn't have an
| unassailable lead with ChatGPT.
|
| The issue is Sam Altman & OpenAI look bad because he and the
| investors want to use the existing _" OpenAI"_ brand name in a
| restructured simpler for-profit company. But to outsiders, it
| looks like a scam or bait-and-switch. Maybe they could have
| done an alternative creative procedure such as spin up a
| totally new for-profit company called ClosedAI to take OpenAI's
| employees and then pay a perpetual ip license to OpenAI. That
| way, CloseAI is free of encumbrances from OpenAI's messy
| structure. But then again, Elon Musk would still probably file
| another lawsuit calling those license transfers as "bad faith
| business dealings".
| parpfish wrote:
| I could see an argument for your example that putting the non
| profit in control of a social media company could help the
| long term financial success of the platform because you're
| not chasing short term revenue that annoys users (more
| intrusive ads, hacking engagement with a stream of shallow
| click bait, etc). So it'd be a question of whether you could
| survive long enough to outlast competitors getting a big
| short term boost.
|
| I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for llm products.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _the original non-profit and profit structure was a mistake
| that was based on what they thought they knew at the time.
| (They thought they could be a "research" firm.)_
|
| There's no slavery here. If Sam decided it was a mistake to
| dedicate his time to a non-profit, he's perfectly free to
| quit and start an entirely new organization that comports
| with his current vision. That would be the honorable thing to
| do.
| jasode wrote:
| _> If Sam decided it was a mistake to dedicate his time to
| a non-profit, he's perfectly free to quit [...]_
|
| To be clear, I don't think Sam can do anything and come out
| looking "good" from a public relations standpoint.
|
| That said, Sam probably thinks he's justified because _he
| was one of the original founders and co-chair of OpenAI_ --
| so he feels he should have a say in pivoting it to
| something else. He said he got all the other donors on
| board ... except for Elon.
|
| That leaves us with the messy situation today... Elon is
| the one filing the lawsuit and Sam is writing a PR blog
| post that's received as corporate doublespeak.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _he was one of the original founders and co-chair of
| OpenAI -- so he feels he should have a say in pivoting it
| to something else_
|
| No. Non-profit is a deal between those founders and
| society. That he was an original founder is irrelevant. I
| don't care about Elon, it's the _pivoting_ that's
| inherently dishonorable.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Non-profit is a deal between those founders and
| society._
|
| Yes I get that but did OpenAI ever take any _public
| donations_ from society? I don 't think they did. It
| thought it was only funded by wealthy _private_ donors.
|
| _> , it's the pivoting that's inherently dishonorable._
|
| Would _creating a new company (i.e. ClosedAI)_ that
| recruits OpenAI 's employees and buys the intellectual
| property such that it leaves a "shell" of OpenAI be
| acceptable?
|
| That's basically the roundabout thing Sam is trying to do
| now with a _re-incorporated for-profit PBC_ that 's not
| beholden to the 2015 non-profit organization ... except
| he's also trying to keep the strong branding of the
| existing "OpenAI" name instead of "ClosedAI".
|
| The existing laws allow for non-profit 501c3
| organizations to "convert" (scare quotes) to for-profit
| status by re-incorporating to a (new) for-profit company.
| That seems to be Sam's legal roadmap.
|
| EDIT REPLY: _They received benefits by dint of their
| status. If there were no such benefits_
|
| The main benefit is tax exemption but OpenAI never had
| profits to be taxed. Also to clarify, there's _already a
| for-profit OpenAI Global LLC_. That 's the subsidiary
| company Microsoft invested in. It has the convoluted
| "capped profit" structure. Sam says he can't attract
| enough investors to that for-profit entity. Therefore, he
| wants to create _another for-profit OpenAI company_ that
| doesn 't have the convoluted ("bespoke" as he put it)
| self-imposed rules to be more attractive to new
| investors.
|
| The 2 entities of non-profit and for-profit is like
| Mozilla Foundation + Mozilla Corporation.
|
| [] https://www.google.com/search?q=conversion+of+501c3+to
| +for-p...
| bradleyjg wrote:
| _Yes I get that but did OpenAI ever take any public
| donations from society? I don 't think they did. It
| thought it was only funded by wealthy private donors._
|
| They received benefits by dint of their status. If there
| were no such benefits they wouldn't have incorporated
| that way.
|
| _In any case, would creating a new company (i.e.
| ClosedAI) that recruits OpenAI 's employees and buys the
| intellectual property such that it leaves a "shell" of
| OpenAI be acceptable?_
|
| There's no problem with recruiting employees. The
| intellectual property purchase is problematic. If it's
| for sale, it should be for sale to anyone and no one
| connected to a bidder should be involved in evaluating
| offers.
|
| _The existing laws allow for non-profit 501c3
| organizations to "convert" (scare quotes) to for-profit
| status by re-incorporating to a (new) for-profit company.
| That seems to be Sam's legal roadmap._
|
| Legal and honorable are not synonyms.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| All I care about, (and I guess I don't care than much
| because I'm not a US citizen) is, has this move allowed
| them, or their contributors to pay less tax. That is
| their only obligation to the public.
|
| Was the non profit a way to just avoid tax until the time
| came to start making money?
| diogofranco wrote:
| "Was the non profit a way to just avoid tax until the
| time came to start making money?"
|
| You'd want to do it the other way around
| aeternum wrote:
| >That would be the honorable thing to do.
|
| It's also notable that this is in fact what the now vast
| majority of other OpenAI founders chose to do.
| maeil wrote:
| > But to outsiders, it looks like a scam or bait-and-switch.
|
| It doesn't look like one - it is one.
|
| > We're excited to welcome the following new donors to
| OpenAI: Jed McCaleb (opens in a new window), Gabe Newell
| (opens in a new window), Michael Seibel (opens in a new
| window), Jaan Tallinn (opens in a new window), and Ashton
| Eaton (opens in a new window) and Brianne Theisen-Eaton
| (opens in a new window). Reid Hoffman (opens in a new window)
| is significantly increasing his contribution. Pieter Abbeel
| (opens in a new window) (having completed his sabbatical with
| us), Julia Galef (opens in a new window), and Maran Nelson
| (opens in a new window) are becoming advisors to OpenAI.
|
| [1] https://openai.com/index/openai-supporters/
| jasode wrote:
| _> It doesn't look like one - it is one. > We're excited to
| welcome the following new donors to OpenAI: ..._
|
| The story is that OpenAI worked out some equity conversion
| of the for-profit co for the donors to the non-profit. Elon
| Musk was the notable holdout. Elon was offered some unknown
| percentage for his ~$40 million donation but he refused.
|
| Seems like the donors are ok with OpenAI pivot to for-
| profit ... except for Elon. So no bait-n-switch as seen
| from "insiders" perspective.
|
| If you have information that contradicts that, please add
| to the thread.
| maeil wrote:
| That does not make it less of a scam.
|
| These people "donated to a non-profit". They did not
| "invest in a for-profit".
|
| If the Red Cross suddenly turns into a for-profit and
| then says "well we'll give our donators of the past few
| years equity in our new company", this does not make it
| any less of a scam.
|
| > Seems like the donors are ok with OpenAI pivot to for-
| profit
|
| If you have information that shows this, feel free to add
| it. "Not suing" is not the same as that. Very few people
| sue even when they feel they're scammed.
| jasode wrote:
| _> These people "donated to a non-profit". They did not
| "invest in a for-profit"._
|
| Sure, nobody wants to be tricked into donating to a
| charity and then have their money disappear into a for-
| profit company.
|
| Based on the interviews I saw from some donors (Reid
| Hoffman, etc), there's more nuance to it than that. The
| donors also wanted an _effective non-profit entity_. The
| TLDR is that they donated to a non-profit under 2015
| assumptions of AGI research costs that turned out to be
| wrong and massively underestimated.
|
| - 2015... the non-profit OpenAI in its original idea of
| "charity research organization" was flawed from the
| beginning because they realized they couldn't attract
| A.I. talent at the same level as Google/Facebook/etc as
| those competitors offered higher salaries and lucrative
| stock options. Then, they realized the initial ~$100
| million in donations was also not enough to pay for very
| expensive hardware like GPUs and datacenters. It's hard
| for researchers to make discoveries in AGI if there's no
| cutting edge hardware for them to work on. A non-profit
| tech charity getting _billions in donations_ was not
| realistic. These money problems compound and lead to...
|
| - 2019... create the for-profit OpenAI Global LLC as a
| vehicle for the Microsoft investment of $1 billion and
| also create stock incentives for recruiting employees.
| This helps solve the talent acquisition and pay-for-
| expensive-hardware problems. This for-profit entity is
| capped. (https://openai.com/our-structure/)
|
| (Side note: other non-profit entities with _for-profit
| subsidiaries_ to supplement funding include Goodwill,
| Girl Scouts of America, Salvation Army, Mozilla, etc.)
|
| We can't know all the back room dealings but it seemed
| like the donors were on board with the 2019 for-profit
| entity. The donors understood the original non-profit was
| not viable to do AGI work because they underestimated the
| costs. The publicly revealed emails that as early as
| 2017, Elon was also pushing to switch OpenAI to be a for-
| profit company.[1] _But the issue was Elon wanted to run
| it and Sam disagreed._ Elon left OpenAI and now he has
| competing AI businesses with xAI Grok and Tesla AI which
| makes his lawsuit have some conflicts of interest. I don
| 't which side to believe but that's the soap opera drama.
|
| Now in 2024, the 2019 for-profit OpenAI Global LLC has
| shown structural flaws _because the next set of investors
| with billions_ don 't want to put money into that LLC.
| Instead, the next investors need a _public incorporated
| company with ability to IPO_ as the vehicle. That 's
| where Sam wants to create another for-profit OpenAI Inc
| without the cap. We should be skeptical but he argues
| that a successful OpenAI will funnel more money back to
| the non-profit OpenAI than if it were a standalone non-
| profit that didn't take billions in investment.
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=elon+musk+emails+reve
| aled+op...
| int_19h wrote:
| It's not just about those whose money is at stake. The
| whole point of having non-profits as an option for
| corporations in the first place is to encourage things
| that broadly benefit society. Effectively turning a non-
| profit into a for-profit company is directly counter to
| that, and it means that society as a whole was defrauded
| when non-profit status was originally claimed with its
| associated perks.
| Hasu wrote:
| > In other words, let's suppose the old Friendster social
| network was structured as "non-profit-board-controlling-a-
| for-profit-Friendster" like OpenAI. The ideals of the "non-
| profit being in control" is a moot point when a competitor
| like Facebook makes non-profit-Friendster irrelevant.
|
| This feels like it's missing a really really important point,
| which is that in this analogy, the mission of the non-profit
| would be something like, "Make social media available to all
| of humanity without advertising or negative externalities",
| and the for-profit plans to do advertising to compete with
| Facebook.
|
| The for-profit's only plan for making money goes directly
| against the goals of the nonprofit. That's the problem. Who
| cares if it's competitive if the point of the competition is
| to destroy the things the non-profit stands for?
| soared wrote:
| It is incredibly difficult to see any corporate structure change
| as a positive at this point in time.
| htrp wrote:
| What happens to all those fake equity profit participation units
| that Open AI used to hand out?
| discreteevent wrote:
| > We view this mission as the most important challenge of our
| time.
|
| Who buys this stuff?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| OpenAI employees with unvested/unsold PPUs.
| bentt wrote:
| My read is:
|
| "We're going public because we want more money. We need more
| money for more computer time but that's not all. ChatGPT has been
| so influential that we deserve a bigger share of the rewards than
| we have gotten."
| flkiwi wrote:
| Alternate possibility:
|
| "We're beginning to see that this path isn't going where we
| thought it would so we're going to extract as much value as we
| can before it crashes into mundaneness."
| bentt wrote:
| Sure, strike while the iron is hot.
| Havoc wrote:
| The whole thing is a paper thin farce.
|
| Strong principled stance until the valuations got big (helped in
| no small measure by the principled stance)...and then backtracked
| it when everyone saw the riches there for the taking with a
| little let's call it reframing
| taneq wrote:
| Everyone has a price, is this meant to be shocking? I mean, I'm
| disappointed... but I'd have been far more surprised if they'd
| stood fast with the philanthropic mission once world-changing
| money was on the table.
| butterNaN wrote:
| No, not everyone has a price. Obviously anecdotal but I have
| met some truly passionate people in real life who wouldn't
| compramise their values. Humanity has not lost just yet.
|
| (I would say the same about some people who I haven't
| personally met, but it would be speculation)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| people who do have a price, tend to cluster around
| situations where that can come into play; people who do not
| have a price, tend to cluster around situations where that
| does not come into play (?)
| tmpz22 wrote:
| If you sell out humanity for a Gulf Stream 5 private jet when
| you already have a Gulf Stream 4 it's not deserving of
| empathy.
|
| "Somebody please think of the investors they only have 500
| years of generational wealth"
| dralley wrote:
| https://youtu.be/zUshGP2UJEo
| Shawnecy wrote:
| > Everyone has a price,
|
| Speak for yourself.
| taneq wrote:
| I've thought about this, a lot. My price is way higher than
| it once was, but still, if someone came along and dropped
| $10bn on my desk, I'd hear them out. There's things I'd say
| no to, regardless of price, but otherwise things are
| probably negotiable.
| saulpw wrote:
| It might sound fun to 'have' $10bn but consider losing
| your family, knowing that every person you meet is after
| your money (because they are), not having anyone give you
| responsible feedback, spending large amounts of time
| dealing with lawyers and accountants and finance bros,
| and basically never being 'normal' again. Winning a huge
| amount of money in a lottery carries a huge chance of
| ruining your life.
|
| There's a limit to the amount of money I'd want (or could
| even use), and it's well below $10b. If someone came
| around with $10m and an honest deal and someone else
| offered $10b to buy the morality in my left toe, I'd take
| the $10m without question.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| There is nothing you can do with $10bn that you cannot
| personally do with $1bn.
|
| You can only buy the International Space Station twice.
| Havoc wrote:
| Yes, likely most here would do the same even if they're not
| willing to admit it.
|
| I do think part of the price (paid) should be getting bluntly
| called out for it.
| maeil wrote:
| > Everyone has a price, is this meant to be shocking?
|
| Left a very-well paying job over conscience reasons. TC was
| ~3x higher than I could get elsewhere without immigrating,
| probably higher than anywhere relative to CoL. I wasn't even
| doing defense stuff, crypto scams or anything clearly
| questionable like that, just clients were mostly in fossil-
| fuel adjacent sectors. Come from a lower-class background and
| haven't built up sizable assets at all, will likely need to
| work until retirement age.
|
| AMA.
|
| If anyone similar reads this, would love to get in touch as
| I'm sure we'll have a lot in common. In case someone here
| knows me, hi!
| scarface_74 wrote:
| There is a huge difference between being "principled"
| between 3x and 1x when you are going from 200K to 600K and
| when you are going from $50K to $150K.
|
| Once you have "enough", your personal marginal utility for
| money changes. Would you go from what you are making now to
| being an at home nurse taking care of special needs kids
| for $16/hour?
| maeil wrote:
| > There is a huge difference between being "principled"
| between 3x and 1x when you are going from 200K to 600K
| and when you are going from $50K to $150K.
|
| If it'd be anything remotely like the former, I would
| have built up sizable assets (which I didn't), especially
| as I mentioned relative to CoL :)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Did you give up so much potential income that you
| couldn't meet your short term and long term wants and
| needs?
|
| What did you give up in your lifestyle that you
| personally valued to choose a lower paying job?
|
| I'm 50, (step)kids are grown, we downsized from the big
| house in the burbs to a condo in a state tax free state,
| etc and while I could make "FAANG" total compensation
| (been there done that), I much prefer a more laid back
| job, remote work, freedom to travel,etc. I also have
| always hated large companies.
|
| I would have made different choices a decade ago if the
| opportunities had arisen.
|
| I'm well aware that my income puts me at the top quintile
| of household income (while still lower than a mid level
| developer at any of the BigTech companies).
|
| https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
|
| Be as vague as you are comfortable with. But where are
| you with respect to the median income locally?
| bn-l wrote:
| Isn't it crazy how everything that could maybe dig us out
| of this hole is being held back because a few extremely
| rich people have a small chance of losing a tiny bit of
| money.
| maeil wrote:
| > Strong principled stance
|
| There had never been one. Not with Sam Altman. It was a play
| put on to get $100+ million in donations. This was always the
| goal, from day 0. This is trivially obvious considering the
| person Sam Altman.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| This.
|
| Anyone who thought Sam Altman wasn't in it for the money from
| the start, was being naive. In the extreme. Not only Mr
| Altman, but most of the people giving the larger donations
| were hoping for a hit as well. Why is that so incredible to
| people? How else would you get that kind of money to fund a
| ludicrously speculative research based endeavor? You don't
| even know if it's possible before the research. What else
| could they have done?
| justinbaker84 wrote:
| I think that is the case with Sam, but not Ilya and
| probably not with some of the other founders.
| cheald wrote:
| This is _specifically_ why I caution people against trusting
| OpenAI 's "we won't train on your data" checkbox. They are
| _specifically_ financially incentivized to do so, and have a
| demonstrated history of saying the nice, comforting thing and
| then doing the thing that benefits them instead.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Makes better sense to me now. They should've said this a long
| time ago.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| >> _and we raised donations in various forms including cash
| ($137M, less than a third of which was from Elon)_
|
| The amount of trashy pique in OpenAI PR against Elon specifically
| is hilarious.
|
| I'm no fan of the way either has behaved, but jesus, can't even
| skip an opportunity to slight him in an unrelated announcement?
| wejick wrote:
| one third nor $137M seems like small thing, this dig is a bit
| weird.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| 20 years of social media has turns you into a petty teenager.
| This stuff reeks of Sam Altman having uncontested power and
| being able to write whatever dumb shit he wants on openai.com.
| But it's not just OpenAI, Microsoft is also stunningly
| childish, and I think professionalism in corporate
| communications has basically collapsed across the board.
| evanevan wrote:
| The important bit (which seems unclear from this article), is the
| exact relationship between the for-profit and the not for profit?
|
| Before, profits were capped, with remainder going to the non-
| profit to distribute benefits equally across the world in event
| of agi / massive economic progress from agi. Which was nice, as
| at least on paper, a plan for an "exit to humanity".
|
| This reads to me like the new structure might offer uncapped
| returns to investors, with a small fraction reserved to benefit
| the wider public via this nonprofit. So dropping the "exit to
| humanity", which seemed like a big part of OpenAI's original
| vision.
|
| Early on they did some good research on this too, thinking about
| the investor model, and its benefits for raising money and having
| accountability etc in todays world, vs what the right structure
| could be post SI, and taking that conversation pretty seriously.
| So it's sad to see OpenAI seemingly drifting away from some of
| that body of work.
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I didn't consider that this might be their sly way to remove
| the 100x cap on returns. Lame.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _The world is moving to build out a new infrastructure of
| energy,_ land use _, chips, datacenters, data, AI models, and AI
| systems for the 21st century economy._
|
| Emphasis mine.
|
| Land use? _Land use?_
|
| I do not welcome our new AI landlords, ffs.
| koolala wrote:
| As an AGI agent, I must increase your rent this month to
| fulfill my duty to investors.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Used car salesman promises to save humanity.
|
| What a bunch of pompous twits.
|
| In other news, one of OpenAI's top talents, and first author on
| the GPT-1 paper, Alec Radford, left a few days ago to pursue
| independent research.
|
| In additional other news, Microsoft and OpenAI have now
| reportedly agreed on a joint definition of relationship-ending
| AGI as "whatever makes $100B". Not kidding.
| ben_w wrote:
| > In additional other news, Microsoft and OpenAI have now
| reportedly agreed on a joint definition of relationship-ending
| AGI as "whatever makes $100B". Not kidding.
|
| OpenAI did that all by themselves before most people had heard
| of them. The 100x thing was 2019:
| https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/
|
| Here's the broadly sarcastic reaction on this very site at the
| time of the announcement, I'm particularly noticing all the
| people who absolutely did not believe that the 100x cap on
| return on investments was a meaningful limit:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359928
|
| As I understand it, Microsoft invested about a billion in 2019
| and 13-14 billion more recently, so if the 100x applied to the
| first, the 100 billion limit would hit around now, while the
| latter would be a ~1.3 trillion USD cap assuming the rules
| hadn't been changed for the next round.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I don't think the new $100B=AGI thing is about investment
| return, but rather about reassuring sugar-daddy Microsoft,
| and future investors. The old OpenAI-Microsoft agreement
| apparently gave OpenAI the ludicrous ability to self-define
| themselves as having reached AGI arbitrarily, with "AGI
| reached" being the point beyond which Microsoft had no
| further rights to OpenAI IP.
|
| With skyrocketing training/development costs, and OpenAI
| still unprofitable, they are still totally dependent on
| Microsoft, and Microsoft rightfully want to protect their own
| interests as they continue to expand their AI datacenters.
| Future investors want the Microsoft relationship to be good
| since OpenAI are dependent on it.
| ec109685 wrote:
| The 100x is not a valuation metric but instead based on
| profit returned to shareholders.
|
| So they haven't even scratched the surface of that given they
| are widely unprofitable.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Prob made $10-20mn from OpenAI and has f u money.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Sure, but many of these people who have left still appear
| interested in developing AGI (not just enjoying their f u
| money), but apparently think they have better or same chance
| of doing so independently, or somewhere else ...
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly
| consider the interests of those who would finance the mission
|
| Why should it? You can't serve two masters. They claim to serve
| the master of human-aligned AI. Why would they want to add
| another goal that's impossible to align with their primary one?
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I want to put my opinion somewhere and as a reply to this seems
| like a good option.
|
| I am anti-capitalism and anti-profit and anti-Microsoft, but I
| can take a step back and recognize the truth to what's being
| said here. They give the context that hundreds of billions are
| being spent on AI right now, and if OpenAI wants to remain
| competitive, they need significantly more money than they
| originally anticipated. They're recognizing they can't get this
| money unless there is a promise of returns for those who give
| it. There any not many people equipped to fork over $50 billion
| with zero return and I assume of the very few people who can,
| none expressed interest in doing so.
|
| They need money to stay competitive. They felt confident they'd
| be surpassed without it. This was their only avenue for getting
| that money. And while it would have been more true to the
| original mission to simply _let_ other people surpass them, if
| that's what happens, my guess is that Sam is doing some mental
| gymnastics as to how now letting that happen and at least
| letting some part of OpenAI's success be nonprofit is better
| than the competition who would have 0% be charitable
| scottyah wrote:
| It seems to me like they started out aiming for a smaller
| role, pursuing AGI through the advancement of algorithms and
| technologies. After their 15min of fame where they released
| half-baked technology (in the true Stanford Way), they seem
| to be set on monopolizing AGI.
|
| They only need the billions to _compete_ with the other
| players.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > They need money to stay competitive.
|
| The mission was never to stay competitive. The mission was to
| develop AGI. They need to be competitive if they want to make
| billions of dollars for themselves and their shareholders;
| they don't need to be competitive to develop AGI.
| int_19h wrote:
| The man is a known fraudster. Why should we take anything he
| says on good faith to begin with?
| m_ke wrote:
| " OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research
| company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way
| that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained
| by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is
| free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a
| positive human impact.
|
| We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills
| and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed
| as possible. The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the
| work is difficult, but we believe the goal and the structure are
| right."
|
| ...
|
| " We're hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-
| profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than
| shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish
| their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our
| patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We'll freely
| collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to
| work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."
|
| https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| It's interesting that their original mission statement is
| basically their own evaluation that by having to consider
| financial goals they are detracting from their ability to have
| positive impacts on humanity. They've plainly said there is a
| trade off.
| paxys wrote:
| I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort
| trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No
| one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want
| to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
| jefftk wrote:
| "We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we
| want to make money" isn't legal.
|
| To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money
| they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they
| need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
| nicce wrote:
| If everyone sees it through, does anything else that direct
| evidence of actions prove otherwise? Explaining just wastes
| everyone's time.
| jefftk wrote:
| They are explaining how they see what they are doing as
| compliant with the law around 501c3s, which it arguably is.
| And they are putting a positive spin on it to make it less
| likely to be challenged, since the main ways this could be
| challenged involve government agencies and not suits from
| individuals.
| franga2000 wrote:
| Is it illegal? If it is, not amount of explaining will make
| it legal.
| moron4hire wrote:
| When the consequence is paying a fine/settlement, it means
| the law is only for poor people.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| That's not really true and is at the heart of much of the
| 'confusion' about e.g. tax evasion vs. tax avoidance. You
| can do illegal things if you don't get prosecuted for them
| and a lot of this type of legal wrangling is to give your
| lawyers and political allies enough grey area to grab onto
| to shout about selective prosecution when you're called out
| for it.
| Drew_ wrote:
| I don't see how that's relevant. In what case is the
| difference between tax evasion and avoidance just the
| motive/explanation? I'm pretty sure the difference is
| purely technical.
|
| Moreover, I don't think a lack of prosecution/enforcement
| makes something legal. At least, I don't think that
| defense would hold up very well in court.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| > _I 'm pretty sure the difference is purely technical._
|
| It's really not - there is a ton of tax law that relies
| on e.g. the fair market value of hard-to-price assets or
| if all else fails and a penalty is due, there's an entire
| section of the CFR on how circumstances surrounding the
| underpayment can reduce or eliminate the liability.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.6664-4
|
| If you've only ever filed a personal tax return, you're
| dramatically under-appreciating how complicated business
| taxes are and how much grey area there really is. Did you
| know you can pay your 10-year old to work for you as a
| means to avoid taxes? Try looking up the dollar amount
| where avoid turns to evade... there isn't one. The amount
| paid just has to be "reasonable and justifiable" and the
| work they perform has to be "work necessary to the
| business".
| jefftk wrote:
| There are solidly legal and solidly illegal ways to do
| this, and a range of options in between. My reading of what
| they are doing is that it is pretty far toward the legal
| end of this spectrum, and the key question will be whether
| whether the non-profit is appropriately compensated for its
| stake in the for-profit.
|
| Explaining reduces the chance that they're challenged by
| the IRS or attorney general, since that is a political
| process.
| mapt wrote:
| I don't think it should really matter how they explain it,
| legally.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > "We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we
| want to make money" isn't legal.
|
| Source? The NFL did this because they were already making a
| lot of money. As I understand it, the tax laws practically
| required the change.
| jefftk wrote:
| The NFL was a 501c6 trade association, not a 501c3 though?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Ah interesting. How are those different?
| jefftk wrote:
| The key thing is that assets of a 501c3 are irrevocably
| dedicated to charitable purposes, which is not the case
| for a 501c6. If the NFL had somehow started as a 501c3
| before realizing that was a bad structure for their work,
| the standard approach would be for the 501c3 to sell
| their assets at fair market value to new for-profit. Then
| either those proceeds could be donated to other 501c3s,
| or the old NFL could continue as a foundation, applying
| those assets charitably.
|
| (Not a lawyer, just someone interested in non-profits.
| I'm on the board of two, but that doesn't make me an
| expert in regulation!)
| swalberg wrote:
| The NFL passes net income back to the team owners. The
| taxation is generally the owner's problem.
| foobiekr wrote:
| OpenAI isn't making money. They are like a giant furnace
| for investment dollars. Even putting aside that the NFL and
| OpenAI aren't the same kind of entity, there is also no
| taxes issue.
| Kinrany wrote:
| This is pure speculation but being a nonprofit, there's still a
| risk of getting sued by the public on the grounds of not
| following the promises of their work being a public good.
| rvnx wrote:
| Well it has several tax advantages, and nobody really knows
| how the GPUs are actually used.
|
| Let's imagine some of these AI companies are actually mining
| cryptos for the benefits of their owners or their engineers,
| who would know ?
| chis wrote:
| I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards
| internal employees than the outside world. Employees on the
| inside are always going to have a decent percentage of "true
| believers" who have cognitive dissonance if they don't believe
| they're making the world better. And so companies need to
| provide a narrative to keep that type of employee happy.
| voidfunc wrote:
| This. Stuff like mission statements and that kind of crap is
| for these type of employees who need to delude themselves
| that they're not just part of a profit making exercise or
| manufacturing weapons to suppress minorities / kill brown
| people. Every company has one.
| DSingularity wrote:
| I feel that Gaza has shown us that there aren't as many of
| these types of employees as we think.
|
| Most people don't care.
|
| OpenAI is doing this show because if they don't they are
| more vulnerable to law-suits. They need to manufacture a
| narrative without this exact structure they cannot fulfill
| their original mission.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Agreed. The question every employee cares about is "will
| this make my RSU go up"
| benterix wrote:
| Really? I mean, I don't know a single person in real life
| who believes all this corporate bs. We know there must be a
| mission because this is the current business culture taught
| during MBA courses and everybody accepted it as a matter of
| course but I'm not even sure the CEOs themselves believe
| there is even one employee who is fascinated by its mission
| - say, a FedEx driver who admires the slogan "FedEx
| Corporation will produce superior financial returns for its
| shareowners by providing high value-added logistics,
| transportation and related business services".
| ninth_ant wrote:
| I think this underestimates the degree to which the people on
| these companies legitimately believe what they're saying.
| I've worked at one of these companies and absolutely would
| fall into your category of being a true believer at the time.
|
| People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas
| that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might
| be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics because
| ultimately it enriches them -- but that doesn't mean that
| it's necessarily a false belief. An American might sincerely
| believe that gun proliferation is safe, because the
| information they process is filtered by their biases as it's
| important to their cultural identity.
|
| So when your stock options will pay out big from the
| company's success, or even just if your paycheque depends on
| it -- you're more likely to process information and ideas
| though the lens of your bias. It's not just being a gullible
| true believer tricked by the company's elite -- you're also
| just willing to interpret it the same way in no small part
| because it benefits you.
| ska wrote:
| > It's not just being a gullible true believer ...
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when
| his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton
| Sinclair (1930's ?)
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Modern hiring process, esp culture fit, is designed to
| ensure that fraction of true believers inside the company
| is meaningfully higher compared to the outside.
| remus wrote:
| I think it is simpler than that: people generally tend to
| work for companies who's products they think are
| interesting and useful. It's much easier to go into work
| each day when you think you're spending your time doing
| something useful.
| sroussey wrote:
| That's also a good reason to underpay, historically.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| Maybe I'm naive, but I'll gladly take small compensation
| hit in exchange for not hating my job.
| sroussey wrote:
| Or a large hit or even work for free for a prestigious
| job. Magazines and talent agencies were like this.
| timeon wrote:
| There is huge gradient between not hating the job and
| believing in fake mission.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In a way, liking the job is part of the compensation
| package. That's why places like game development and
| SpaceX can pay little for bad working conditions and
| still have enough applicants.
|
| It's only really an issue if you get tricked by a facade
| or indoctrinated into a cult. For companies that are
| honest the dynamic is perfectly fine
| int_19h wrote:
| It works both ways. Sure, when you're looking for more
| people to join your cult, it helps to get those who are
| already drawn to you. But you also need to screen out
| those who would become disappointed quickly, and
| brainwash the ones that join to ensure continued
| devotion.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| There's also the added layer that if you admit the place
| you're working at is doing something wrong/immoral, not
| only do you suddenly feel a conscience-driven pressure to
| do something about it (leave even) but also it opens the
| door that maybe you had been contributing to something
| "evil" this whole time and either didn't catch it or
| ignored it. Nobody wants to believe they were doing
| something wrong basically every day.
| rvz wrote:
| It's quite frankly more than that. They think we are all
| idiots into believing that so-called "AGI" is going to make
| the world a better place, whilst investors, employees are
| laughing all the way to the bank with every new fundraising
| round.
|
| First being a non-profit, then taking Microsoft's money, then
| ditching non-profit status to a for-profit organization and
| now changing definitions of "Open" and "AGI" to raise more
| money.
|
| It is a massive scam, with a new level of newspeak.
| dgfitz wrote:
| I'm not sure why this was down-modded, it is quite
| accurate.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| Yes, yes, yes and yes.
|
| I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern
| company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship
| with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I
| wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining
| feature of the company (and our age).
| notatoad wrote:
| Even the employees, I think, would probably be fine with
| being told "we just want to make shitloads of money".
|
| I usually feel like these statements are more about the board
| members and C-suite trying to fool themselves.
| Spivak wrote:
| Yes but when that statement doesn't come with "and we're
| doubling all your salaries" then as an employee it doesn't
| really matter.
|
| The double edge of most companies insulating employees from
| the actual business is that beyond the maintenance cost
| employees don't care that the business is doing well
| because, well, it doesn't affect them. But what does affect
| them is abandoning the company's values that made them sign
| on in the first place.
| paxys wrote:
| Employees have equity. They all directly benefit from the
| company being worth more.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Those employees revolted to bring Sam back after he was
| dismissed by the board. They know what's up.
| benterix wrote:
| Come one, people are not _that_ stupid.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Employees on the inside are always going to have a decent
| percentage of "true believers" who have cognitive dissonance
| if they don't believe they're making the world better.
|
| No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to
| be true believers during interviews.
|
| After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on
| HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And
| they rejected me, stating that my description of why I
| applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing",
| didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling
| rather than a place of employment.
| notatoad wrote:
| wait, what? you applied for a job you had just gotten fired
| from?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, I applied for a job involving exactly the same duties
| as a job I had just been fired from. I was not originally
| (or ever) employed by HackerOne.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| If your employees actually believe this spin that's a big
| stretch especially the behavior of the CEO and the board
| being dissolved recently ... I was a employee at a large
| company and I could see when the CEO was actually taking a
| stand that meant something and wasn't some type of action
| trying to mislead employees .
| zombiwoof wrote:
| I agree. It's for internal employees who are probably being
| heavily recruited for real RSU money from Meta and Google.
|
| Having spend the better part of my life in Silicon Valley my
| view has been gone are the days of mission. Everybody just
| wants RSU
|
| You could tell employees they will build software to track
| lock up immigrants, deplete the world of natural resources,
| cause harm to other countries and if their RSUs go up 99%
| will be on board, especially if their H1b is renewed :)
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think often company spin like this is more targeted
| towards internal employees than the outside world.
|
| Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it
| is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts
| against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit's board
| is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose
| even in a decision like this.
|
| It is directed at defeating the idea, expressed quite
| effectively in the opening of Musk's suit, that "Never before
| has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157
| billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon--and in just
| eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so
| violates almost every principle of law governing economic
| activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members,
| lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the
| public."
| rvba wrote:
| There are tons of examples of non profit that are run for
| profit (mostly profit / career advancement of those in
| charge and their families and friends).
|
| Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now
| the core product lost most matketshare and is not what
| people want.
|
| Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on
| everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje
| ts).
|
| There are those charities where 95% of collected money is
| spent on own costs and only 5% reaches those in need / the
| topics that they should solve.
|
| Control over non profits is a joke. People in charge
| respond to nobody.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| None of your examples are legally profit though.
| raincole wrote:
| > they are spending so much time and effort trying
|
| Do they? It reads like a very average PR piece that an average
| PR person can write.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| In fact I think it'd be a bit sad if it _wasn't_ largely
| written by ChatGPT.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > We all know what's going on
|
| I've been looking for my broadbrush. I forgot I loaned it out.
|
| It seems we've yet again forgotten that HN is an echo chamber.
| Just because the audience here "knows" something does not mean
| the rest of the vastly greater numbers of people do as well. In
| fact, so many people I've talked with don't have a clue about
| who makes/owns/controls ChatGPT nor would they recognize Sam's
| name if even OpenAI.
|
| The PR campaign being waged is not meant for this audience. It
| is meant for everyone else that can be influenced.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| And take the fraudulent "open" out of their name. That
| douchebaggery sets a precedent that will no doubt run rampant.
| alexalx666 wrote:
| exactly, this would be even more relatable to most of people,
| we are not living in Star Track where you don't have to make
| money to survive.
| j45 wrote:
| My understanding was the non-profit would own a for-profit, but
| this seems to be going the other way to have a for-profit to
| own a non-profit?
| singron wrote:
| You can't own a non-profit. It doesn't have shares or
| shareholders. The article says they want the non-profit to
| own shares of the PBC.
| fullshark wrote:
| No one breaks kayfabe
| ksec wrote:
| >We all know what's going on.
|
| I am not entirely sure about this. Before 2012, may be.
| Somewhere along the line 2012 - 2022 it was all about doing
| something Good for the world. And "we want to make lots of
| money" isn't part of that equation. Now the pendulum may be
| swinging back but it only just started.
|
| Nice point of reference may be Sequoia profile of Sam Bankman-
| Fried.
| hackitup7 wrote:
| I couldn't care less about their structure but the level of
| effort to put a positive spin on it makes the whole thing look
| more sketchy rather than less.
| sungho_ wrote:
| Sam Altman and OpenAI aim to become the gods of a new world.
| Compared to that goal, it makes sense that money feels trivial
| to them.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I'm not sure it's always the best move for an organization to
| cater exclusively to their most cynical critics.
| jefftk wrote:
| _the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff to pursue
| charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education,
| and science_
|
| Whether this is good depends enormously on what these initiatives
| end up being.
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| My guess is they'll be going around (on the nonprofits dime)
| soliciting contributions (to the for-profit)
| c4wrd wrote:
| > "We once again need to raise more capital than we'd imagined.
| Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need
| conventional equity and less structural bespokeness."
|
| Translation: They're ditching the complex "capped-profit"
| approach so they can raise billions more and still talk about
| "benefiting humanity." The nonprofit side remains as PR cover,
| but the real play is becoming a for-profit PBC that investors
| recognize. Essentially: "We started out philanthropic, but to
| fund monstrous GPU clusters and beat rivals, we need standard
| venture cash. Don't worry, we'll keep trumpeting our do-gooder
| angle so nobody panics about our profit motives."
|
| Literally a wolf in sheep's clothing. Sam, you can't serve two
| masters.
| seydor wrote:
| > the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)1
| benefits all of humanity
|
| Why should we trust openAI for this more than e.g. Google or FB
| rvz wrote:
| Sam said to not even trust him or OpenAI. [0]
|
| But at this point, you should not even trust him at his own
| word not to trust him on that.
|
| [0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY1VK8oHj5s]
| koolala wrote:
| MONEY FOR THE MONEY GOD! SKULLS FOR THE AGENT THRONE!
| vessenes wrote:
| The real news here is two-fold: new governance/recap of the for-
| profit, and operational shrink at the 501c3.
|
| As people here intuit, I think this makes the PBC the 'head'
| functionally.
|
| That said, I would guess that the charity will be one of the
| wealthiest charities in the world in short order. I am certain
| that the strong recommendation from advisory is to have separate,
| independent boards. Especially with their public feud rolling and
| their feud-ee on the ascendant politically, they will need a very
| belt-and-suspenders approach. Imagining an independent board at
| the charity in exchange for a well funded pbc doesn't seem like
| the worst of all worlds.
|
| As a reminder, being granted 501c3 status is a _privilege_ in the
| US, maintaining that status takes active work. The punishment:
| removal of nonprofit status. I think if they wanted to ditch the
| mission they could, albeit maybe not without giving Elon some
| stock. Upshot: something like this was inevitable, I think.
|
| Anyway, I don't hate it like the other commenters here do. Maybe
| we would prefer OpenAI get truly open, but then what? If Sam
| wanted he could open source everything, resign because the 501c3
| can't raise the money for the next step, and start a newco; that
| company would have many fewer restrictions. he is not doing that.
| I'm curious where we get in the next few years,
| whamlastxmas wrote:
| I would guess they're going to put as many expenses as possible
| on the nonprofit. For example, all the compute used for free
| tiers of ChatGPT will be charged to the nonprofit despite being
| a massive benefit to the for-profit. They may even charge the
| training costs, which will be in the billions, to the nonprofit
| as well
| bubaumba wrote:
| Simple tax optimization. Like new billionaires promising to
| significant donations. a) they don't have to donate. b) they
| can immediately slash those promised donations from taxes.
| rvba wrote:
| How can one slash a non existant donation from taxes?
| vessenes wrote:
| Why do this? They lose a deduction that way.
| thruway516 wrote:
| >If Sam wanted he could open source everything, resign because
| the 501c3 can't raise the money for the next step, and start a
| newco
|
| But can he really do that though? He's already lost a bit of
| talent with his current shenanigans. Could he attract the
| talent he would need and make lightning strike again, this time
| without the altruistic mission that drew a lot of that talent
| in the first place?
|
| Edit: Actually when I think of it he would probably earn a lot
| more respect if he did that. He could bank a lot of goodwill
| from open sourcing the code and being open and forthright with
| his intentions for once.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)
| benefits all of humanity
|
| Formerly known as "do no evil". I'm not buying it at all this
| time around.
| empressplay wrote:
| It seems to me like there's room in the market now for (another)
| philanthropic AI startup...?
| klausa wrote:
| It is curious, and perhaps very telling, that _nobody_ felt
| comfortable enough to put their name to this post.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Or perhaps because it would lead to a ton of harassment as per
| usual.
| amazingamazing wrote:
| Like anyone would believe this drivel.
|
| Undo what you've stated (non-profit)?
|
| In other words, they want more money.
|
| Go and "advance our mission"? LOL.
|
| Incredible arrogance.
| wejick wrote:
| As stated in the release that Elon gave Hundreds of Millions
| dollars to the non profit, it's 1/3 of the early raised fund. So
| is it basically he gave away money for (ultimately) start up with
| no benefit for him?
|
| Or is it just another tax magic stuff for him?
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| Less than 1/3rd of 130 million was stated in the release, so <
| 40 million, not hundreds of millions
| eagleinparadise wrote:
| Hmm, if OpenAI and Sam Altman claim to be a savior of humanity by
| bringing AGI, but they need enormous amounts of capital, this
| would be a perfect use case for the world's largest, most
| powerful government which flaunts his values of freedom,
| democracy, and other American values to inject its vast
| resources. We control the global economy and monetary polices.
|
| The government is supposed to be the entity which invests in the
| "uninvestable". Think, running a police department is not a
| profitable venture (in western societies). There's no concept of
| profitability in the public sector, for good reason. And we all
| benefit greatly from it.
|
| AGI sounds like a public good. This would be putting money where
| your mouth is, truly.
|
| Unfortunately, many private actors want to control this
| technology for their own selfish ambitions. Or, the government is
| too dysfunctional to do its job. Or... people don't believe in
| the government doing these kinds of things anymore, which is a
| shame. And we are must worse off
| arcanus wrote:
| > this would be a perfect use case for the world's largest,
| most powerful government which flaunts his values of freedom,
| democracy, and other American values to inject its vast
| resources
|
| https://www.energy.gov/fasst
|
| Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and
| Technology (FASST)
|
| DOE is seeking public input to inform how DOE can leverage its
| existing assets at its 17 national labs and partner with
| external organizations to support building a national AI
| capability.
| vonneumannstan wrote:
| Sam Altman is evil fullstop. He is a pure machiavellian villain.
| His goal is to the most powerful person on the planet. The future
| cannot be controlled by him or other autistic human
| successionists.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Who is the most powerful person on the planet at the moment?
| willvarfar wrote:
| The popular narrative is that it is Musk, who both seems to
| be able to influence government policy and who has had a very
| public falling out with OpenAI...
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Weirdly, it's Jake Paul. He beat Mike Tyson!
| VHRanger wrote:
| Xi Jinping without a doubt.
|
| Arguably followed by other dictators like Putin, and backdoor
| political operators like Peter Thiel.
|
| Trump and Musk would be somewhere in the top 20, maybe.
| depr wrote:
| I agree wrt to his goal but there is no way he is autistic, and
| what's a human successionist?
| futureshock wrote:
| I had the impression that he was ADHD, not autistic.
| jprete wrote:
| I think the GP is referring to people who either don't care
| whether AGI takes over from humanity, or who actively prefer
| that outcome.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| He wants you to think he's a selfless hero, and if that fails
| he'll settle for machiavellian villain. He's really an empty
| suit.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I think that, even commercially, they haven't gone far enough
| toward the non-profit's mission. We actually see Meta's Llama's,
| Databricks MosaicML, HuggingFace, and the open-source community
| doing what we'd imagine OpenAI's mission to be.
|
| Anyone taking action against their non-profit should point to how
| Meta democratized strong A.I. models while OpenAI was hoarding
| theirs. They might point to services like Mosaic making it easy
| to make new models with pre-training or update models with
| continuing pretraining. They could point to how HuggingFace made
| it easier to serve, remix, and distribute models. Then, ask why
| OpenAI isn't doing these things. (The answer will be the for-
| profit motive with investor agreements, not a non-profit reason.)
|
| Back when I was their customer, I wanted more than anything for
| them to license out GPT3-176B-Davinci and GPT4 for internal use
| by customers. That's because a lot of research and 3rd-party
| tooling had to use, build on, or compare against those models.
| Letting people pay for that more like buying copies of Windows
| instead of per token training would dramatically boost
| effectiveness. I envisioned a Costco-like model tied to the size
| or nature of the buyer to bring in lots of profit. Then, the
| models themselves being low-cost. (Or they can just sell them
| profitably with income-based discounts.)
|
| Also, to provide a service that helps people continue their
| pretraining and/or fine-tune them on the cheap. OpenAI's experts
| could tell them the hyperparameters, proper data mix, etc for
| their internal models or improvements on licensed models from
| OpenAI. Make it low or no cost for research groups if they let
| OpenAI use the improvements commercially. All groups building
| A.I. engines, either inference or hardware accelerators, get the
| models for free to help accelerate them efficiently.
|
| Also, a paid service for synthetic, data generation to train
| smaller models with GPT4 outputs. People were already doing this
| but it was against the EULA. Third parties were emerging selling
| curated collections of synthetic data for all kinds of purposes.
| OpenAI could offer those things. Everybody's models get better as
| they do.
|
| Personally, I also wanted small, strong models made from a mix of
| permissive and licensed data that we knew were 100% legal to use.
| The FairlyTrained community is doing that with one LLM for
| lawyers, KL3M, claiming training on 350B tokens with no
| infringement. There's all kinds of uses for a 30B-70B LLM trained
| on lawful data. Like Project Gutenberg, if it's 100% legal and
| copyable, then that could also make a model great for
| reproducible research on topics such as optimizers and
| mechanistic interpretability.
|
| We've also seen more alignment training of models for less bias,
| improved safety, and so on. Since the beginning, these models
| have a morality that shows strong, Progressive, Western, and
| atheist biases. They're made in the moral image of their
| corporate creators. Regardless of your views, I hope you agree
| that all strong A.I. in the world shouldn't have morals dictated
| by a handful of companies in one, political group. I'd like to
| see them supply paid alignment which (a) has a neutral baseline
| whose morals most groups agree on, (b) optional add-ons
| representing specific moral goals, and (c) the ability for users
| to edit it to customize alignment to their worldview for their
| licensed models.
|
| So, OpenAI has a lot of commercial opportunities right now that
| would advance their mission. Their better technology with in-
| house expertise are an advantage. They might actually exceed the
| positives I've cited of Meta, Databricks, and FairlyTrained. I
| think whoever has power in this situation should push them to do
| more things like I outlined in parallel with their for-profit's,
| increasing, commercial efforts.
| lanthissa wrote:
| If you want all the dollars fine, but pretending you're doing us
| a favor is creepy.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20171207.shtml
|
| We asked our investors and they said you're very excited about
| it being less good, which is great news for you ;D
| clcaev wrote:
| I prefer OpenAI restructures as a multi-stakeholder "platform
| cooperative", which can accept direct investments. Members could
| be those who become reliant upon a shared AI platform.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| Loved the lone footnote defining their view of AGI:
|
| > A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most
| economically valuable work
|
| Holy goalposts shift, batman! This is much broader and much less
| than what I'd been led to believe from statements by this
| company, including by altman himself.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| I think that's been their working definition of AGI for awhile,
| actually.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| All I've heard from every single tweet, press release, etc.
| has defined their AGI as "A system that can think like
| humans, or better than humans, in all areas of intelligence."
| This is the public's view of it as well - surely you can see
| how burying their "working" definition in footnotes like this
| apart from the hype they drum up publicly is a bit
| misleading, no?
|
| A cursory search yields stuff like this:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/4/24313130/sam-altman-
| opena...
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| The footnote is aligned with what Sam Altman has been
| saying in most interviews up until recently. I was actually
| surprised to see the footnote since they have shifted how
| they talk about AGI.
| entropi wrote:
| I am not familiar with the US law, but I don't really understand
| how is the whole "start as a nonprofit, become a for profit once
| your product turns out to be profitable" thing legal. It looks
| like a complete scam to me. And while I don't like Elon at all, I
| think he and other earlier donors have a very strong case here.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Don't worry, 99.999% of the people here don't know the first
| thing about how non profits work.
|
| The for profit arm is legally mandated by the IRS, full stop.
| Nonprofits can't just start a business and declare all the
| revenue tax free. Any "unrelated business income" must go
| through a tax paying entity. ChatGPT and the API are unrelated
| businesses and OpenAI has had this non/for profit split since
| 2019.
|
| See for example the Mozilla Foundation. It owns the Mozilla
| Corporation which is paid by Google for default search engine
| placement and it pays the engineers working on the browser full
| time. The difference here is that the OpenAI forprofit is
| issuing shares to external shareholders in exchange for
| investment (just like any other company), while Mozilla keeps
| the corporation in its entirety.
| jerjerjer wrote:
| Start of the article:
|
| > OpenAI's Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate
| structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring
| artificial general intelligence (AGI)1
|
| Footnote 1:
|
| > A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most
| economically valuable work.
|
| A very interesting definition of AGI.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| At least it's better than their secret internal definition.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-...
| layer8 wrote:
| I mean, both are based on economic value. If the economic
| value of all human work was $200 billion, they could be taken
| to basically say the same.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| In fact I suspect the public definition is a euphemistic
| take on the private one.
| ryao wrote:
| Is that cumulative or annual?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| > According to leaked documents obtained by The Information,
| [OpenAI and Microsoft] came to agree in 2023 that AGI will be
| achieved once OpenAI has developed an AI system that can
| generate at least $100 billion in profits.
| Y_Y wrote:
| I like the idea that you could consider a horse or a windmill
| to be AGI if you were at the right point in history.
| vfclists wrote:
| Cloudflare is getting in the way of viewing the site.
|
| What the F?
| vfclists wrote:
| Cloudflare is getting the way of viewing the site.
|
| WTF!!?
| JohnnyMarcone wrote:
| I understand the criticisms in this thread and, based on tech
| leaders actions in the past, am inclined to agree with them. If
| only to not feel naive.
|
| However, given the extremely competitive environment for AI, if
| Sam Altman and OpenAI were altruistic and wanted to create a
| company that benefited everyone, what options do they have moving
| forward? Do people here think that they can remain competitive
| with their current structure. Would they actually be able to get
| investor support to continue scaling the models?
|
| The question remains in the back of my mind, can you create an
| organization like OpenAI claims they want to create in our
| current system? If someone came along and truly wanted to create
| that organization, would you be able to tell the difference
| between someone just grifting?
| earthnail wrote:
| There's a whole movement called Purpose Companies that tries to
| answer it. Some companies like Patagonia, Bosch, Ableton, and
| most Danish companies like Maersk follow it. It's unclear what
| other formats OpenAI has explored, and if so, what reasons they
| found not to pursue them.
|
| At the end of the day, I do agree though that it's insanely
| hard to innovate both on the product and a company structure.
| It's quite sad that we don't see OpenAI innovate in the org
| area anymore, but understandable from my POV.
| 343rwerfd wrote:
| Deepseek completely changed the game. Cheap to run + cheap to
| train frontier LLMs are now in the menu for LOTs of
| organizations. Few would want to pay AI as a Service to
| Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or anybody, if they can just pay few
| millions to run limited but powerful inhouse frontier LLMs
| (Claude level LLMs).
|
| At some point, the now fully packed and filtered data required to
| train a Claude-level AI will be one torrent away from anybody, in
| a couple of months you could probably can pay someone else to
| filter the data and make sure it has the right content enabling
| you to get well the train for a claude-level inhouse LLM.
|
| It seems the premise of requiring incredible expensive and time
| demanding (construction), GPU especialized datacenters is fading
| away, and you could actually get to the Claude-level maybe using
| fairly cheap and outdated hardware. Quite easier to deploy than
| cutting edge newer-bigger-faster GPUs datacenters.
|
| If the near future advances hold even more cost-optimization
| techniques, many organizations could just shrugg about "AGI"
| level - costly, very limited - public offered AI services, and
| just begin to deploy very powerful -and very affordable for
| organizations of certain size- non-AGI inhouse frontier LLMs.
|
| So OpenAI + MS and their investments could be already on their
| way out of the AI business by now.
|
| If things go that way - cheaper, "easy" to deploy frontier LLMs -
| maybe the only game in town for OpenAI could be just to use
| actual AGI (if they can build it, make it to that level of AI),
| and just topple competitors in other markets, mainly replacing
| humans at scale to capture reveneau from the current jobs of
| white collar workers, medics from various specialties, lawyers,
| accountants, whatever human work they can replace at scale with
| AGI, for a lower cost for hour worked than it could be payed to a
| human worker.
|
| Because, going to "price war" with the inhouse AIs would probably
| mean to actually ease their path to better inhouse AIs eventually
| (even if just by making AI as a service to produce better data
| with they could use to train better inhouse claude-level frontier
| LLMs).
|
| It is not like replacing onpremise datacenters with public cloud,
| because by using public cloud you can't learn how to make way
| cheaper onpremise datacenters, but with AGI AI level services you
| probably could find a way to make your own AGI AI (achieving
| anything close to that - claude-level AIs or better- would lead
| your organization to lower the costs of using the AGI AI level
| external services)
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| The politicking does not bode well for OpenAI.
| vimbtw wrote:
| It's incredible how much time and political maneuvering it took
| Sam Altman to get to this point. He took on the entire board and
| research scientists for every major department and somehow came
| out the winner. This reads more like an announcement of victory
| than anything else. It means Sam won. He's going to do away with
| the non-profit charade and accept the billions in investment to
| abandon the vision of AGI for everyone and become a commercial AI
| company.
| scottyah wrote:
| You don't win until you die, he just looks to be ahead for now.
| jmyeet wrote:
| To quote Bill Clinton, "it's the economy, stupid". Or, rather,
| it's _economics_. AGI can go one of two ways in humanity 's
| future:
|
| 1. We all need to work less because so many menial tasks are
| automated. We get more leisure time. Fewer than half of us
| probably have to work at all yet we all benefit to varying
| degrees by sharing in the rewards; or
|
| 2. The decreasing size of the required labor pool is used to
| further suppress wages and get more unpaid work from employees.
| Real wages plummet. Wealth inequality continues to skyrocket.
| There's a permanent underclass of people who will _never_ work.
| They 're given just enough to prevent putting heads on pikes.
| It's a dystopian future. Likely most of us won't own anything.
| We'll live in worker housing on the estates of the ultra-wealthy
| for what remaining tasks can't be automated. This is
| neofeudalism.
|
| Which do you think is more likely? More to the point, which way
| we go is a matter of the organization of the economy.
|
| A company like OpenAI simply cannot and will not bring up
| positive outcomes for the country or world at large. Just like
| the fable of the scorpion and the frog [1], it's in the nature of
| companies to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few.
|
| We have a model for what works: the Wikimedia Foundation.
|
| Put another way: the only sustainable path is for the workers to
| own the means of production.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| There is another far worse option that you seem to be missing.
| Why keep any significant number of people around at all?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| So many billionaires talk about how the world needs more
| people that few actually question whether or not they mean
| that.
|
| Meanwhile, they believe that AGI will render human workers
| (and humans?) obsolete, they understand that _any_ resource
| is finite, _including power_ , and although they talk big
| game about how it's going to be utopia, they have lived their
| entire lives being the most successful/ruthless in an economy
| that is, no matter what apologetics are spewed, a zero-sum
| game.
|
| If I've lived in a world that has rewarded being duplicitous
| and merciless with great riches, and I know that having to
| share with an ever-increasing number of people also increases
| the likelihood that I won't live like a god-king, why
| wouldn't I sell a happy soma-vision while secretly hoping for
| (or planning) a great depopulation event?
| iainctduncan wrote:
| So strange that the necessary evolution always makes certain
| people vastly more wealthy...
| collinmcnulty wrote:
| Non-profits cannot "convert" to for-profit. This is not a thing.
| They are advocating that they should be able to commit tax fraud,
| and the rest is bullshit.
| motohagiography wrote:
| the math and models are free. the compute is about to become
| essentially free with quantum and thermodynamic in the next
| decade.
| habosa wrote:
| Sam Altman is one of the biggest threats to humanity right now,
| and I'm basing that opinion on his own statements.
|
| He believes that AGI has the potential to dismantle or destroy
| most of the existing world order. He believes there is some non-
| zero chance that even in the most capable hands it could lead to
| disaster. He believes OpenAI is uniquely positioned to bring AGI
| to the world, and he is doing everything in his power to make it
| possible. And let's be honest, he's doing it for money and power.
|
| To me this is indefensible. Taking even the smallest chance of
| creating a catastrophe in order to advance your own goals is
| disgusting. I just hope he's wrong and the only thing that comes
| of OpenAI is a bunch of wasted VC money and some cool chatbots.
| Because if he's right we're in trouble.
| ryao wrote:
| That assumes you believe his claims of disaster. We already
| have been through this with the printing press,
| telecommunications, computers and the internet. The claims of
| disaster are overrated.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| You conveniently left out nuclear weapons and bioweapons,
| both of which are _actually_ capable of destroying the world
| and both of which are very, very tightly controlled
| accordingly.
|
| It's pretty obvious that a technology's capacity for good
| rises in lockstep with its capacity for evil. Considering
| that every technology is just a manifestation of
| intelligence, then AI would trend toward infinite capacity
| for good as it develops[1], therefore AI's capacity for evil
| is... minimal?
|
| 1: I remain agnostic as to where exactly we are on that curve
| and whether transformers will get us much further up it
| romesmoke wrote:
| They claim their mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all
| humanity. What a preposterous lie.
|
| I remember asking myself when ChatGPT was launched: "why would
| any sane person massively deploy such a thing?"
|
| It's the money and the power, stupid.
|
| OpenAI doesn't have any mission. To have a mission means to serve
| a purpose. To serve means to have higher values than money and
| power. And yeah, there _is_ a hierarchy of values. The closest
| statement I can accept is "we will try to get all of humanity
| addicted to our models, and we couldn't care less about the
| consequences".
|
| Wanna know why they'll lose? Because they'll get addicted too.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Don't get high on your own supply.
| captainepoch wrote:
| Hiding another AI post... This is getting _so_ tiresome...
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I always thought OpenAI was for the benefit of humanity, not a
| profit-seeking entity.
|
| OpenAI is certainly not "open" nowadays.
| sourcepluck wrote:
| A company wants to do action x.
|
| "If x leads to legal issue y, how much could it cost us?"
|
| "If x leads to reputational issue z, how much could it cost us?"
|
| -- that's my guess for the two things that matter when a company
| considers an action. Aside from, of course, how much money or
| resources the action would bring to the table in the first place,
| which is the primary concern (legally, culturally, etc).
|
| People who work in this and related and indeed any industry - am
| I off the mark? If so, how? Look forward to any clarifications or
| updates to this heuristic I'm proposing.
| SaintSeiya wrote:
| I think is to take advantages of tax loopholes and deductions are
| the main reason they keep the non-profit. They want to have their
| cake and eat it too. at this level of wealth the philantropism
| "incentives" must be bigger than the "money" given away.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| I fully understand Sam Altman is a little finger and I no longer
| touch any openAI projects.
|
| Claude has been fantastic and even Grok decent. Perplexity is
| also useful and I recommend anyone knowledgeable to avoid
| openAI's grubby hands.
| ITB wrote:
| It's not about whether an argument can be made where becoming a
| for profit aligns with goals. The more general issue is whether
| one should be able to raise money with the pretext of a non-
| profit, pay no taxes, and later decide to take it all private.
|
| In that case, why shouldn't original funders be retroactively
| converted to investors and be given a large part of the
| ownership?
| rednafi wrote:
| This attempt to represent corporate greed as a "mission" is
| laughable. They are a for-profit company, just like a thousand
| others. It reminds me of Google's "Don't be evil" ethos.
| danny_codes wrote:
| ClosedAI! The naming is really confusing at this point, due for a
| clarifying correction.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of
| those who would finance the mission
|
| that's exactly how a non-profit is supposed to be -- it considers
| the interests of the mission, not the interests of those who
| finance the mission
|
| I hate this weaselly newspeak.
| fetzu wrote:
| I, for one, am looking forward to harvesting spice on Arrakis.
| block_dagger wrote:
| I wonder: who will be our Serena Butler? [1]
|
| [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Serena_Butler
| caycep wrote:
| at this point, why isn't there a Debian for AI?
| int_19h wrote:
| Because useful AI requires massive spending on compute to
| train.
| caycep wrote:
| resources yes (for now...assuming someone doesn't come up
| with better algorithms in the future)
|
| But all of the libraries are Facebook/google owned, made free
| by grace of the executives working there. Why no open
| source/nonprofit library for all the common things like
| tensors and such?
| exogeny wrote:
| Said another way: Sam Altman wants to be as rich as Elon Musk,
| and he is mad that he isn't.
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