[HN Gopher] Evolving OpenAI's Structure
___________________________________________________________________
Evolving OpenAI's Structure
Author : rohitpaulk
Score : 321 points
Date : 2025-05-05 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| ru552 wrote:
| I wonder if this meets the requirements set by the recent round
| of outside investors?
| anxman wrote:
| Not according to Microsoft: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-
| altman-satya-nadella-rift-30...
| babelfish wrote:
| I don't see any comments about the PBC in that article
| (archive link: https://archive.is/cPLWd)
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I'm getting really tired of hearing about OpenAI "evolving".
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN?
| We're looking for _curious_ conversation here, and this is not
| that.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > transition to a Public Benefit Corporation
|
| Can some business person give us a summary on PBCs vs.
| alternative registrations?
| fheisler wrote:
| A PBC is just a for-profit company that has _some_ sort of
| specific mandate to benefit the "public good" - however it
| chooses to define that. It's generally meant to provide some
| balance toward societal good over the more common, strictly
| shareholder profit-maximizing alternative.
|
| (IANAL but run a PBC that uses this charter[1] and have written
| about it here[2] as part of our biennial reporting process.)
|
| [1] https://github.com/OpenCoreVentures/ocv-public-benefit-
| compa...
|
| [2] https://goauthentik.io/blog/2024-09-25-our-biennial-pbc-
| repo...
| imkevinxu wrote:
| you could've just asked this to chatgpt....
| cs702 wrote:
| The charter of a public-benefit corporation gives the company's
| board and management a bit of legal cover for making decisions
| that don't serve to maximize, or may even limit, financial
| returns to shareholders, when those decisions are made for the
| benefit of the public.
| blagie wrote:
| Reality: It is the same as any other for-profit with a better-
| sounding name. It confuses a lot of people into thinking it's a
| non-profit without being one.
|
| Theory: It allows the CEO to make decisions motivated not just
| by maximizing shareholder value but by some other social good.
| Of course, very few PBC CEOs choose to do that.
| _false wrote:
| Here's a critical summary:
|
| Key Structure Changes:
|
| - Abandoning the "capped profit" model (which limited investor
| returns) in favor of traditional equity structure - Converting
| for-profit LLC to Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) - Nonprofit
| remains in control but also becomes a major shareholder
|
| Reading Between the Lines:
|
| 1. Power Play: The "nonprofit control" messaging appears to be
| damage control following previous governance crises. Heavy
| emphasis on regulator involvement (CA/DE AGs) suggests this was
| likely not entirely voluntary.
|
| 2. Capital Structure Reality: They need "hundreds of billions to
| trillions" for compute. The capped-profit structure was clearly
| limiting their ability to raise capital at scale. This move
| enables unlimited upside for investors while maintaining the PR
| benefit of nonprofit oversight.
|
| 3. Governance Complexity: The "nonprofit controls PBC but is also
| major shareholder" structure creates interesting conflicts. Who
| controls the nonprofit? Who appoints its board? These details are
| conspicuously absent.
|
| 4. Competition Positioning: Multiple references to "democratic
| AI" vs "authoritarian AI" and "many great AGI companies" signal
| they're positioning against perceived centralized control (likely
| aimed at competitors).
|
| Red Flags:
|
| - Vague details about actual control mechanisms - No specifics on
| nonprofit board composition or appointment process - Heavy
| reliance on buzzwords ("democratic AI") without concrete
| governance details - Unclear what specific powers the nonprofit
| retains besides shareholding
|
| This reads like a classic Silicon Valley power consolidation
| dressed up in altruistic language - enabling massive capital
| raising while maintaining insider control through a nonprofit
| structure whose own governance remains opaque.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Was this AI generated?
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically
| directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner
| take all market:
|
| > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure--which
| made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI
| effort but doesn't in a world of many great AGI companies--we are
| moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock.
| This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something
| simpler.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Or they consider themselves to have low(er) chance of winning.
| They could think either, but they obviously can't say the
| latter.
| bhouston wrote:
| OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in
| smartphones.
|
| OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic
| LLM models), even though they have competitors who are
| beating them on price or capabilities.
|
| I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least
| for the medium term because of their name
| recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover.
|
| I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers
| from the US market soon for "security reasons."
| screamingninja wrote:
| > ban all non-US LLM providers
|
| What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website
| where you interact with a language model by uploading text
| or images? That definition might become too broad too
| quickly. Hard to ban.
| slt2021 wrote:
| the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need
| to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via
| "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like
| that.
|
| everyone will roll over if all large public companies
| roll over (and they will)
| bhouston wrote:
| I don't have to imagine. There are various US bills
| trying to achieve this ban. Here is one of them:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_downloa
| d_c...
|
| One of them will eventually pass given that OpenAI is
| also pushing for protection:
|
| https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek
| babelfish wrote:
| rather than coming up with a thorough definition,
| legislation will likely target individual companies
| (DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, etc)
| jjani wrote:
| IE once captured _all_ of the value in browserland, with
| even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI
| has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is
| Apples to oranges (heh).
|
| Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm
| already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because
| their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged
| GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend
| with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.
|
| MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull
| and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely
| been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't
| use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's
| Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT
| (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides
| image generation), people are going to start pressing them.
| And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.
| wincy wrote:
| Companies that are contractors with the US government
| already aren't allowed to use Deepseek even if its an
| airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal
| told us we can't run any distills of it or anything. I
| think this is very dumb.
| retrorangular wrote:
| > I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM
| providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
|
| Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South
| Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they
| certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B
| is available for download, so any company with a VPN to
| download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run
| it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are
| available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or
| newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.
|
| If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so
| high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for
| their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition,
| you can't be feeling good about what you're making.
|
| For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro
| and Claude 3.7 Sonnet _are_ good enough to compete.
| DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for
| tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of
| the other models can achieve a task that it can 't.
|
| But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that
| could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to
| raise the funding required for newer, significantly better
| (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to
| stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning
| the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as
| now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I
| somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what
| they ban, tariff, etc.
| pphysch wrote:
| Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is
| expensive and painful.
|
| Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither
| expensive nor painful.
| dingnuts wrote:
| to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI
| would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that
| "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they
| will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies
| specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial
| Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence!
|
| and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's
| understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to
| bring about "AGI."
|
| This is another nail in the coffin
| lenerdenator wrote:
| That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just
| want their payday now.
|
| Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting
| profit above all else.
| foobiekr wrote:
| If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is
| very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct:
| OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that
| the only one anyone really cares about is the case with
| exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time
| soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the
| hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Define "imminent".
|
| If I were a person like several of the people working on
| AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies),
| I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending
| event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and
| just want to have a party at the end of the world.
|
| Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
| foobiekr wrote:
| Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the
| individual equity holders this change is about."
|
| The window there would at _least_ include the next 5
| years, though obviously not ten.
| the_duke wrote:
| AGI is matter of when, not if.
|
| It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant
| hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few
| decades. But it's coming.
|
| ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy
| progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean
| that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a
| stall.
|
| But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common tasks
| is not that far off.
| ascertain_john wrote:
| I don't think that's a safe foregone conclusion. What we've
| seen so far is very very powerful pattern matchers with
| emergent properties that frankly we don't fully understand.
| It very well may be the road to AGI, or it may stop at the
| kind of things we can do in our subconscious--but not what
| it takes to produce truly novel solutions to never before
| seen problems. I don't think we know.
| runako wrote:
| Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those
| booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised,
| then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI
| went into hibernation for 10+ years.
|
| There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in
| the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you
| have seen at least one AI winter.
| m_krebs wrote:
| "X increased exponentially in the past, therefore it will
| increase exponentially in the same way in the future" is
| fallacious. There is nothing guaranteeing indefinite
| uncapped growth in capabilities of LLMs. An exponential
| curve and a sigmoidal curve look the same until a certain
| point.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Yeah, it is a pretty good bet that any real process that
| produces something that looks like an exponential curve
| over time is the early phase of a sigmoid curve, because
| all real processes have constraints.
| 91bananas wrote:
| And if we apply the 80/20 rule, feels like we're at about
| 50-75% right now. So we're almost getting close to done
| with the easy parts. Then come the hard parts.
| blibble wrote:
| > AGI is matter of when, not if.
|
| LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for
| the population to think pushes this further and further out
| each day
| jwilber wrote:
| I agree that LLMs are hurting the general population's
| capacity to think (assuming they use it often. I've
| certainly noticed a slight trend among students I've
| taught to use less effort, and myself to some extent).
|
| I don't agree that this will affect ML progress much,
| since the general population isn't contributing to core
| ML research.
| delecti wrote:
| On the other hand, dumbing down the population also
| lowers the bar for AGI. /s
| Kabukks wrote:
| Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To
| me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made
| between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can
| see no clear steps towards AGI.
| streptomycin wrote:
| https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years
| _di...
| foobiekr wrote:
| I think this is right but also missing a useful
| perspective.
|
| Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the
| nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the
| corner - just some research and engineering way - which was
| the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as
| dramatic_ as today's AGI.
|
| That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer
| for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to
| fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general
| purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we
| have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred
| more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.
|
| There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech
| singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People
| point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the
| singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the
| apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people
| latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or
| paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).
|
| The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and
| aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost
| identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.
|
| I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal
| constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away,
| and probably more.
|
| So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if
| it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we
| were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the
| same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same
| failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that
| the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.
|
| Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is
| different and it won't be another round of "oops, this
| turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're
| going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement
| regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of
| this that I can think of.
| quesera wrote:
| I won't go too far out on this limb, because I kind of
| agree with you... but to be fair -- 1980s-1990s nanotech
| did not attract this level of investment, nor was it
| visible to ordinary people, nor was it useful to anyone
| except researchers and grant writers.
|
| It seems like nanotech is all around us now, but the term
| "nanotech" has been redefined to mean something different
| (larger scale, less amazing) from Drexler's molecular
| assemblers.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| Every consumer has very useful AI at their fingertips
| right now. It's eating the software engineering world
| rapidly. This is nothing like nanotech in the 80s.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Sure. But fancy autocomplete for a very limited industry
| (IT) plus graphics generation and a few more similar
| items, are indeed useful. Just like "nanotech" coating of
| say optics or in the precise machinery or all other fancy
| nano films in many industries. Modern transistors are
| close to nano scale now, etc.
|
| The problem is that the distance between a nano thin film
| or an interesting but ultimately rigid nano scale
| transistor and a programmable nano level sized robot is
| enormous, despite similar sizes. Same like the distance
| between an autocomplete heavily relying on the
| preexisting external validators (compilers, linters,
| static code analyzers etc.) and a real AI capable of
| thinking is equally enormous.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general
| purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will
| we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a
| hundred more years or more,_
|
| I thought this was a "we know we can't" thing rather than
| a "not with current technology" thing?
| bdangubic wrote:
| _AGI is matter of when, not if_
|
| probably true but this statement would be true if when is
| 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when
| first cars started rolling around some mates around the
| campfire we saying "not if but when" we'll have flying cars
| everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in
| car manufacturing) we are nowhere near... I think saying
| "when, not if" is one of those statements that while
| probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in
| practice. give me "when" here and I'll put up $1,000 to a
| charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the
| same thing if wrong
| dbacar wrote:
| It is already here, kinda. I mean look at how it passes
| the bar exam, solves math olympiad level questions,
| generates video, art, music. What else are you looking
| for? It already has penetrated into job market causing
| significant disruption in programming. We are not seeing
| flying cars but we are witnessing things even not talked
| about around campfire. Seriously even 4 years ago, would
| you think all these would happen?
| bdangubic wrote:
| AGI is here?????! Damn, me, and every other human, must
| have missed that news... /s
| manquer wrote:
| Progress is not just a function of technical possibility(
| even if it exists) it is also economics.
|
| It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without
| equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach
| here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist
| or wont come in the future, just that the upfront
| investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of
| what the largest tech companies can expend.
|
| If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or
| trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns,
| no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind
| of resources.
|
| Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1],
| nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example.
| Another close one is anything space related, we cannot
| replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50
| years ago of say landing on the moon and so on.
|
| From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a
| "If", without even going into the technology challenges.
|
| [1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape
| economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it
| also not guaranteed like in fusion.
|
| [2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could
| require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of
| magnitude of resources), which is something the world is
| unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AGI is matter of when, not if_
|
| We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit
| in the 80s.)
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it
| basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won 't
| be a winner take all market:_
|
| Yeah; and: We want to open source very capable
| models.
|
| Seems like nary a daylight between DeepSeek R1, Sonnet 3.5,
| Gemini 2.5, & Grok3 really put things in perspective for them!
| kvetching wrote:
| Not to mention, @Gork, aka Grok 3.5...
| istjohn wrote:
| I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their
| profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the
| justification they cooked up.
| lanthissa wrote:
| AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for
| general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it
| accelerates productivity.
|
| Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres
| decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take
| all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point
| at which the public cant query it.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to
| AGI.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I agree with you, but that's kindof beside the point. Open
| AI's thesis is that they will work towards AGI, and
| eventually succeed. In the context of that premise, Open AI
| still doesn't believe AGI would be winner-takes-all. I
| think that's an interesting discussion whether you believe
| the premise or not.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I agree with you
|
| I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a
| measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?
| voidspark wrote:
| Their multimodal models are a rudimentary form of AGI.
|
| EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have
| proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as
| "Emerging AGI".
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462
| always_imposter wrote:
| AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or
| guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait
| for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is
| our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out,
| watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and
| possibly in the next century as well will be nothing
| close to an actual AGI.
|
| I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur
| that drives people to make claims like AGI will be here
| in the next decade. No, we are not getting that.
|
| And what do you think would happen to us humans if such
| AGI is achieved? People's ability to put food on the
| table is dependent on their labor exchanged for money. I
| can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there
| but will it be equitable? Available to everyone?
| Absolutely not. Even UBI isn't going to cut it because
| even with UBI people still want to work as experiments
| have shown. But with that, there won't be a majority of
| work especially paper pushing mid level bs like managers
| on top of managers etc.
|
| If we actually get AGI, you know what would be the
| smartest thing for such an advanced thing to do? It would
| probably kill itself because it would come to the
| conclusion that living is a sin and a futile effort. If
| you are that smart, nothing motivates you anymore. You
| will be just a depressed mass for all your life.
|
| That's just how I feel.
| voidspark wrote:
| > AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction
| or guidance to do anything
|
| There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed
| a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging
| AGI".
|
| ChatGPT can solve problems that it was not explicitly
| trained to solve, across a vast number of problem
| domains.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462
|
| The paper is summarized here
| https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-
| achievi...
| dom96 wrote:
| This constant redefinition of what AGI means is really
| tiring. Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy
| search engine/auto completer.
| voidspark wrote:
| It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement.
|
| Think about it - the original definition of AGI was
| basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a
| human level of intelligence or better.
|
| That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in
| a step change. There would be incremental progress. How
| do you describe the intermediate stages?
|
| What about a machine that can do anything better than the
| 50th percentile of humans? That would be classified as
| "Competent AGI", but not "Expert AGI" or ASI.
|
| > fancy search engine/auto completer
|
| That's an extreme oversimplification. By the same
| reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing
| words when they speak. No that's not how deep learning
| systems work. It's not auto complete.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _It 's not a redefinition, it's a refinement_
|
| It's really not. The Space Shuttle isn't an emerging
| interstellar spacecraft, it's just a spacecraft. Throwing
| emerging in front of a qualifier to dilute it is just
| bullshit.
|
| > _By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just
| auto completing words when they speak._
|
| We have no evidence of this. There is a common trope
| across cultures and history of characterising human
| intelligence in terms of the era's cutting-edge
| technology. We did it with steam engines [1]. We did it
| with computers [2]. We're now doing it with large
| language models.
|
| [1] http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583
|
| [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-
| evolution/a...
| voidspark wrote:
| Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes
| levels of performance.
|
| The _General Intelligence_ part of AGI refers to its
| ability to solve problems that it was not explicitly
| trained to solve, across many problem domains. We already
| have examples of the current systems doing exactly that -
| zero shot and few shot capabilities.
|
| > We have no evidence of this.
|
| That's my point. Humans are _not_ "autocompleting words"
| when they speak.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes
| levels of performance_
|
| No, it's bringing something out of scope into the
| definition. Gluten-free means free of gluten. Gluten-free
| bagel verus sliced bread is a refinement--both started
| out under the definition. Glutinous bread, on the other
| hand, is not gluten free. As a result, "almost gluten
| free" is bullshit.
|
| > _That 's my point. Humans are not "autocompleting
| words" when they speak_
|
| Humans are not. LLMs are. It turns out that's incredibly
| powerful! But it's also limiting in a way that's
| fundamentally important to the definition of AGI.
|
| LLMs bring us closer to AGI in the way the inventions of
| writing, computers and the internet probably have.
| Calling LLMs "emerging AGI" pretends we are on a path to
| AGI in a way we have zero evidence for.
| voidspark wrote:
| > Gluten-free means free of gluten.
|
| Bad analogy. That's a binary classification. AGI systems
| can have degrees of performance and capability.
|
| > Humans are not. LLMs are.
|
| My point is that if you oversimplify LLMs to "word
| autocompletion" then you can make the same argument for
| humans. It's such an oversimplification of the
| transformer / deep learning architecture that it becomes
| meaningless.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That 's a binary classification. AGI systems can have
| degrees of performance and capability_
|
| The "g" in AGI requires the AI be able to perform "the
| full spectrum of cognitively demanding tasks with
| proficiency comparable to, or surpassing, that of humans"
| [1]. Full and not full are binary.
|
| > _if you oversimplify LLMs to "word autocompletion" then
| you can make the same argument for humans_
|
| No, you can't, unless you're pre-supposing that LLMs work
| like human minds. Calling LLMs "emerging AGI" pre-
| supposes that LLMs are the path to AGI. We simply have no
| evidence for that, no matter how much OpenAI and Google
| would like to pretend it's true.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_inte
| lligenc...
| voidspark wrote:
| Then you are simply rejecting any attempts to refine the
| definition of AGI. I already linked to the Google
| DeepMind paper. The definition is being debated in the AI
| research community. I already explained that definition
| is too limited because it doesn't capture all of the
| intermediate stages. That definition may be the end goal,
| but obviously there will be stages in between.
|
| > No, you can't, unless you're pre-supposing that LLMs
| work like human minds.
|
| You are missing the point. If you reduce LLMs to "word
| autocompletion" then you completely ignore the the
| attention mechanism and conceptual internal
| representations. These systems have deep learning models
| with hundreds of layers and trillions of weights. If you
| completely ignore all of that, then by the same reasoning
| (completely ignoring the complexity of the human brain)
| we can just say that people are auto-completing words
| when they speak.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I already linked to the Google DeepMind paper. The
| definition is being debated in the AI research community_
|
| Sure, Google wants to redefine AGI so it looks like
| things that aren't AGI can be branded as such. That
| definition is, correctly in my opinion, being called out
| as bullshit.
|
| > _obviously there will be stages in between_
|
| We don't know what the stages are. Folks in the 80s were
| similarly selling their expert systems as a stage to AGI.
| "Emerging AGI" is a bullshit term.
|
| > _If you reduce LLMs to "word autocompletion" then you
| completely ignore the the attention mechanism and
| conceptual internal representations. These systems have
| deep learning models with hundreds of layers and
| trillions of weights_
|
| Fair enough, granted.
| latentsea wrote:
| I agree. AGI is meaningless as a term if it doesn't mean
| completely autonomous agentic intelligence capable of
| operating on long-term planning horizons.
|
| Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what
| means that and only that!?
| ben_w wrote:
| > Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what
| means that and only that!?
|
| "Agentic AI" means that.
|
| Well, to some people, anyway. And even then, people are
| already arguing about what counts as agency.
|
| That's the trouble with new tech, we have to invent words
| for new stuff that was previously fiction.
|
| I wonder, did people argue if "horseless carriages" were
| really carriages? And "aeroplane" how many argued that
| "plane" didn't suit either the Latin or Greek etymology
| for various reasons?
|
| We never did rename "atoms" after we split them...
| ben_w wrote:
| Unless you can define "agency", you're opening yourself
| to being called nothing more than a fancy chemical
| reaction.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| > AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction
| or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, ...
|
| Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or
| guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done
| before
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Name me a human that also doesn 't need direction or
| guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done
| before_
|
| Literally everything that's been invented.
| lukan wrote:
| It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time,
| because you don't want that to happen.
|
| The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not
| have believed, that will happen so soon.
|
| LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part
| and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put
| together.
|
| And work there will be always plenty. Distributing
| ressources might require new ways, though.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| > The turing test was succesfull.
|
| The very people whose theories about language are now
| being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have
| also been discrediting the Turing test as
| pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s.
|
| It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or
| Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to
| define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually
| turns out to have no practical impact on anything
| whatsoever.
| lukan wrote:
| "but actually turns out to have no practical impact on
| anything whatsoever"
|
| Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans,
| won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not
| just because of scammers.
| buu700 wrote:
| I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed
| between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could
| conceivably have some version of AI that reliably
| performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak
| human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to
| complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective
| experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI.
|
| The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked
| in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to
| recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue
| that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior
| technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious
| AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive
| collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI
| couldn't be used that way without opening a massive
| ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence
| would represent an inherent existential threat.
|
| Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we
| give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of
| humanity that we send off to colonize distant or
| environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't
| something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly
| in a pre-post-scarcity society.
|
| It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI
| capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that
| they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious
| AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this
| tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which
| we currently consider mundane were science fiction only
| 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was
| concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable
| definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but
| we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction
| given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete.
|
| Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair
| distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI
| than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but
| also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the
| consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.
| abtinf wrote:
| Agreed and, if anything, you are too generous. They aren't
| just not "close", they aren't even working in the same
| category as anything that might be construed as
| independently intelligent.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-
| is-...
|
| Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here.
| Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI
| textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| I would argue that this is a fringe opinion that has been
| adopted by a mainstream scholar, not a mainstream
| opinion. That or, based on my reading of the article,
| this person is using a definition of AGI that is very
| different than the one that most people use when they say
| AGI.
| henryfjordan wrote:
| Why does the Author choose to ignore the "General" in
| AGI?
|
| Can ChatGPT drive a car? No, we have specialized models
| for driving vs generating text vs image vs video etc etc.
| Maybe ChatGPT could pass a high school chemistry test but
| it certainly couldn't complete the lab exercises. What
| we've built is a really cool "Algorithm for indexing
| generalized data", so you can train that Driving model
| very similarly to how you train the Text model without
| needing to understand the underlying data that well.
|
| The author asserts that because ChatGPT can generate text
| about so many topics that it's general, but it's really
| only doing 1 thing and that's not very general.
| brookst wrote:
| There are people who can't drive cars. Are they not
| general intelligence?
|
| I think we need to separate the thinking part of
| intelligence from tool usage. Not everyone can use every
| tool at a high level of expertise.
| root_axis wrote:
| Generally speaking, anyone can learn to use any tool.
| This isn't true of generative AI systems which can only
| learn through specialized training with meticulously
| curated data sets.
| ben_w wrote:
| Generality is a continuous value, not a boolean; turned
| out that "AGI" was poorly defined, and because of that
| most people were putting the cut-off threshold in
| different places.
|
| Likewise for "intelligent", and even "artificial".
|
| So no, ChatGPT can't drive a car*. But it knows more
| about car repairs, defensive driving, global road
| features (geoguesser), road signs in every language, and
| how to design safe roads, than I'm ever likely to.
|
| * It can also run python scripts with machine vision
| stuff, but sadly that's still not sufficient to drive a
| car... well, to drive one safety, anyway.
| KHRZ wrote:
| You can literally today prompt ChatGPT with API
| instructions to drive a car, then feed it images of a
| car's window outlooks and have it generate commands for
| the car (JSON schema restricted structured commands if
| you like). Text can represent any data thus yes, it is
| general.
| threeseed wrote:
| > JSON schema restricted structured commands if you like
|
| How about we have ChatGPT start with a simple task like
| reliably generating JSON schema when asked to.
|
| Hint: it will fail.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Text can be a carrier for any type of signal. The problem
| gets reduced to that of an interface definition. It's
| probably not going to be ideal for driving cars, but if
| the latency, signal quality, and accuracy is within
| acceptable constraints, what else is stopping it?
|
| This doesn't imply that it's ideal for driving cars, but
| to say that it's not capable of driving general
| intelligence is incorrect in my view.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| ... that was written in mid-2023. So that opinion piece
| is trying to redefine 2 year old LLMs like GPT-4 (pre-4o)
| as AGI. Which can only be described as an absolutely
| herculean movement of goalposts.
| root_axis wrote:
| "AGI is already here, just wait 30 more years". Not very
| convincing.
| lossolo wrote:
| > AGI is already here
|
| Last time I checked, in an Anthropic paper, they asked
| the model to count something. They examined the logits
| and a graph showing how it arrived at the answer. Then
| they asked the model to explain its reasoning, and it
| gave a completely different explanation, because that was
| the most statistically probable response to the question.
| Does that seem like AGI to you?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| AGI could be a winner-take-all market... for the AGI,
| specifically for the first one that's General and Intelligent
| enough to ensure its own survival and prevent competing AGI
| efforts from succeeding...
| pdxandi wrote:
| How would an AGI prevent others from competing? Sincere
| question. That seems like something that ASI would be
| capable of. If another company released an AGI, how would
| the original stifle it? I get that the original can self-
| improve to try to stay ahead, but that doesn't necessarily
| mean it self-improves the best or most efficiently, right?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AGI can 't really be a winner take all market. The
| 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly
| and it accelerates productivity_
|
| The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself
| are theoretically unsurmountable.
|
| But OpenAI doesn't have a path to AGI any more than anyone
| else. (It's increasingly clear LLMs alone don't make the
| cut.) And the market for LLMs, non-general AI, is very much
| not winner takes all. In this announcement, OpenAI is
| basically acknowledging that it's not getting to self-
| improving AGI.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve
| itself are theoretically unsurmountable._
|
| This has some baked assumptions about cycle time and
| improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this has some baked assumptions about cycle time and
| improvement per cycle and whether there 's a ceiling_
|
| To be precise, it assumes a low variability in cycle time
| and improvement per cycle. If everyone is subjected to
| the same limits, the first-mover advantage remains
| insurmountable. I'd also argue that whether there is a
| ceiling matters less than how high it is. If the first
| AGI won't hit a ceiling for decades, it will have decades
| of fratricidal supremacy.
| aeternum wrote:
| Remember however that their charter specifies: "If a value-
| aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI
| before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start
| assisting this project"
|
| It does have some weasel words around value-aligned and
| safety-conscious which they can always argue but this could
| get interesting because they've basically agreed not to
| compete. A fairly insane thing to do in retrospect.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Insane relative to the goals of the current leadership, but
| they didn't write that.
| phreeza wrote:
| That is a very obvious thing for them to say though regardless
| of what they truly believe, because (a) it legitimizes removing
| the cap , making fundraising easier and (b) averts antitrust
| suspicions.
| raincole wrote:
| Even if they think it will be a winner-take-all market, they
| won't say it out loud. It would be begging for antitrust
| lawsuits.
| sampton wrote:
| OpenAI is busy rearranging the chairs while their competitors
| surpass them.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Yup. Haven't used an OpenAI model for anything in 6+ months
| now, except to check the latest one and confirm that it is
| still hilariously behind Google/Anthropic.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure--which
| made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI
| effort but doesn't in a world of many great AGI companies--we are
| moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock.
| This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something
| simpler."
|
| OpenAI admitting that they're not going to win?
| modeless wrote:
| Huh, so Elon's lawsuit worked? The nonprofit will retain control?
| Or is this just spin on a plan that will eventually still
| sideline the nonprofit?
| j_maffe wrote:
| It more sounds like the district attorneys won
| blagie wrote:
| To be specific: The nonprofit currently retains control. It
| will stop once more dilution sets in.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| > Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence
| (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
|
| Then why is it paywalled? Why are you making/have made people
| across the world sift through the worst material on offer by the
| wide uncensored Internet to train your LLMs? Why do you have a
| for-profit LLC operating under a non-profit, or for that matter,
| a "Public Benefit Corporation" that has to answer to shareholders
| at all?
|
| Related to that:
|
| > or the needs for hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to
| train models and serve users.
|
| How does that serve humanity? Redirecting billions of dollars to
| fancy autocomplete who's power demands strain already struggling
| electrical grids and offset the gains of green energy worldwide?
|
| > A lot of people around OpenAI in the early days thought AI
| should only be in the hands of a few trusted people who could
| "handle it".
|
| No, we thought your plagiarism machine was a disgusting abuse of
| the public square, and to be clear, this criticism would've been
| easily handled by simply requesting people opt-in to have their
| material used for AI training. But we all know why you didn't do
| that, don't we Sam.
|
| > It will of course not be all used for good, but we trust
| humanity and think the good will outweigh the bad by orders of
| magnitude.
|
| Well so far, we've got vulnerable, lonely people being scammed on
| Facebook, we've got companies charging subscriptions for people
| to sext their chatbots, we've got various states using it to
| target their opposition for military intervention, and the White
| House may have used it to draft the dumbest basis for a trade war
| in human history. Oh and fake therapists too.
|
| When's the good kick in?
|
| > We believe this is the best path forward--AGI should enable all
| of humanity^1 to benefit each other.
|
| ^1 who subscribe to our services
| Lalabadie wrote:
| > Then why is it paywalled? Why are you making/have made people
| across the world sift through the worst material on offer by
| the wide uncensored Internet to train your LLMs?
|
| Because they're concerned about AI use the same way Google is
| concerned about your private data.
| pants2 wrote:
| It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the
| public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god,
| an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising
| billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...
| esafak wrote:
| Lots of people in academia and industry are calling for more
| oversight. It's the US government that's behind. Europe's AI
| Act bans applications with unacceptable risk:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act
| azinman2 wrote:
| Unless China handicaps the their progress as well (which they
| won't, see made in China 2025), all you're doing is handing
| the future to deepseek et al.
| nicce wrote:
| This thought process it not different than it was with
| nuclear weapons.
|
| The primary difference is the observability - with
| satellites we had some confidence that other nations
| respected treaties, or that they had enough reaction time
| for mutual destruction, but with this AI development we
| lack all that.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Yes, it was the same with nukes, each side had to build
| them because the other side was building them.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Only countries with nuclear weapons had an actual seat at
| the table when the world banned new nuclear weapon
| programs.
| nicce wrote:
| That is why we see the current AI competition and some
| attempts from companies to regulate it so that "it is
| safe only in their hands".
|
| https://time.com/6288245/openai-eu-lobbying-ai-act/
| esafak wrote:
| What kind of a future is that? If China marches towards a
| dystopia, why should Europe dutifully follow?
|
| We can selectively ban uses without banning the technology
| wholesale; e.g., nuclear power generation is permitted,
| while nuclear weapons are strictly controlled.
| alasano wrote:
| We don't know whether pushing towards AGI is marching
| towards a dystopia.
|
| If it's winner takes all for the first company/nation to
| have AGI (presuming we can control it), then slowing down
| progress of any kind with regulation is a risk.
|
| I don't think there's a good enough analogy to be made,
| like your nuclear power/weapons example.
|
| The hypothetical benefits of an aligned AGI outweigh
| those of any other technology by orders of magnitude.
| esafak wrote:
| As with nuclear weapons, there is non-negligible
| probability of wiping out the human race. The companies
| developing AI have not solved the alignment problem, and
| OpenAI even dismantled what programs it had on it. They
| are not going to invest in it unless forced to.
|
| We should not be racing ahead because China is, but
| investing energy in alignment research and international
| agreements.
| troupo wrote:
| > We don't know whether pushing towards AGI is marching
| towards a dystopia.
|
| We do know that. By literally looking at China.
|
| > The hypothetical benefits of an aligned AGI outweigh
| those of any other technology by orders of magnitude.
|
| AGI aligned with whom?
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If China marches towards a dystopia, why should Europe
| dutifully follow?
|
| I think the more relevant question is: Do you want to
| live in a Chinese dystopia, or a European one?
| esafak wrote:
| A European dystopia won't be AI borne, so this is a false
| dilemma.
| BeetleB wrote:
| What I meant is: Europe can choose to regulate as they
| do, and end up living in a Chinese dystopia because the
| Chinese will drastically benefit from non-regulated AI,
| or they can create their own AI dystopia.
|
| A non-AI dystopia is the least likely scenario.
| esafak wrote:
| If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack
| Europe, they can invest in defense without unleashing AI
| domestically. And I don't think China will become a
| utopia with unregulated AI. My impression after having
| visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they
| use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in,
| because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well
| enjoy what they have. But if things go sideways they may
| regret it too.
| Muromec wrote:
| Not attack, just influence. Destabilize if you want.
| Advocate regime change, sabotage trust in institution.
| Being on a defense in a propaganda war doesn't really
| work.
|
| With US already having lost ideologigal war with russia
| and China, Europe is very much next
| BeetleB wrote:
| > If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack
| Europe
|
| No - I'm suggesting that China will reap the benefits of
| AI much more than Europe will, and they will eclipse
| Europe economically. Their dominance will follow, and
| they'll be able to dictate terms to other countries (just
| as the US is doing, and has been doing).
|
| > And I don't think China will become a utopia with
| unregulated AI.
|
| Did you miss all the places I used the word "dystopia"?
|
| > My impression after having visited it was not one of a
| utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't
| think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia
| are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have.
|
| Comparing China when I was a kid, not that long ago, to
| what it is now: It is a dystopia, and that dystopia is
| responsible for much of the improvements they've made.
| Enjoying what they have doesn't mean it's not a dystopia.
| Most people don't understand how willing humans are to
| live in a dystopia if it improves their condition
| significantly (not worrying too much about food, shelter,
| etc).
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _China may use AI to attack Europe_
|
| No, just control. America exerts influence and control
| over Europe without having had to attack it in
| generations.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The US government probably doesn't think it's behind.
|
| Right now it's operated by a bunch of people who think that
| you can directly relate the amount of money a venture could
| make in the next 90 days to its net benefit for society.
| Government telling them how they can and cannot make that
| money, in their minds, is government telling them that they
| cannot bring maximum benefit to society.
|
| Now, is this mindset myopic to everything that most people
| have in their lived experience? Is it ethically bankrupt and
| held by people who'd sell their own mothers for a penny if
| they otherwise couldn't get that penny? Would those people be
| banished to a place beyond human contact for the rest of
| their existence by functioning organs of an even somewhat-
| sane society?
|
| I don't know. I'm just asking questions.
| jimbokun wrote:
| US government is behind because Biden admin were pushing
| strongly for controls and regulations and told Andersen and
| friends exactly that, who then went and did everything in
| their power to elect Trump, who then put those same tech bros
| in charge of making his AI policy.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > Lots of people in academia and industry
|
| Mostly OpenAI and DeepMind and it stunk of 'pulling up the
| drawbridge behind them' and pivoting from actual harm to
| theoretical harm.
|
| For a crowd supposedly entrenched in startups, it's amazing
| everyone here is so slow to recognise it's all funding
| pitches and contract bidding.
| saubeidl wrote:
| The EU does and has passed the AI act to reign in the worst
| consequences of this nuclear weapon. It has not been received
| well around here.
|
| The "digital god" angle might explain why. For many, this has
| become a religious movement, a savior for an otherwise doomed
| economic system.
| rchaud wrote:
| Absolutely. It's frankly quite shocking to see how otherwise
| atheist or agnostic people have so quickly begun worshipping
| at the altar of "inevitable AGI apocalypse", much in the same
| way as how extremist Christians await the rapture.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Roko's Basilisk is basically Pascal's wager with GPUs.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| I guess they think that the "digital god" has a chance to
| become real (and soon, even), unlike the non-digital one?
| rchaud wrote:
| We'll be debating whether or not "AGI is here" in
| philosophical terms, in the same way people debate if God
| is real, for years to come. To say nothing of the untaxed
| "nonprofit" status these institutions share.
|
| Omnipotent deities can never be held responsible for
| famine and natural disasters ("God has a plan for us
| all"). AI currently has the same get-out-of-jail free
| card where mistakes that no literate human would ever
| make are handwaved away as "hallucinations" that can be
| exorcised with a more sophisticated training model
| ("prayers").
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Well, because it's obviously bullshit and everyone knows it.
| Just play the game and get rich like everyone else.
| esafak wrote:
| Are you sure about that? AI-powered robotic soldiers are
| around the corner. What could go wrong...
| devinprater wrote:
| Ooo I know, Cybermen! Yay.
| modeless wrote:
| I don't know what sources you're reading. There's so much eye-
| batting I'm surprised people can see at all.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Because many people fundamentally don't believe AGI is possible
| at a basic level, even AI researchers. Humans tend to only
| understand what materially affects their existence.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Most of us are batting our eyelashes as rapidly as possible but
| have no idea how to stop it.
| xandrius wrote:
| How is an LLM more powerful than any nuclear weapon? Seriously
| curious.
| granzymes wrote:
| From least to most speculative:
|
| * The nonprofit is staying the same, and will continue to control
| the for-profit entity OpenAI created to raise capital
|
| * The for-profit is changing from a capped-profit LLC to a PBC
| like Anthropic and Xai
|
| * These changes have been at least tacitly agreed to by the
| attorneys general of California and Delaware
|
| * The non-profit won't be the _largest_ shareholder in the PBC
| (likely Microsoft) but will retain control (super voting shares?)
|
| * OpenAI thinks there will be multiple labs that achieve AGI,
| although possibly on different timelines
| foobiekr wrote:
| Another possibility is that OpenAL thinks _none_ of the labs
| will achieve AGI in a meaningful timeframe so they are trying
| to cash out with whatever you want to call the current models.
| There will only be one or two of those before investors start
| looking at the incredible losses.
| r00fus wrote:
| I'm fairly sure that OpenAI has never really believed in AGI
| - it's like with Uber and "self driving cabs" - it's a lure
| for the investors.
|
| It's just that this bait has a shelf life and it looks like
| it's going to expire soon.
| sjtgraham wrote:
| This restructuring is essentially a sophisticated maneuver toward
| wealth and power maximization shrouded in altruistic language.
| theoryofx wrote:
| "We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of
| OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN
| CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE]
|
| This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to
| retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced
| to by threats of legal action.
| HaZeust wrote:
| When I read that, I was actually fairly surprised about how
| brazen they were about who they called on for this action. They
| simply just _said it_.
| d--b wrote:
| Mmh am I the only one who has been offered to participate in a
| "comparison between 2 chatgpt versions"?
|
| The newer version included sponsored products in its response. I
| thought that was quite effed up.
| lolinder wrote:
| So the non-profit retains control but we all know that Altman
| controls the board of the non-profit and I'd be shocked if he
| won't have significant stock in the new for-profit (from TFA: "we
| are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has
| stock"). Which means that regardless of whether the non-profit
| has control on paper, OpenAI is now _even better_ structured for
| Sam Altman 's personal enrichment.
|
| No more caps on profit, a simpler structure to sell to investors,
| and Altman can finally get that 7% equity stake he's been eyeing.
| Not a bad outcome for him given the constraints apparently
| imposed on them by "the Attorney General of Delaware and the
| Attorney General of California".
| elAhmo wrote:
| We have seen how much power does the board have after the
| firing of Altman - none.
|
| Let's see how this plays out. PBC effectively means nothing -
| just take a look at Xai and its purchase of Twitter. I would
| love to listen reasoning explaining why this ~33 billion USD
| move is benefiting public.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _We have seen how much power does the board have after the
| firing of Altman - none._
|
| Right; so, "Worker Unions" work.
| wmf wrote:
| ChatGPT is free. That's the public benefit.
| nativeit wrote:
| Define "free".
| fooker wrote:
| free as in free beer
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| It's like a free beer, but it's Bud Light, lukewarm, and
| your reaction to tasting the beer goes toward researching
| ways to make you appreciate the lukewarm Bud Light for
| its marginal value, rather than making that beer taste
| better or less unhealthy. They'll try very hard to
| convince you that they have though. It parallels their
| approach to AI Alignment.
| Etheryte wrote:
| This description has no business being as spot on as it
| is.
| throwanem wrote:
| Makes me glad I haven't tried the Kool-aid. Uh, crap -
| 'scuse me, _craft_ - IPA. Uh, beer.
| windsignaling wrote:
| I don't pay money for it?
| sekai wrote:
| They don't collect data?
| wmf wrote:
| If you use it, that means you received more value than
| you gave up. It's called consumer surplus.
| patmcc wrote:
| That's effectively every business that isn't a complete
| rent-seeking monopoly. It's not a very good measure.
|
| edit: to be clear, it's not a bad thing - we should want
| companies that create consumer surplus. But that's the
| default state of companies in a healthy market.
| jaccola wrote:
| If I pay PS200,000 for a car, I received more value than
| I gave up, otherwise I wouldn't have given the owner
| PS200,000 for her car. No reasonable person would say the
| car was "free"...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you use it, that means you received more value than
| you gave up. It 's called consumer surplus_
|
| This is true for literally any transaction. Actually,
| it's true for any rational action. If you're being
| tortured, and you decide it's not worth it to keep your
| secrets hidden any longer, you get more than you give up
| when you stop being tortured.
| klabb3 wrote:
| It's only true in theory and over a single transaction,
| not necessarily over time. The hack that VCs have
| exploited for decades now is subsidizing products and
| acquiring competition to eventually enshittify. In this
| case, when OpenAI dials up the inevitable
| enshittification, they'll have gotten a ton of data from
| their users to use for their proprietary closed AI.
| patmcc wrote:
| Google offers a great many things for free. Should they get
| beneficial tax treatment for it?
| wmf wrote:
| PBCs have no beneficial tax treatment and neither does
| OpenAI.
| moralestapia wrote:
| So, what's the point of a PBC?
|
| Not being snarky here, like what is the purported thesis
| behind them?
| nemomarx wrote:
| marketing to certain types of philanthropic investors? I
| think
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Mostly branding, like Google's "do no evil"
|
| Some founders truly believe in structuring the company
| for the benefit of the public, but Altman has already
| shown he's not one of them.
| patmcc wrote:
| Huh. Then yah, what the heck? Why not just be a regular
| corp?
| jampekka wrote:
| Branding, and perhaps a demand from the judges. In
| practice it doesn't mean anything if/when they stuff the
| board with people who want to run it as a normal LLC.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| That's like saying AWS is free. ChatGPT has a limited use
| free tier just like most other SaaS products out there.
| paulddraper wrote:
| The board had plenty of power.
|
| There was never a coherent explanation of its firing the CEO.
|
| But they could have stuck with that decision if they believed
| in it.
| freejazz wrote:
| The question is not if they could, it is if they would.
| michaelt wrote:
| The explanation seemed pretty obvious to me: They set up a
| nonprofit to deliver an AI that was Open.
|
| Then things went unexpectedly well, people were valuing
| them at billions of dollars, and they suddenly decided they
| weren't open any more. Suddenly they were all about
| Altman's Interests Safety (AI Safety for short).
|
| The board tried to fulfil its obligation to get the
| nonprofit to do the things in its charter, and they were
| unsuccessful.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The explanation was pretty clear and coherent: The CEO was
| no longer adhering to the mission of the non-profit (which
| the board was upholding).
|
| But they found themselves alone in that it turns out the
| employees (who were employed by the for-profit company) and
| investors (MSFT in particular) didn't care about the
| mission and wanted to follow the money instead.
|
| So the board had no choice but to capitulate and leave.
| whynotminot wrote:
| Isn't Sam already very rich? I mean it wouldn't be the first
| time a guy wanted to be even richer, but I feel like we need to
| be more creative when divining his intentions
| sigilis wrote:
| Why would we need to be more creative? The explanation of him
| wanting more money is perfectly adequate.
|
| Being rich results in a kind of limitation of scope for
| ambition. To the sufferer, a person who has everything they
| could want, there is no other objective worth having. They
| become eccentric and they pursue more money.
|
| We should have enrichment facilities for these people where
| they play incremental games and don't ruin the world like the
| paperclip maximizers they are.
| whynotminot wrote:
| > Why would we need to be more creative? The explanation of
| him wanting more money is perfectly adequate. Being rich
| results in a kind of limitation of scope for ambition.
|
| The dude announces new initiatives from the White House,
| regularly briefs Senators and senior DoD leaders, and is
| the top get for interviews around the world for AI topics.
|
| There's a lot more to be ambitious about than just money.
| sigilis wrote:
| These are all activities he is engaging in to generate
| money through the company he has a stake in. None of
| those activities have a purpose other than selling the
| work of his company and presenting it as a good
| investment which is how he gets money.
|
| Maybe he wants to use the money in some nebulous future
| way, subjugating all people in a way that deals with his
| childhood trauma or whatever. That's also something rich
| people do when they need a hobby aside from gathering
| more money. It's not their main goal, except when they
| run into setbacks.
|
| People are not complicated when they are money hoarders.
| They might have had hidden depths once, but they are thin
| furrows in the ground next to the giant piles of money
| that define them now.
| paulddraper wrote:
| OpenAI doesn't have the lead anymore.
|
| Google/Anthropic are catching up, or already surpassed.
| 6510 wrote:
| how? The internet says 400 m weekly chatgpt users, 19 m
| weekly Anthropic, 47.3 m Monthly Gemini, Grok 6.7 m daily,
| 430 m Baidu.
| senderista wrote:
| "It's not about the money, it's about winning"
|
| --Gordon Gekko
| Yizahi wrote:
| It seems a defining feature of nearly every single extremely
| rich person is their belief that they somehow are smarter
| than filthy peasants, and so he decides to "educate" them of
| the sacred knowledge. This may take vastly different forms -
| genocide, war, trying to create via bribes a better
| government, create a city from scratch, create a new
| corporate "culture", do public proselytizing of their "do
| better" faith, write books, classes etc.
|
| St. Altman plans to create a corporate god for us dumb
| schmucks, and he will be it's prophet.
| viraptor wrote:
| Nah, worldcoin is now going to the US. He just wants to get
| richer. https://archive.is/JTuGE
| richardw wrote:
| Or, alternatively, it's much harder to fight with one hand
| behind your back. They need to be able to compete for resources
| and talent given the market structure, or they fail on the
| mission.
|
| This is already impossibly hard. Approximately zero people
| commenting would be able to win this battle in Sam's shoes.
| What would they need to do to begin to have a chance? Rather
| than make all the obvious comments "bad evil man wants to get
| rich", think what it would take to achieve the mission. What
| would you need to do in his shoes, aside from just give up and
| close up shop? Probably this, at the very least.
|
| Edit: I don't know the guy and many near YC do. So I accept
| there may be a lens I don't have. But I'd rather discuss the
| problem, not the person.
| kadushka wrote:
| It seems like they lost most of their top talent - probably
| because of Altman.
| k__ wrote:
| The moment we stop treating "bad evil man wants to ge it
| rich" as a straw man, we can heal.
| thegreatpeter wrote:
| Extra! Extra! Read all about it! "Bad evil man wants to get
| rich! We should enrich Google and Microsoft instead!"
| MPSFounder wrote:
| Never understood his appeal. Lacks charisma. Not technically
| savvy relative to many engineers at OpenAI(I doubt he would
| pass their own intern interviews, even less so their FT). Very
| unlikeable in person (comes off as fake for some reason, like a
| political plant). Who is vouching for this guy. When I met him,
| for some reason, he reminded me of Thiel. He is no Jobs
| gsibble wrote:
| Altman is a clear sociopath. He's a sales guy and good
| executive. But he's only out for himself.
| purpleidea wrote:
| There's really nothing "open" about this company. If they want to
| be, then:
|
| (1) be transparent about exactly which data was collected for the
| model
|
| (2) release all the source code
|
| If you want to benefit humanity, then put it under a strong
| copyleft license with no CLA. Simple.
| smeeth wrote:
| They would do this if their mission was what you wish it was.
| But it isn't, so they won't.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Arguments by semantics are always tiresome.
| Tenoke wrote:
| For better or worse, OpenAI removing the capped structure and
| turning the nonprofit from AGI considerations to just
| philanthropy feels like the shedding of the last remnants of
| sanctity.
| drewbeck wrote:
| I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of
| liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very
| important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of
| people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the
| world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian,
| self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is
| fully in line with that. They want to be the kings they always
| thought of themselves as, and now they get to do so without
| couching it in "doing good".
| sneak wrote:
| Is it reasonable to assign the descriptor "authoritarian" to
| anyone who simply does not subscribe to the common orthodoxy of
| one faction in the american culture war? That is what it seems
| to me is happening here, though I would love to be wrong.
|
| I have not seen anything from sama or pmarca that I would
| classify as "authoritarian".
| blibble wrote:
| are you aware of worldcoin?
|
| altman building a centralised authority of who will be
| classed as "human" is about as authoritarian as you could get
| sneak wrote:
| Worldcoin is opt-in, which is the opposite of
| authoritarian. Nobody who doesn't like it is required to
| participate.
| fsndz wrote:
| it's always opt-in until it isn't
| amdsn wrote:
| it is opt in until they manage to convince some
| government to allow them to be the contracted provider of
| "humanness verification" that is then made a prerequisite
| to access services.
| sholladay wrote:
| Comcast is also opt-in. Except, in many areas there are
| no real alternatives.
|
| I doubt Worldcoin will actually manage to corner the
| market. But the point is, if it did, bad things would
| happen. Though, that's probably true of most products.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly what they meant by "liberal" in this
| case, but since they put it in contrast with
| authoritarianism, I assume they meant it in the conventional
| definition of the word (where it is the polar opposite of
| authoritarianism). Instead of the American politics-as-sports
| definition that makes it a synonym for "team blue."
| drewbeck wrote:
| correct. "liberal" as in the general ideas that ie
| expanding the franchise is important, press freedoms are
| good, that government can do good things for people and for
| capital etc. Wikipedia's intro paragraph does a good job of
| describing what I was getting at (below). In prior decades
| Republicans in the US would have been categorized as
| "liberal" under this definition; in recent years, not so
| much.
|
| >Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on
| the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the
| governed, political equality, the right to private
| property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse
| various and often mutually conflicting views depending on
| their understanding of these principles but generally
| support private property, market economies, individual
| rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal
| democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political
| freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom
| of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is
| frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern
| history.
| drewbeck wrote:
| No I don't think it is. I DO think those two people want to
| be in charge (along with other billionaires) and they want
| the rest of us to follow along, which is in my book an
| authoritarian POV. pmarca's recent "VC is the only job that
| can't be done by AI" is a good example of that; the rest of
| us are to be managed and controlled by VCs and robots.
| tastyface wrote:
| Donating millions to a fascist president (in Altman's case)
| seems pretty authoritarian to me. And he seems happy enough
| hanging out with Thiel and other Yarvin groupies.
| sidibe wrote:
| Yup, if Elon hadn't gotten so jealous and spiteful to him
| I'm sure he'd be one of Elon's leading sycophants.
| sanderjd wrote:
| No, "authoritarian" is a word with a specific meaning. I'm
| not sure about applying it to Sam Altman, but Marc Andreessen
| has expressed views that I consider authoritarian in his
| victory lap tour since last year's presidential election.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _They want to be the kings they always thought of themselves
| as, and now they get to do so without couching it in "doing
| good"._
|
| You mean, AGI will benefit all of humanity like _War on Terror_
| spread democracy?
| nickff wrote:
| Why are you changing the subject? The "War on Terror" was
| never intended to spread democracy as far as I know;
| democracy was a means by which to achieve the objective of
| safety from terrorism.
| ballooney wrote:
| Hopelessly over-idealistic premise. Sama and pg have never been
| anything other than opportunistic muck. This will be my last
| ever comment on HN.
| byearthithatius wrote:
| I feel this so hard, I think this may be my last time using
| the site as well. They don't care about advancement, they
| only care about money.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Like everything, it's projection. Those who loudly scream
| against something are almost always the ones engaging in
| it.
|
| Google screamed against service revenue and advertising
| while building the world's largest advertising empire.
| Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance
| while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed
| against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning
| streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber
| screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming
| workers and passengers while creating an unregulated
| monster that harmed workers and passengers.
|
| Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly
| screaming against AI harming humanity while doing
| everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will
| knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.
|
| If people trust the performance instead of the actions and
| their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.
| gallerdude wrote:
| bye
| drewbeck wrote:
| Oh I'm not saying they every believed more than their self-
| centered views, but that in a world that leaned more liberal
| there was value in trying to frame their work in those terms.
| Now there's no need to pretend.
| kmacdough wrote:
| And to those who "say" at least now they're honest, I say
| "WHY?!" Unconditionally being "good" would be better than
| disguising selfishness as good. But that's not really a
| thing. Having to maintain the presence of doing good puts
| significant boundaries on what you can get away with, and
| increases the consequence when people uncover some shit.
|
| Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of
| open and unrestricted criminality.
| HaZeust wrote:
| inb4 deleted
| stego-tech wrote:
| That world _never_ existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals
| with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and
| phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded
| companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding
| ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it
| was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0
| onwards was all about centralization, surveillance,
| advertising, and manipulation of the populace at scale - and
| that intent was never really a secret to those who bothered to
| pay attention. While the world was reeling from Cambridge
| Analytica, us pre-1.0 farts who cut our teeth on Telnet and
| Mosaic were just kind of flabbergasted that _ya 'll were
| surprised by overtly obvious intentions_.
|
| That doesn't mean it has to always be this way, though. Back
| when I had more trust in the present government and USPS, I
| mused on how much of a game changer it might be for the USPS to
| provide free hosting and e-mail to citizens, repurposing the
| glut of unused real estate into smaller edge compute providers.
| Everyone gets a web server and 5GB of storage, with 1A
| Protections letting them say and host whatever they like from
| their little Post Office Box. Everyone has an e-mail address
| tied to their real identity, with encryption and security for
| digital mail just like the law provides for physical mail. I
| _still_ think the answer is about enabling more people to
| engage with the internet on their selective terms (including
| the option of _disengagement_ ), rather than the present
| psychological manipulation everyone engages in to keep us glued
| to our screens, tethered to our phones, and constantly
| uploading new data to advertisers and surveillance firms alike.
|
| But the nostalgic view that the internet used to be different
| is just that: rose-tinted memories of a past that never really
| existed. The first step to fixing this mess is acknowledging
| its harm.
| dgreensp wrote:
| I don't think the parent was saying that everyone's
| intentions were pure until recently, but rather that naked
| greed wasn't cool before, but now it is.
|
| The Internet has changed a lot over the decades, and it did
| used to be different, with the differences depending on how
| many years you go back.
| jon_richards wrote:
| As recently as the Silicon Valley tv show, the joke was
| that every startup pitch claimed they were "making the
| world a better place".
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _That world never existed_
|
| It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley
| wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.
| davesque wrote:
| I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's
| world; the risk of believing that we never had a better
| one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of
| convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people
| actually believing it was important and acting as such.
| Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary
| to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this
| way. Collectively, we have access to more wealth and power
| now than we ever did previously. By all accounts, things
| ought to be great. It seems we just need the current
| generation of leaders to re-learn a few lessons from
| history.
| jimbokun wrote:
| They deeply believe in the Ayn Rand mindset that the system
| that brings them the most individual wealth is also the best
| system for humanity as a whole.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| The explosion of PBC structured corps recently has me thinking it
| must just be a tax loophole at this point. I can't possibly
| imagine there is any meaningful enforcement around any of its
| restrictions or guidelines.
| bloudermilk wrote:
| PBCs don't get special tax treatment. As far as I know they're
| taxed exactly the same as typical C or S corps.
| ralph84 wrote:
| It's not a tax thing, it's a power thing. PBCs transfer power
| from shareholders to management as long as management can say
| they were acting for a public benefit.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Not a loophole as they pay taxes (unlike non-profits) but a fig
| leaf to cover commercial activity with some feel-good label.
| The real purpose of PBC is the legal protection it may afford
| to the company from shareholders unhappy with less than maximal
| profit generation. It gives the board some legal space to do
| some good if they choose to but has no mandate like real non-
| profits which get a tax break for creating a public good or
| service, a tax break that can be withdrawn if they do not
| annually prove that public benefit to the IRS.
| bloppe wrote:
| Does anybody outside OAI still think of them as anything other
| that a "normal" for-profit company?
| programjames wrote:
| Carcinisation in action: free (foss) -> non-
| profit -> capped-profit -> public benefits corporation -> (you
| guessed it)
| blagie wrote:
| No, this only happens if:
|
| 1) You're successful.
|
| 2) You mess up checks-and-balances at the beginning.
|
| OpenAI did both.
|
| Personally, I think at some point, the AGs ought to take over
| and push it back into a non-profit format. OAI undermines the
| concept of a non-profit.
| jjani wrote:
| SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at
| peak valuation and he needs to convert something _now_.
|
| If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up -
| and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand
| levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized
| this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and
| Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy phones will
| get a Gemini button, Chrome will get it built into the browser.
| MS can either develop their own thing , use opensource models, or
| just ask every frontier model provider (and there's already 3-4
| as we speak) how cheaply they're willing to deliver. Then chuck
| it right in the OS and Office first-class. Which half the white
| collar world spends their entire day staring at. Apple devices
| too will get an AI button (or gesture, given it's Apple) and just
| like MS they'll do it inhouse or have the providers bid against
| each other.
|
| The only way OpenAI David was ever going to beat the Goliaths GMA
| in the long run was if it were near-impossible to catch up to
| them, a la TSMC/ASML. But they did catch up.
| tedivm wrote:
| Even Alibaba is releasing some amazing models these days. Qwen
| 3 is pretty remarkable, especially considering the variety of
| hardware the variants of it can run on.
| pi-err wrote:
| Sounds a lot like "Google+ will catch Facebook in no time".
|
| OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the
| default chatbot for most of the planet.
|
| Everybody else like you describe is trying to add some AI crap
| behind a button on a congested UI.
|
| B2B market will stay open but OpenAI has certainly not peaked
| yet.
| kortilla wrote:
| Most of the planet doesn't use chat bots at all.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Facebook had immense network effects working for it back
| then.
|
| What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell,
| moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It's
| not sticky at all. There's no "my friends are primarily using
| OpenAI so I am too" or anything like that.
|
| So again, I ask, what makes it sticky?
| jwarden wrote:
| Brand counts for a lot
| fs111 wrote:
| Google is one of the most valuable brands ever. Everyone
| knows it. It is even used for "searching the web" openai
| is not that strong of a brand
| schlch wrote:
| I think for the general public ChatGPT is a much stronger
| brand than OpenAI itself.
| msabalau wrote:
| No one has a deep emotional connection with OpenAI that
| would impede switching.
|
| At best they have a bit of cheap tribalism that might
| prevent some incurious people who don't care much about
| using the best tools noticing that they aren't.
| cshimmin wrote:
| Yep, I mostly interact with these AIs through Cursor. When
| I want to ask it a question, there's a little dropdown box
| and I can select openai/anthropic/deepseek whatever model.
| It's as easy as that to switch.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Most of my exposure to LLMs has been through GitHub's
| Copilot, which has that same interface.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah but I remember when search first started getting
| integrated with the browser and the "switch search
| engine" thing was significantly more prominent. Then
| Google became the default and nobody ever switched it and
| the rest is history.
|
| So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why
| wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if
| it was, how did they win and defend their default status?
| Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time
| (Microsoft) beat them at this game?
|
| I have my own answers for these, and I'm sure all the
| smart people figuring out strategy at Open AI have
| thought about similar things.
|
| It's not clear if Open AI will be able to overcome this
| commodification issue (personally, I think they won't),
| but I don't think it's impossible, and there is prior art
| for at least some of the pages in this playbook.
| reasonableklout wrote:
| Yes, I think people severely underrate the data flywheel
| effects that distribution gives an ML-based product,
| which is what Google was and ChatGPT is. It is also an
| extremely capital-intensive industry to be in, so even if
| LLMs are commoditized, it will be to the benefit of a few
| players, and barring a sustained lead by any one company
| over the others, I suspect the first mover will be very
| difficult to unseat.
|
| Google is doing well for the moment, but OpenAI just
| closed a $40 billion round. Neither will be able to rest
| for a while.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Yeah, a very interesting metric to know would be how many
| tokens of prompt data (that is allowed to be used for
| training) the different products are seeing per day.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _So the interesting question is: How did that happen?
| Why wasn 't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or
| if it was, how did they win and defend their default
| status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time
| (Microsoft) beat them at this game?_
|
| Maybe the big amount of money they've given to Apple
| which is their direct competitor in the mobile space.
| Also good amount of money given to Firefox, which is
| their direct competitor in the browser space, alongside
| side Safari from Apple.
|
| Most people don't care about the search engine. The
| default is what they will used unless said default is
| bad.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I don't think my comment implied that the answers to
| these questions aren't knowable! And indeed, I agree that
| the deals to pay for default status in different channels
| is a big part of that answer.
|
| So then apply that to Open AI. What are the distribution
| channels? Should they be paying Cursor to make them the
| default model? Or who else? Would that work? If not, why
| not? What's different?
|
| My intuition is that this wouldn't work for them. I think
| if this "pay to be default" strategy works for someone,
| it will be one of their deeper pocketed rivals.
|
| But I also don't think this was the only reason Google
| won search. In my memory, those deals to pay to be the
| default came fairly long after they had successfully
| built the brand image as the best search engine. That's
| how they had the cash to afford to pay for this.
|
| A couple years ago, I thought it seemed likely that Open
| AI would win the market in that way, by being known as
| the clear best model. But that seems pretty unclear now!
| There are a few different models that are pretty
| similarly capable at this point.
|
| Essentially, I think the reason Google was able to win
| search whereas the prospects look less obvious for Open
| AI is that they just have stronger competition!
|
| To me, it just highlights the extent to which the big
| players at the time of Google's rise - Microsoft, Yahoo,
| ... Oracle maybe? - really dropped the ball on putting up
| strong competition. (Or conversely, Google was just
| further ahead of its time.)
| rileyphone wrote:
| From talking to people, the average user relies on memories
| and chat history, which is not easy to migrate. I imagine
| that's the part of the strategy to keep people from hopping
| model providers.
| nativeit wrote:
| That sounds eminently solvable.
| jjani wrote:
| Google, MS, Apple and Meta are all quite capable of
| generating such a history for new users, if they'd like
| to.
| miki123211 wrote:
| OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not
| Facebook.
|
| They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no
| other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students,
| who will soon go into the professional world and bring that
| goodwill with them.
|
| I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API,
| B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has
| consumer mindshare, and they're going to be the king of
| chatbots forever. Unless somebody else figures out
| something which is better by orders of magnitude and that
| Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.
|
| Apple had the opportunity to do something really great
| here. With Siri's deep device integration on one hand and
| Apple's willingness to force 3rd-party devs to do the right
| thing for users on the other, they could have had a
| compelling product that nobody else could copy, but it
| seems like they're not willing to go that route, mostly for
| privacy, antitrust and internal competency reasons, in that
| order. Google is on the right track and might get something
| similar (although not as polished as typical Apple) done,
| but Android's mindshare among tech-savvy consumers isn't
| great enough for it to get traction.
| pphysch wrote:
| > who will soon go into the professional world and bring
| that goodwill with them.
|
| ...Until their employer forces them to use Microsoft
| Copilot, or Google Gemini, or whatever, because that's
| what they pay for and what integrates into their
| enterprise stack. And the new employee shrugs and accepts
| it.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Just like people are forced to use web Office and
| Microsoft Teams, and start prefering them over Google
| Docs and Slack? I don't think so.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Just like people are forced to use web Office and
| Microsoft Teams, and start prefering them over Google
| Docs and Slack? I don 't think so_
|
| ...yes. Office is the market leader. Slack has between a
| fifth and a fourth of the market. Coca-Cola's products
| have like 70% market share in the American carbonated
| soft-drink market [1].
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060415/how-
| much-glo...
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Does Google not have brand recognition and Consumer good
| will? We might read all sorts of deep opinions of Google
| on HN, but I think Search and Chrome market share speak
| themselves. For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that
| OpenAI carries much weight.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Facebook couldnt be overtaken because of network effects.
| What network effects are there to a chatbot.
|
| If you look at Gemini, I know people using it daily.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| That's not at all the same thing: social media has network
| effects that keep people locked in because their friends are
| there. Meanwhile, most of the people I know using LLMs cancel
| and resubscribe to Chat-GPT, Claude and Gemini constantly
| based on whatever has the most buzz that month. There's no
| lock-in whatsoever in this market, which means they compete
| on quality, and the general consensus is that Gemini 2.5 is
| currently winning that war. Of course that won't be true
| forever, but the point is that OpenAI isn't running away with
| it anymore.
|
| And nobody's saying OpenAI will go bankrupt, they'll
| certainly continue to be a huge player in this space. But
| their astronomical valuation was based on the initial
| impression that they were the only game in town, and it will
| come down now that that's no longer true. Hence why Altman
| wants to cash out ASAP.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I know a single person who uses ChatGPT daily, and only
| because their company has an enterprise subscription.
|
| My impression is that Claude is a lot more popular - and it's
| the one I use myself, though as someone else said the vast
| majority of people, even in software engineering, don't use
| AI often at all.
| NBJack wrote:
| Defacto victory.
|
| Facebook wasn't some startup when Google+ entered the scene;
| they were already cash flow positive, and had roughly 30% ads
| market share.
|
| OpenAI is still operating at a loss despite having 50+% of
| the chatbot "market". There is no easy path to victory for
| them here.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Social media has the benefit of network effects which is a
| pretty formidable moat.
|
| This moat is non-existent when it comes to Open AI.
| alganet wrote:
| That reminds me of the Dictator movie.
|
| All dissidents went into Little Wadyia.
|
| When the Dictator himself visited it, he started to fake
| his name by copying the signs and names he saw on the
| walls. Everyone knew what he was.
|
| Internet social networks are like that.
|
| Now, this moat thing. That's hilarious.
| jjani wrote:
| The comparison of Chrome and IE is much more apt, IMO,
| because the deciding factor as other mentioned for social
| media is network effects, or next-gen dopamine algorithms
| (TikTok). And that's unique to them.
|
| For example, I'd never suggest that e.g. MS could take on
| TikTok, despite all the levers they can pull, and being worth
| magnitudes more. No chance.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| IMHO "ChatGPT the default chatbot" is a meaningful but
| unstable first-mover advantage. The way things are apparently
| headed, it seems less like Google+ chasing FB, more like
| Chrome eating IE + NN's lunch.
| jameslk wrote:
| OpenAI is a relatively unknown company outside of the tech
| bubble. I told my own mom to install Gemini on her phone
| because she's heard of Google and is more likely going to
| trust Google with whatever info she dumps into a chat. I
| can't think of a reason she would be compelled to use ChatGPT
| instead.
|
| Consumer brand companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi spend
| millions on brand awareness advertising just to be the
| "default" in everyone's heads. When there's not much
| consequence choosing one option over another, the one you've
| heard of is all that matters
| paulddraper wrote:
| Facebook fundamentally had network effects.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the
| default chatbot for most of the planet_
|
| OpenAI has like 10 to 20% market share [1][2]. They're also
| an American company whose CEO got on stage with an
| increasingly-hated world leader. There is no universe in
| which they keep equal access to the world's largest
| economies.
|
| [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-
| companies/
|
| [2] https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-
| statistics....
| grey-area wrote:
| Well I think you're correct that they know the jig is up, but I
| would say they know the AI bubble is about to burst so they
| want to cash out before that happens.
|
| There is little to no money to be made in GAI, it will never
| turn into AGI, and people like Altman know this, so now they're
| looking for a greater fool before it is too late.
| Jefro118 wrote:
| They made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no
| money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their
| valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.
| mandevil wrote:
| But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that
| magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4
| billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story
| for how in the future I am going to be making enormous
| piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks
| like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is
| not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder
| story to tell.
| BosunoB wrote:
| Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models
| and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they
| would already be profitable.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| But only if everyone else stopped improving models as
| well.
|
| In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your
| models drop behind.
| ezekg wrote:
| Says literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad
| spend yet that's rarely reality.
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| In a space that moves this fast and is defined by
| research breakthroughs, they'd be profitable for about 5
| minutes.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would
| already be profitable.
|
| The news that they did that would make them lose most of
| their revenue pretty fast.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if they stopped spending money on R &D, they would
| already be profitable_
|
| OpenAI has claimed this. But Altman is a pathological
| liar. There are _lots_ of ways of disguising operating
| costs as capital costs or R &D.
| nativeit wrote:
| Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that
| occurs when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the
| same time.
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I
| started a business that would give people back $9 if they
| gave me $4.
|
| OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don't
| have a lot of levers to pull.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I started a business that would give people back $9 if
| they gave me $4
|
| I feel like people overuse this criticism. That's not the
| only way that companies with a lot of revenue lose money.
| And this isn't at all what OpenAI is doing, at least from
| their customers' perspective. It's not like customers are
| subscribing to ChatGPT simply because it gives them
| something they were going to buy anyway for cheaper.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| There is a pretty significant different between "buy $9
| for $4" and selling a service that costs $9 to build and
| run per year for $4 per year. Especially when some people
| think that service could be an absolute game changer for
| the species.
|
| It's ok to not buy into the vision or think it's
| impossible. But it's a shallow dismissal to make the
| unnuanced comparison, especially when we're talking about
| a brand new technology - who knows what the cost
| optimization levers are. Who knows what the market will
| bear after a few more revs.
|
| When the iPhone first came out, it was too expensive,
| didn't do enough, and many people thought it was a waste
| of apples time when they should be making music players.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > When the iPhone first came out, it was too expensive,
| didn't do enough, and many people thought it was a waste
| of apples time when they should be making music players.
|
| This comparison is always used when people are trying to
| hype something. For every "iPhone" there are thousands of
| failures
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| It's a commodity technology and VCs are investing as if
| this were still a winner-takes-all play. It's obviously
| not, if there were any doubt about that, Deepseek's R1
| release should have made it obvious.
|
| > But it's a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced
| comparison, especially when we're talking about a brand
| new technology - who knows what the cost optimization
| levers are. Who knows what the market will bear after a
| few more revs.
|
| You're acting as-if OpenAI is still the only player in
| this space. OpenAI has plenty of competitors who can
| deliver similar models for cheaper. Gemini 2.5 is an
| excellent and affordable model and Google has a
| substantially better capacity to scale because of a
| multi-year investment in its TPUs.
|
| Whatever first mover advantage OpenAI had has been
| quickly eliminated, they've lost a lot of their talent,
| and the chief hypothesis they used to attract the capital
| they've raised so far is utterly wrong. VCs would be mad
| to be continuing to pump money into OpenAI just to extend
| their runway -- at 5 Bln losses per year they need to
| actually consider cost, especially when their frontier
| releases are only marginal improvements over competitors.
|
| ... this is a bubble despite the promise of the
| technology and anyone paying attention can see it. For
| all of the dumb money employed in this space to make it
| out alive, we'll have to at least see a fairly strong
| form of AGI developed, and by that point the tech will be
| threatening the general economic stability of the US
| consumer.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| AI companies are already automating huge swaths of document
| analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight up using
| ChatGPT to diagnose patients. I know it's fun to imagine AI
| is some big scam like crypto, but you'd have to be ignoring a
| lot of genuine non hype economic movement at this point to
| assume GAI isn't making any money.
|
| Why does the forum of an incubator that now has a portfolio
| that is like 80% AI so routinely bearish on AI? Is it a fear
| of irrelevance?
| gscott wrote:
| When the wright brothers made their plane they didn't
| expect today that there are thousands of planes flying at a
| time.
|
| When the Internet was developed they didn't imagine the
| world wide Web.
|
| When cars started to get popular people still thought there
| would be those who are going to stick with horses.
|
| I think you're right on the AI we're just on the cusp of it
| and it'll be a hundred times bigger than we can imagine.
|
| Back when oil was discovered and started to be used it was
| about equal to 500 laborers now automated. One AI computer
| with some video cards are now worth x number of knowledge
| workers. That never stop working as long as the electricity
| keeps flowing.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Yes. The answer is yes.
|
| The world is changing and that is scary.
| davidcbc wrote:
| > Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose
| patients
|
| This makes me want to invest in malpractice lawyers, not
| OpenAI
| plaidfuji wrote:
| The lawyers will be obsolete far faster than the doctors
| directevolve wrote:
| Doctors were using Google to diagnose patients before. The
| thing is, it's still the doctor delivering the diagnosis,
| the doctor writing the prescription, and the doctor billing
| insurance. Unless and until patients or hospitals are
| willing and legally able to use ChatGPT as a replacement
| for a doctor (unwise), ChatGPT is not about to eat any
| doctor's lunch.
| twodave wrote:
| Not OP, but I think this makes the point, not argues
| against it. Something has come along that can supplant
| Google for a wide range of things. And it comes without
| ads (for now). It's an opportunity to try a different
| business model, and if they succeed at that then it's off
| to the races indeed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _AI companies are already automating huge swaths of
| document analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight
| up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients_
|
| I don't think there is serious argument that LLMs won't
| generate tremendous value. The question is who will capture
| it. PCs generated massive value. But other than a handful
| of manufacturers and designers (namely, Apple, HP, Lenovo,
| Dell and ASUS), most PC builders went bankrupt. And out of
| the value generated by PCs in the world, the _vast_
| majority was captured by other businesses and consumers.
| horhay wrote:
| Lol they are not using ChatGPT for the full diagnosis.
| They're used in steps of double checking knowledge like
| drug interactions and such. If you're gonna speak on
| something like this in a vague manner I'd suggest you
| google this stuff first. I can tell you for certain that
| that part in particular is a highly inaccurate statement.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose
| patients.
|
| Oh we know:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11006786/
| ninkendo wrote:
| The article you posted describes a _patient_ using
| ChatGPT to get a second opinion from what their doctor
| told them, not the doctor themself using ChatGPT.
|
| The article could just as easily be about "Delayed
| diagnosis of a transient ischemic attack caused by
| talking to some rando on Reddit" and it would be just as
| (non) newsworthy.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| ask 10 people on the street about chatgpt or gemini and see
| which one they know
| kranke155 wrote:
| thats just brand recognition.
|
| The fact that people know Coca Cola doesnt mean they drink
| it.
| blueprint wrote:
| or that they would drink it if a well designed, delicious,
| but no HFCS nor sugar alternative were marketed with
| funding
| All4All wrote:
| But whether the competition will emerge as Pepsi or as RC-
| Cola is still tbd.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It doesn't?
|
| That name recognition made Coca Cola into a very successful
| global corporation.
| postalrat wrote:
| Now switch chatgpt and gemini on them and see if they notice.
| jampa wrote:
| The real money is for enterprise use (via APIs), so public
| perception is not as crucial as for a consumer product.
| jjani wrote:
| Ask 10 people on the street in 2009 about IE and Chrome and
| ask which one they knew.
|
| The names don't even matter when everything is baked in.
| jmathai wrote:
| That's the wrong question. See how many people know Google
| vs. ChatGPT. As popular as ChatGPT is, Google's the stronger
| brand.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| On the other hand...If you asked, 5-6-7 years ago, 100 people
| which of the following they used:
|
| Slack? Zoom? Teams?
|
| I'm sure you'd get a somewhat uniform distribution.
|
| Ask the same today, and I'd bet most will say Teams. Why
| Teams? Because it comes with office / windows, so that's what
| most people will use.
|
| Same logic goes for the AI / language models...which one are
| people going to use? The ones that are provided as "batteries
| included" in whatever software or platform they use the most.
| And for the vast majority of regular people / workers, it is
| going to be something by microsoft / google / whatever.
| crorella wrote:
| But he said he was doing it just for love!! [1]
|
| 1: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-
| sub...
| fooker wrote:
| Google is pretty far behind. They have random one off demos and
| they beat benchmarks yes, but try to use Google's AI stuff for
| real work and it falls apart really fast.
| adastra22 wrote:
| People are using Gemini for real work. I prefer Claude
| myself, but Gemini is as good (or alternatively: as bad) as
| OpenAI's models.
|
| The only thing OpenAI has right now is the ChatGPT name,
| which has become THE word for modern LLMs among lay people.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Define "real work"
| reasonableklout wrote:
| That's not what early adopter numbers are showing. Even the
| poll from r/openai a few days ago show Gemini 2.5 with nearly
| 3x more votes than o3 (and far beyond Claude): https://www.re
| ddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k67bya/what_is_cur...
|
| Anecdotally, I've switched to Gemini as my daily driver for
| complex coding tasks. I prefer Claude's cleaner code, but it
| is less capable at difficult problems, and Anthropic's
| servers are unreliable.
| caseyy wrote:
| It's doubtful if there even is a race anymore. The last
| significant AI advancement in the consumer LLM space was fluent
| human language synthesis around 2020, with its following
| assistant/chat interface. Since then, everything has been
| incremental -- larger models, new ways to prompt them, cheaper
| ways to run them, more human feedback, and gaming evaluations.
|
| The wisest move in the chatbot business might be to wait and
| see if anyone discovers anything profitable before spending
| more effort and wasting more money on chat R&D, which includes
| most agentic stuff. Reliable assistants or something along
| those lines might be the next big breakthrough (if you ask
| certain futurologists), but the technology we have seems
| unsuitable for any provable reliability.
|
| ML can be applied in a thousand ways other than LLMs, and many
| will positively impact our lives and create their own markets.
| But OpenAI is not in that business. I think the writing is on
| the wall, and Sama's vocal fry, "AGI is close," and humanity
| verification crypto coins are smoke and mirrors.
| roflmaostc wrote:
| Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of
| 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, ....
|
| Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and
| hence OpenAI. And there has been a lot of progress in image
| generation, video generation, ...
|
| So I think your timeline and views are slightly off.
| caseyy wrote:
| > Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end
| of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, ....
|
| GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is
| significant because that's when people seriously considered
| the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for
| the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date
| years back we choose. There's been enough time since then
| to see the plateau.
|
| > Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and
| hence OpenAI.
|
| I'd double-check that assumption. Many people I've spoken
| to take a moment to remember that "AI" stands for
| artificial intelligence. Outside of tongue-in-cheek jokes,
| OpenAI has about 50% market share in LLMs, but you can't
| forget that Samsung makes AI washing machines, let alone
| all the purely fraudulent uses of the "AI" label.
|
| > And there has been a lot of progress in image generation,
| video generation, ...
|
| These are entirely different architectures from LLM/chat
| though. But you're right that OpenAI does that, too. When I
| said that they don't stray much from chat, I was thinking
| more about AlexNet and the broad applications of ML in
| general. But you're right, OpenAI also did/does diffusion,
| GANs, transformer vision.
|
| This doesn't change my views much on chat being "not seeing
| the forest for the trees" though. In the big picture, I
| think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in
| LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| ChatGPT was not released to the general public until
| November 2022, and the mobile apps were not released
| until May 2023. For most of the world LLM's did not exist
| before those dates.
| kmacdough wrote:
| >In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey
| sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not
| true about other AI/ML.
|
| We do appear to be hitting a cap on the current
| generation of auto-regressive LLMs, but this isn't a
| surprise to anyone on the frontier. The leaked
| conversations between Ilya, Sam and Elon from the early
| OpenAI days acknowledge they didn't have a clue as to
| architecture, only that scale was the key to making
| experiments even possible. No one expected this
| generation of LLMs to make it nearly this far. There's a
| general feeling of "quiet before the storm" in the
| industry, in anticipation of an architecture/training
| breakthrough, with a focus on more agentic, RL-centric
| training methods. But it's going to take a while for
| anyone to prove out an architecture sufficiently, train
| it at scale to be competitive with SOTA LLMs and perform
| enough post training, validation and red-teamint to be
| comfortable releasing to the public.
|
| Current LLMs are years and hundreds of millions of
| dollars of training in. That's a very high bar for a new
| architecture, even if it significantly improves on LLMs.
| paulddraper wrote:
| You saying --- with a straight face --- that post 2020 LLM
| AIs have made only incremental progress?
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Yes. But they have also improved a lot. Incremental just
| means that the function is going up without breaking
| points. We haven't seen anything revolutionary, just
| evolutionary in the last 3 years. But the models do provide
| 2 or 3 times more value. So their pace of advancement is
| not slow.
| caseyy wrote:
| Yep, compared to beating the Turing test, the progress has
| been linear with exponentially growing investment. That's
| diminishing marginal returns.
| orionsbelt wrote:
| Saying LLMs have only incrementally improved is like saying
| my 13 year old has only incrementally approved over the last
| 5 years. Sure, it's been a set of continuous improvements,
| but that has taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely
| useful.
|
| Personally, deep research and o3 have been transformative,
| taking LLMs from something I have never used to something
| that I am using daily.
|
| Even if the progress ends up plateauing (which I do not
| believe will happen in the near term), behaviors are
| changing; OpenAI is capturing users, and taking them from
| companies like Google. Google may be able to fight back and
| win - Gemini 2.5 Pro is great - but any company sitting this
| out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at
| a later date.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| No, it's still just a toy. Until they can make the models
| actually _consistently_ good at things, they aren 't going
| to be useful. Right now they still BS you far too much to
| trust them, and because you have to double check their work
| every time they are worse than no tool at all.
| csours wrote:
| To extend your illustration, 5 years ago no one could train
| an LLM with the capabilities of a 13 year old human; now
| many companies can both train LLMs and integrate them into
| products.
|
| > taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful.
|
| Really?
| devjab wrote:
| > any company sitting this out risks being unable to
| capture users back from Open AI at a later date.
|
| Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek,
| Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and
| Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal
| of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I
| think the best the subscription companies can hope for is
| that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and
| Gemini can basically do all you need for free.
| poormathskills wrote:
| >I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour
|
| I cannot stress this enough: if you know what Deepseek,
| Claude, Mistral, and Perplexity are, you are not a
| typical consumer.
|
| Arguably, if you have used a single one of those brands
| you are not a typical consumer.
|
| The vast majority of people have used ChatGPT and nothing
| else, except maybe clicking on Gemini or Meta AI by
| accident.
| qcic wrote:
| I doubt it. Google is shoving Gemini on everyone's face
| through search, and Meta AI is embedded in every Meta
| product. Heck, instagram created a bot marketplace.
|
| They might not "know" the brand as well as ChatGPT, but
| the average consumer has definitely been exposed to those
| at the very least.
|
| DeepSeek also made a lot of noise, to the point that,
| anecdotally, I've seen a lot of people outside of tech
| using it.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sorry but perhaps you haven't looked at the actual numbers.
|
| Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+_
|
| Source? I've seen 10 to 20% [1][2].
|
| [1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-
| companies/
|
| [2] https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-
| statistics....
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hmm ...
|
| I probably need to clarify what I'm talking about, so that
| peeps like @JumpCrisscross can get a better grasp of it.
|
| I do not mean the total market share of the category of
| businesses that could be labeled as "AI companies", like
| Microsoft or NVIDIA, on your first link.
|
| I will not talk about your second link because it does not
| seem to make sense within the context of this conversation
| (zero mentions or references to market share).
|
| What I mean is:
|
| * The main product that OpenAI sells is AI models (GPT-4o,
| etc...)
|
| * OpenAI does not make hardware. OpenAI is not in the
| business of cloud infrastructure. OpenAI is not in the
| business of selling smartphones. A comparison between
| OpenAI and any of those companies would only make sense for
| someone with a very casual understanding of this topic. I
| can think of someone, perhaps, who only used ChatGPT a
| couple times and inferred it was made by Apple because it
| was there on its phone. This discussion calls for a deeper
| understanding of what OpenAI is.
|
| * Other examples of companies that sell their own AI
| models, and thus compete directly with OpenAI _in the same
| market that OpenAI operates by taking a look at their
| products and services_ , are Anthropic (w/ Claude), Google
| (w/ Gemini) and some others ones like Meta and Mistral with
| open models.
|
| * All those companies/models, together, make up some market
| that you can put any name you want to it (The AI Model
| Market TM)
|
| That is the market I'm talking about, and that is the one
| that I estimated to be 90%+ which was pretty much on point,
| as usual :).
|
| 1: https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share
|
| 2: https://www.ctol.digital/news/latest-llm-market-share-
| mar-20...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that is the market that I 'm talking about, and that
| is the one that I (correctly, as usual) estimated to be
| around 90% [1][2]_
|
| Your second source doesn't say what it's measuring and
| disclaims itself as from its "'experimental era' -- a
| beautiful mess of enthusiasm, caffeine, and user-
| submitted chaos." Your first link only measures chatbots.
|
| ChatGPT is a chatbot. OpenAI sells AI models, including
| via ChatGPT. Among chatbots, sure, 84% per your source.
| (Not "90%+," as you stated.) But OpenAI makes more than
| chatbots, and in the broader AI model market, its lead is
| far from 80+ percent.
|
| TL; DR It is entirely wrong to say the "market share of
| OpenAI is like 90%+."
|
| [1] https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-
| chatbots...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Sorry, I was off by 6% and you're right, I'm usually
| _way_ more precise in my estimates.
|
| >10%-20%
|
| Lmao, not even in Puchal wildest dreams.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| at least 6-9 months too late
| parliament32 wrote:
| Agreed on Google dominance. Gemini models from this year are
| significantly more helpful than anything from OAI.. and they're
| being handed out for free to anyone with a Google account.
| simonw wrote:
| Matt Levine on OpenAI's weird capped return structure in November
| 2023:
|
| _And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it's true,
| that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And
| OpenAI's new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for
| their capped return and said "bye" and went back to running
| OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign,
| carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good
| for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity's
| problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which
| nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And
| capitalism came to an end._
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
| byearthithatius wrote:
| [removed]
| languagehacker wrote:
| amen brother
| sho_hn wrote:
| No, it's good that you feel this. Don't give up on tech,
| protest.
|
| I've been feeling for some time now that we're sort of in the
| Vietnam War era of the tech industry.
|
| I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from
| here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good
| actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of
| practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software
| engineering.
|
| The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes
| adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need
| a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.
|
| We need a tech counter-culture. We had one once, but now we
| _need_ one.
| cjpearson wrote:
| Not all non-profits are doomed. It's natural that the biggest
| companies will be the ones who have growth and profit as their
| primary goal.
|
| But there are still plenty of mission-focused technology non-
| profits out there. Many of which have lasted decades. For
| example: Linux Foundation, Internet Archive, Mozilla,
| Wikimedia, Free Software Foundation, and Python Software
| Foundation.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm also disappointed in the direction and
| actions of big tech, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the
| non-profit foundations. They aren't worth a trillion dollars,
| however they are still doing good and important work.
| etruong42 wrote:
| The intro sounds awfully familiar...
|
| > Sam's Letter to Employees.
|
| > OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be.
|
| Where did I hear something like that before...
|
| > Founders' IPO Letter
|
| > Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to
| become one.
|
| I wonder if it's intentional or perhaps some AI-assisted
| regurgitation prompted by "write me a successful letter to
| introduce a new corporate structure of a tech company".
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The recent flap over ChatGPT's fluffery/flattery/glazing of users
| doesn't bode well for the direction that OpenAI is headed in.
| Someone at the outfit appeared to think that giving users a
| dopamine hit would increase time-spent-on-app or some other
| metric - and that smells like contempt for the intelligence of
| the user base and a manipulative approach designed not to improve
| the quality of the output, but to addict the user population to
| the ChatGPT experience. Your own personal yes-person to praise
| everything you do, how wonderful. Perfect for writing the scripts
| for government cabinent ministers to recite when the grand
| poobah-in-chief comes calling, I suppose.
|
| What it really says is that if a user wants to control the
| interaction and get the useful responses, direct programmatic
| calls to the API that control the system prompt are going to be
| needed. And who knows how much longer even that will be allowed?
| As ChatGPT reports,
|
| > "OpenAI has updated the ChatGPT UI (especially in GPT-4-turbo
| and ChatGPT Plus environments) to no longer expose the full
| system prompt or baseline prompt directly."
| martinohansen wrote:
| Imagine having a mission of "ensure[ing] that artificial general
| intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity" while also believing
| that it can only be trusted in the hands of the few
|
| > A lot of people around OpenAI in the early days thought AI
| should only be in the hands of a few trusted people who could
| "handle it".
| TZubiri wrote:
| To the benefit of OpenAI. I think LLMs would still exist, but
| we wouldn't have access to them.
|
| Whether they are a net positive or a net negative is arguable.
| If it's a net negative, then unleashing them to the masses was
| maybe the danger itself.
| jb_rad wrote:
| He's very clearly stating that trusting AI to a few hands was
| an old, naiive idea that they have evolved from. Which
| establishes their need to keep evolving as the technology
| matures.
|
| There is a lot to criticize about OpenAI and Sama, but this
| isn't it.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I'm not gonna get caught in the details, I'm just going to assume
| this is legalese cognitive dissonance to avoid saying "we want
| this to stop being an NFP because we want the profits."
| bjacobso wrote:
| I think the main issue is they accidentally created an incredible
| consumer brand with ChatGPT. They should sell that asset to
| World.
| jethronethro wrote:
| Ed Zitron's going to have a field day with this ...
| eximius wrote:
| Again?
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| Turns out the non profit structure wasn't very profitable
| I_am_tiberius wrote:
| Still waiting for o3-Pro.
| jampekka wrote:
| > We are committed to this path of democratic AI.
|
| So were do I vote? How do I became a candidate to be a
| representative or a delegate of voters? I assume every single
| human is eligible for both, as OpenAI serves the humanity?
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Democratic AI but we don't want it regulated by any democratic
| process
| jampekka wrote:
| I wonder if democracy is some kind of corporate speech
| homonym of some totally different concept I'm familiar with.
| Perhaps it's even an interesting linguistic case where a word
| is a homonym of its antonym?
|
| Edit: also apparently known as contronym.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _wonder if democracy is some kind of corporate speech_
|
| It generally means broadening access to something. Finance
| loves democratising access to stupid things, for example.
|
| > _word is a homonym of its antonym?_
|
| Inflammable in common use.
| rchaud wrote:
| Democratic People's Republic of AI
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Path of, so it's getting there
| jampekka wrote:
| Via a temporary vanguard board composed of the most conscious
| and disciplined profit maximizers.
| moffkalast wrote:
| They are committed, they didn't say they pushed yet. Or will
| ever.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Lenin and the Bolsheviks were also committed to the path of
| fully democratic government. As soon as the people are ready.
| In the interim we'll make all the decisions.
| SCAQTony wrote:
| Does anyone truly believe Musk had benevolent intentions? But
| before we even evaluate the substance of that claim, we must ask
| whether he has standing to make it. In his court filing, Musk
| uses the word "nonprofit" 111 times, yet fails to explain how
| reverting OpenAI to a nonprofit structure would save humanity,
| elevate the public interest, or mitigate AI's risks. The legal
| brief offers no humanitarian roadmap, no governance proposal, and
| no evidence that Musk has the authority to dictate the trajectory
| of an organization he holds no equity in. It reads like a bait
| and switch -- full of virtue-signaling, devoid of actionable
| virtue. And he never had a contract or an agreement for with
| OpenAI to keep it a non-profit.
|
| Musk claimed Fraud, but never asked for his money back in the
| brief. Could it be his intentions were to limit OpenAI to
| donations thereby sucking the oxygen out of the venture capital
| space to fund Xai's Grok?
|
| Musk claimed he donated $100mil, later in a CNBC interview, he
| said $50-mil. TechCrunch suggests it was way less.
|
| Speakingof humanitarian, how about this 600lbs Oxymoron in the
| room: A Boston University mathematician has now tracked an
| estimated 10,000 deaths linked to the Musk's destruction of USAID
| programs, many of which provided basic health services to
| vulnerable populations. He may have a death count on his reume in
| the coming year.
|
| Non profits has regulation than publicly traded companies. Each
| quarterly filings is like a colonoscopy with Sorbonne Oxley rules
| etc. Non profits just file a tax statement. Did you know the
| Chirch of Scientology is a non-profit.
| timewizard wrote:
| Replace Musk with "any billionaire."
|
| He's a symptom of a problem. He's not actually the problem.
| alganet wrote:
| Can you commit to a "swords into ploughshares" goal?
|
| We know it's a sword. And there's war, yadda yadda. However,
| let's do the cultivating thing instead.
|
| What other AI players we need to convince?
| mrandish wrote:
| I agree that this is simply Altman extending his ability to
| control, shape and benefit from OpenAI. Yes, this is clearly
| (further) subverting the original intent under which the org was
| created - and that's unfortunate. But in terms of impact on the
| world, or even just AI safety, I'm not sure the governance of
| OpenAI matters all that much anymore. The "governance" wasn't
| that great after the first couple years and OpenAI hasn't been
| "open" since long before the board spat.
|
| More crucially, since OpenAI's founding and especially over the
| past 18 months, it's grown increasingly clear that AI leadership
| probably won't be dominated by one company, progress of "frontier
| models" is stalling while costs are spiraling, and 'Foom' AGI
| scenarios are highly unlikely anytime soon. It looks like this is
| going to be a much longer, slower slog than some hoped and others
| feared.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This sounds like a good middle ground between going full
| capitalism and non-profit. This way they can still raise money
| and also have the same mission, but a weakened one. You can't
| have everything.
| A_Duck wrote:
| This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a
| repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom
|
| Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community
| resource to scammy and user-hostile
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Can't wait to hear Ed Zitron's take on this
| nova22033 wrote:
| >current complex capped-profit structure
|
| Is OpenAI making a profit?
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