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OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

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Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#231

Post by boringg »

MobileVet wrote: post #175
3D29021196 wrote: post #11

Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save earths environment" stuff he lik…

I think it’s a weird narcissistic need to feel that they are the center of the conversation and so they are important. What is so interesting about Elon is that he was objectively quite important prior to Twitter... but that wasn't enough. Whatever your target, whatever you achieve... it is not enough.

I was listening to a podcast recently (Maybe Ian Leslie on EconTalk) talking about people who are goal seeking vs people who get pleasure out of the process. The people who are goal seeking achieve their next goal but are never satiated - once achieved they need something to fill that "hole". It seems he might be one of those goal objective people. It's obviously more complicated than that but it does make a lot of sense intuitively.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#232

Post by 93po »

rippercushions wrote: post #135
mellosouls wrote: post #20

This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream. They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future, es…

To quote Spaceballs, they're not doing it for money, they're doing it for a shitload of money.

OpenAI, if successful, will likely become the most valuable company in the history of the planet, both past and future.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#233

Post by boringg »

freehorse wrote: post #19
sigmoid10 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI went downhill fast after Elon left the board of directors due to a "conflict of interest" with Tesla. I don't know if he would have allowed the for-profit restructuring after giving them so much money precisely so that it didn't need profits for AI research. It probably also didn't help that he poached Karpathy from them and put him in charge of Tesla's AI efforts. So it's no surprise that there is a lot of po…

So Elon wanted to build an open source non-profit AI but had to resign from openAI, which he had cofounded with that intention, because he wanted to create a closed-source and for-profit AI for Tesla and that brought a conflict of interest. Sounds quite contradictory to me to present this as an argument to construct an image of open-source, non-profit advocate. It reads as "I support open-source etc AI as long as it…

I think you should probably read up on Elon's statements about AI and you would probably realize that, at least from the statements, he doesn't trust AI and has deep concern about it (hence why he was part of OpenAI to keep watch over its progress).

The models used at Tesla are vastly different than the LLM models. There is nuance here.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#234

Post by kgwgk »

nulbyte wrote: post #174
olalonde wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that this is even possible legally (turning a nonprofit into a for-profit).

You can't. In the U.S., the assets of charity must be permanently dedicated to an exempt purpose. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz... OpenAI is still a nonprofit. Their Financials are public. A lot of folks use "profit" in a hand-wavey sense to describe something they don't like, like an organization sitting on cash or paying key employees more than they expect. The organization may not be…

> OpenAI is still a nonprofit.

But OpenAI isn’t a nonprofit. It all depends on what do you mean by OpenAI - and what you call OpenAI is not what they call OpenAI.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

> Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), “OpenAI” refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff), and the original entity is referred to as “OpenAI Nonprofit.”

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#235

Post by permo-w »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #37
windowshopping wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if your comment feels good to write, it's often a red flag I'm not new to HN and I don't think any such rule of thumb exists. Writing vindictive flame comments is one thing, but writing a measured opinion of someone's actions is another. Your comment sounds condescending and I don't think it accurately represents the community's mindset here.

Their comment could have been replaced with “Elon bad” and it wouldn’t change the delta of how much you’ve learned from reading it. It was little more than a vindictive flame comment. As for being condescending, I’ve often wondered how Dan manages not to sound condescending when explaining the philosophy behind why the rules are in place. It’s true that he’s articulate in a way that I probably can’t match. But if you…

I think the sentiment of your flagged comment is fair. the parent was a bit of an non-contributive emotional diatribe that could more or less be replaced with "Elon bad". but the tone of your reply completely misses the mark. beyond seeming a bit like the kid trying to impress the teacher by telling others how to behave, the explicit assumption that the commenter was new to HN was extremely tactless, and the way you appeared to speak for the community as a whole was quite grating

my equally-unsolicited friendly advice to you would be that if you do look at someone's comment history before replying, it's quite uncouth to comment on it, and you probably should avoid speaking for the community, especially if what you're saying isn't literally directly in the community guidelines

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#236

Post by permo-w »

wodenokoto wrote: post #78
mort96 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. He's listed as one of the founders, and I always assumed he had some say. If that's really how he thinks, why wouldn't he have done something? Do we have any reason to believe this isn't just more empty grifting from him to optically distance himself from a unethical company he profits from?

Key word being "had". He is not part of it any more. >In 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars, but remained a donor I don't think he counts as an investor, and I'd imagine he has stopped donating.

this is pedantic, but the parent comment was conjugating "to have" to "had" via the subjunctive, not via the past tense

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#237

Post by kgwgk »

brookst wrote: post #194
stingraycharles wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not difficult. I suspect it’s not as much as turning a non-profit into a for-profit, as it is about starting a new company and somehow transferring/licensing the IP from the old into the new.

Do you have any evidence that’s what openai did? Seems like it would be pretty easy to document.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#238

Post by permo-w »

neom wrote: post #230
permo-w wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they were two disparate thoughts why did you put them next to each other with no indication of the disparity? and why do the two things have clear impact on each other?

I don't think they impact each other, I thought it was weird elon was taking random swipes at openai, but when I searched his Twitter for openai, the collection of tweets made it clear, interestingly for the same reason the article states (I tend to agree with Elon and the article). In other news, imo, if a startup doing society altering work per the article is going to be closed, at least, imo, the people working th…

okay, I do see what you're saying now you explain it, but can you see how your original comment can appear more like "I find Elon criticising OpenAI weird: OpenAI is fine because these two guys I know [/of] are at the helm"

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#239

Post by tqwhite »

A corporation lied. Where are my pearls?!!!

In 1970, OpenAI would have been funded by the DARPA and would have been deployed along with the internet. Americans decided that it Morning in America meant corporations should eat all of our lunches. It was a bad decision but, we elected Trump, so it's clear we can't have nice things.

My beef with this article is all the criticism of chatGPT itself. Not a single complaint is valid. It's fine if it says weird stuff. Nobody expects (or should) it to be perfect presently. Programming that can be done by it is grunt work anyway. You're better off on unemployment figuring out how to do something cool.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#240

Post by 93po »

mhb wrote: post #216

Well, Eliezer thinks it's better for it to be closed source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34969892

Eliezer says anything, for conscious or unconscious reasons, to further spread his opinions as fact. There is also a large profit incentive for him to do so, since his foundation and personal income depends on donations from people who are concerned about AI safety. I've seen him imply some pretty ridiculous things that amount to hyperbole.

He is ultimately doing nothing in the engineering and development side of AI and his predictions about this technology are based on armchair philosophy exercises, not reality.

As an aside, I love this gem from the transcript: "We're all crypto investors here. We understand the efficient market hypothesis for sure"

Fairly confident most crypto investors have never even heard that phrase.

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