Kind of ironically I uploaded this to chatGPT to help me understand the details.
Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not seeing Mistral Large as an open source model now has a bitter taste to it. A company needs a product to sell. If they give away everything, they have nothing to sell. This was surely always the plan. (1) They can give away the model but sell an API - but they can’t serve a model as cheap as Goog/Msft/Amzn who have better unit economics on their cloud and better pricing on GPUs (plus custom inference chips). (2)…
See The Linux Foundation, they don’t seem to have this problem.
I used to work for an opensource organization full time. They used to rely on contracting for revenue. It wasnt a lot but it was sufficient to keep the org going for 10 years.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
The organization consists of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. (From Wikipedia)
A non-profit can have a for-profit subsidiary?
A surprising one I came across was a group of government departments that collectively controlled a "shell" government agency that ran a non-profit that owned a for-profit Pty Ltd which had over 1K staff.
It was a "legal fiction" to sidestep union rules, government employment regulations, etc...
This let them hire IT staff at market rates, because otherwise they couldn't pay them a competitive wage as normal public servants working directly for the departments.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuinely curious why I'm getting downvoted - similar comments don't appear to have met the same fate, and I'm by no means defending Altman or OpenAI. If it's because I mentioned that Altman is gay - and I can't find another reason - I think that's relevant in context of Musk's recent hard shift rightward and his consistently aggressive, unprovoked behavior toward LGBTQ people. For some reason the topic looms large i…
I didn't downvote you because I don't have downvote rights yet. I would have downvoted you, though, because in a sea of comments of questionable value, your comment stands out as actually having negative value.
You left out an explanation of why it has negative value. This makes your own comment worthless.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#805Wouldn't you have to prove damages in a lawsuit like this? What damages does Musk personally suffer if OpenAI has in fact broken their contract?
How much money have competitors been spending to keep up, reproducing the technology that was supposed to be released to the public benefiting everyone. All of that could conceivably be claimed as damages. Money they should not have needed to spend.
Even all of the money spent to access ChatGPT. Because, if OpenAI had been releasing their tech to the public, the public would not have had to pay OpenAI to use it.
Or the value of OpenAI-for-profit itself could be considered damages in a class action. Because it gained that value because of technology withheld from the public, rather than releasing it and allowing the public to build the for-profit businesses around the tech.
Lots of avenues for Musk and others' lawyers to get their teeth into, especially if this initial law suit can demonstrate the fraud.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#806Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A powerful technology is a danger to society if only a few people possess it. By giving it to everyone, you even the playing field. Except nukes. Only allies can have nukes.
Is that really the case? Nukes are supposed to be deterrents. If only groups aligned with each other have nukes that sounds more dangerous than enemies having nukes and knowing they can't use them.
Until people who believe in martyrdom get them
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#807If OpenAI became a non-profit with this in its charter: “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open source technology for the public benefit when applicable. The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person" I don't think it is going to be hard to show that they are doing something very different than what they said they were going to do.
They claim that this is about the end result, but in the meantime, they can license the not-yet-done AI to Microsoft.
Arguably a lot of it is "done". They sell subscriptions to third parties...
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#808Earlier quoted context omitted.
It likely depends on what constitutes a valid contract in this jurisdiction. For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract, and you can be taken to court for violating that agreement. I'm certain people have been found guilty in a legal context because they replied to a email one way but acted in the opposite manner. The Articles of Incorporation are going to be the key lega…
> For example, some states recognize a "handshake agreement" as a legally-binding contract Subject to limits on specific kinds of contracts that must be reduced to writing, all US jurisdictions (not just some states) recognize oral contracts provided that the basic requirements of a contract (offer, acceptance, consideration, etc.) are present.
The trouble with oral agreements then become determining what is in the oral agreement, after the fact. Whether one party remembers it differently to the other, either due to poor memory or deliberately.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#809Similar to the firing-unfiring of Sam Altman, so much of this seems to be boil down to OpenAI's puzzle-box organizational structure. It seems like the whole "capped for-profit within a non-profit" is not going to to work long term.
A non-profit with a for-profit subsidiary is actually pretty common and it is probably one of the more "normal" things OpenAI has done. https://www.marcumllp.com/insights/creating-a-for-profit-sub... My personal opinion is that not creating a for-profit wing would have made a even bigger mess. (But then I also think this suit is very obviously without merit and the complaint is written in a way that it sounds like la…
I don't think the problem is with having a for-profit wing. The problem is that only the for-profit wing got to use the technology developed by the non-profit, when the non-profit was explicitly tasked with releasing the technology to the public, allowing competition.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#810I do wonder if OpenAI is built on a house of cards. They aren’t a nonprofit, aren’t open, and stole a huge quantity of copyrighted material to get started. But, by moving fast and scaling quickly, are they at the Too Big to Fail stage already? The attempted board coup makes me think so.
Openai isn't even close to too big to fail. Bank of America fails the entire banking system collapses and the entire real economy grinds to a halt. If GM fails hundreds of thousands lose their jobs and entire supply chains collapse. If power utilities fail then people start actually dying within hours or days. If OpenAI fails nothing actually important happens.
When their product is embedded at the OS level in every Windows 11 computer, would that be too big to fail?