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Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

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Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#21

Post by causal »

keiferski wrote: post #9

Maybe I’m missing it in this article or elsewhere on the website, but how exactly is OpenAI’s vision of making AGI going to “benefit humanity as as a whole”? I’m not asking to be snarky or imply any hidden meaning…I just don’t see how they plan on getting from A to B. From this recent press release the answer seems to be: make ChatGPT really good and offer it for free to people to use. Which is a reasonable answer, I…

> Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness

Well you see the AGI can only benefit humanity if it is funded via traditional equity... Investors WANT to give their money but the horrendous lack of ownership is defeating their goodwill

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#22

Post by latexr »

keiferski wrote: post #9

Maybe I’m missing it in this article or elsewhere on the website, but how exactly is OpenAI’s vision of making AGI going to “benefit humanity as as a whole”? I’m not asking to be snarky or imply any hidden meaning…I just don’t see how they plan on getting from A to B. From this recent press release the answer seems to be: make ChatGPT really good and offer it for free to people to use. Which is a reasonable answer, I…

> but how exactly is OpenAI’s vision of making AGI going to “benefit humanity as as a whole”?

Considering their definition of AGI is “makes a lot of money”, it’s not going to—and was never designed to—benefit anyone else.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjQUCpeJG1Y

What else could we have expected from someone who made yet another cryptocurrency scam?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

Sam Altman doesn’t give a rat’s ass about improving humanity, he cares about personal profit.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#23

Post by causal »

llamaimperative wrote: post #6
yalogin wrote: post #4

Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me. They clearly want to be a for profit company, is this the threat of Elon talking?

It’s a really idiosyncratic and very subtle, intelligent, calculated imperative called “want yacht.”

Want yacht before world realizes they've run out of ideas

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#24

Post by Eumenes »

Can they quit this "non profit" larp already? Is this some recruiting tactic to attract idealistic engineers or a plan to evade taxes, or both? Sam Altman was offering crypto-alms to third world people in exchange for scanning their eyeballs. There is no altruism here.

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#25

Post by tux3 »

keiferski wrote: post #9

Maybe I’m missing it in this article or elsewhere on the website, but how exactly is OpenAI’s vision of making AGI going to “benefit humanity as as a whole”? I’m not asking to be snarky or imply any hidden meaning…I just don’t see how they plan on getting from A to B. From this recent press release the answer seems to be: make ChatGPT really good and offer it for free to people to use. Which is a reasonable answer, I…

Once OpenAI becomes fabulously rich, the world will surely be transformed, and then the benefits of all this concentration of power will simply trickle down.

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#26

Post by jasfi »

yalogin wrote: post #4

Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me. They clearly want to be a for profit company, is this the threat of Elon talking?

The only proof is in benchmarks and carefully selected demos. What we have is enough AI to do some interesting things, and that's good enough for now. AGI is a fuzzy goal that keeps the AI companies working at an incredible pace.

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#27

Post by soared »

rasengan wrote: post #11

While there are issues that Mr. Musk must address, I don’t think this is one of them. Demonizing someone who helped you is an awful thing to do. If he gave 1/3 of the initial funding, he helped a lot.

This article very briefly mentions his name in relation to funding but does not demonize him or ask him to address issues?

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#28

Post by jrmg »

Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission and does not enable the non-profit to easily do more than control the for-profit.

I kind of thought that was the point of the current structure.

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#30

Post by ben_w »

keiferski wrote: post #9

Maybe I’m missing it in this article or elsewhere on the website, but how exactly is OpenAI’s vision of making AGI going to “benefit humanity as as a whole”? I’m not asking to be snarky or imply any hidden meaning…I just don’t see how they plan on getting from A to B. From this recent press release the answer seems to be: make ChatGPT really good and offer it for free to people to use. Which is a reasonable answer, I…

The path between A and B has enough tangled branches that I'm reminded of childhood maze puzzles where you have to find which entrance even gets to the right goal and not the bad outcomes.

The most positive take is: they want to build a general-purpose AI, to allow fully automated luxury for all; to built with care to ensure it can only be used for positive human flourishing and cannot (easily or at all) be used for nefarious purposes by someone who wants to sow chaos or take over the world; and to do so in public so that the rest of us can prepare for it rather than wake up one day to a world that is alien to us.

Given the mental image I have here is of a maze, you may well guess that I don't expect this to go smoothly — I think the origin in Silicon Valley and startup culture means OpenAI, quite naturally, has a bias towards optimism and to the idea that economic growth and tech is a good thing by default. I think all of this is only really tempered by the memetic popularity of Eliezer Yudkowsky, and the extent to which his fears are taken seriously, and his fears are focussed more on existential threat of an optimising agent that does the optimising faster than we do, not on any of the transitional dynamics going from the current economy to whatever a "humans need not apply" economy looks like.

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