Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

The more I look the more I think it's ever so more out of reach and if there's a chance at it, OpenAI doesn't seem to be the one that will deliver it.

To extrapolate, (of LLMs and GenAI) the more I see use of and how it's used the more it shows severe upwards limits, even though the introduction of those tools has been phenomenal.

On business side, OpenAI lost key personnel and seemingly the plot as well.

I think we've all been drinking a bit too much on the hype of it all. It'll al;l settle down into wonderful set of (new) tools, but not on AGI. Few more (AI) winters down the road, maybe..

The important bit (which seems unclear from this article), is the exact relationship between the for-profit and the not for profit?

Before, profits were capped, with remainder going to the non-profit to distribute benefits equally across the world in event of agi / massive economic progress from agi. Which was nice, as at least on paper, a plan for an “exit to humanity”.

This reads to me like the new structure might offer uncapped returns to investors, with a small fraction reserved to benefit the wider public via this nonprofit. So dropping the “exit to humanity”, which seemed like a big part of OpenAI’s original vision.

Early on they did some good research on this too, thinking about the investor model, and its benefits for raising money and having accountability etc in todays world, vs what the right structure could be post SI, and taking that conversation pretty seriously. So it’s sad to see OpenAI seemingly drifting away from some of that body of work.

Used car salesman promises to save humanity.

What a bunch of pompous twits.

In other news, one of OpenAI's top talents, and first author on the GPT-1 paper, Alec Radford, left a few days ago to pursue independent research.

In additional other news, Microsoft and OpenAI have now reportedly agreed on a joint definition of relationship-ending AGI as "whatever makes $100B". Not kidding.

Every letter of "AGI" means different things to different people, and the thing as a whole sometimes means things not found in any of the letters.

We had what I, personally, would count as a "general-purpose AI" already with the original release of ChatGPT… but that made me realise that "generality" is a continuum not a boolean, as it definitely became more general-purpose with multiple modalities, sound and vision not just text, being added. And it's still not "done" yet: while it's more general across academic fields than any human, there's still plenty that most humans can do easily that these models can't — and not just counting letters, until recently they also couldn't (control a hand to) tie shoelaces*.

There's also the question of "what even is intelligence?", where for some questions it just matters what the capabilities are, and for other questions it matters how well it can learn from limited examples: where you have lots of examples, ChatGPT-type models can be economically transformative**; where you don't, the same models *really suck*.

(I've also seen loads of arguments about how much "artificial" counts, but this is more about if the origin of the training data makes them fundamentally unethical for copyright reasons).

* 2024, September 12, uses both transformer and diffusion models: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext...

** the original OpenAI definition of AGI: "by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work" — found on https://openai.com/charter/ at time of writing

“ OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible. The outcome of this venture is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the goal and the structure are right.”

…

“ We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.”

https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/