101–110 of 339 posts
My read is: “We’re going public because we want more money. We need more money for more computer time but that’s not all. ChatGPT has been so influential that we deserve a bigger share of the rewards than we have gotten.”
Alternate possibility: "We're beginning to see that this path isn't going where we thought it would so we're going to extract as much value as we can before it crashes into mundaneness."
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.
Yes, it is but if we only stopped the analysis right there, we could take pleasure in the fact that Sam Altman checkmated himself in his own blog post. "Dude, the non-profit is _supposed_ to control the profit company because that's how you formed the companies in the first place! Duh!!!"
To go beyond that analysis, we have to at least entertain (not "agree" but just _entertain_ for analysis) ... what Sam is saying:
- the original non-profit and profit structure was a mistake that was based on what they thought they knew at the time. (They thought they could be a "research" firm.)
- having a non-profit control the profit becomes a moot point if the for-profit company becomes irrelevant in the marketplace.
Here is a key paragraph:
>The hundreds of billions of dollars that major companies are now investing into AI development show what it will really take for OpenAI to continue pursuing the mission. We once again need to raise more capital than we’d imagined. Investors want to back us but, at this scale of capital, need conventional equity and less structural bespokeness.
In other words, let's suppose the old Friendster social network was structured as "non-profit-board-controlling-a-for-profit-Friendster" like OpenAI. The ideals of the "non-profit being in control" is a moot point when a competitor like Facebook makes non-profit-Friendster irrelevant.
Or put another way, pick any hard problem today (self-driving, energy discovery, etc) that requires billions of investment and hypothetically create a new company to compete in that space. Would creating that company as a non-profit-controlling-the-profit-company confer any market advantage or would it be a handicap? It looks like it's a handicap.
OpenAI is finding it hard to compete for investors' billions in the face of Tesla's billions spent on 50000 GPU supercluster, Google billions spent on Gemini, Anthropic billions spent on Claude, Alibaba's billions, etc. OpenAI doesn't have an unassailable lead with ChatGPT.
The issue is Sam Altman & OpenAI look bad because he and the investors want to use the existing "OpenAI" brand name in a restructured simpler for-profit company. But to outsiders, it looks like a scam or bait-and-switch. Maybe they could have done an alternative creative procedure such as spin up a totally new for-profit company called ClosedAI to take OpenAI's employees and then pay a perpetual ip license to OpenAI. That way, CloseAI is free of encumbrances from OpenAI's messy structure. But then again, Elon Musk would still probably file another lawsuit calling those license transfers as "bad faith business dealings".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we want to make money" isn't legal. To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
Is it illegal? If it is, not amount of explaining will make it legal.
I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world. Employees on the inside are always going to have a decent percentage of “true believers” who have cognitive dissonance if they don’t believe they’re making the world better. And so companies need to provide a narrative to keep that type of employee happy.
> A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work
Holy goalposts shift, batman! This is much broader and much less than what I’d been led to believe from statements by this company, including by altman himself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we want to make money" isn't legal. To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
Is it illegal? If it is, not amount of explaining will make it legal.
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.
>I kind of thought that was the point of the current structure. Yes, it is but if we only stopped the analysis right there , we could take pleasure in the fact that Sam Altman checkmated himself in his own blog post. "Dude, the non-profit is _supposed_ to control the profit company because that's how you formed the companies in the first place! Duh!!!" To go beyond that analysis, we have to at least entertain (not "a…
I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for llm products.