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Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

openai.com

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

#161

Post by layer8 »

throw4847285 wrote: post #143
jerjerjer wrote: post #134

Start of the article: > OpenAI’s Board of Directors is evaluating our corporate structure in order to best support the mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence (AGI)1 Footnote 1: > A highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. A very interesting definition of AGI.

At least it's better than their secret internal definition. https://gizmodo.com/leaked-documents-show-openai-has-a-very-...

I mean, both are based on economic value. If the economic value of all human work was $200 billion, they could be taken to basically say the same.

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

#163

Post by rmbyrro »

optimalsolver wrote: post #39
jrmg wrote: post #28

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.

They referring to the reconstructed board that solely exists to rubber stamp every Altman decision as officially great for humanity, so what do they care what the board's considerations are? They'll go along with literally anything.

humanity benefactor CEOs can get fired out of the blue

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

#164

Post by j45 »

paxys wrote: post #53

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.

My understanding was the non-profit would own a for-profit, but this seems to be going the other way to have a for-profit to own a non-profit?

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

#165

Post by vimbtw »

It’s incredible how much time and political maneuvering it took Sam Altman to get to this point. He took on the entire board and research scientists for every major department and somehow came out the winner. This reads more like an announcement of victory than anything else. It means Sam won. He’s going to do away with the non-profit charade and accept the billions in investment to abandon the vision of AGI for everyone and become a commercial AI company.

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

#166

Post by throw-qqqqq »

llm_trw wrote: post #38
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?

Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it. I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open…

> Start building nuclear power plants like it's 1950 and keep going like it's Fallout

Nuclear has a (much) higher levelized cost of energy than solar and wind (even if you include a few hours of battery storage) in many or most parts of the world.

Nuclear has been stagnant for ~two decades. The world has about the same installed nuclear capacity in 2024 as it had in 2004. Not in percent (i.e. “market share”) but in absolute numbers.

If you want energy generation cheap and fast, invest in renewables.

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

#167

Post by abecedarius »

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?

I believe e.g. Ilya Sutskever believed AGI is in reach at the founding, and was in earnest about the reasons for the nonprofit. AFAICT the founders who still think that way all left.

It's not that the remainder want nonprofit ownership, it's that they can't legally just jettison it, they need a story how altering the deal is good actually.

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

#168

Post by thaumasiotes »

chis wrote: post #106
paxys wrote: post #53

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.

> 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.

No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to be true believers during interviews.

After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And they rejected me, stating that my description of why I applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing", didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling rather than a place of employment.

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

#169

Post by bubaumba »

whamlastxmas wrote: post #89
vessenes wrote: post #72

The real news here is two-fold: new governance/recap of the for-profit, and operational shrink at the 501c3. As people here intuit, I think this makes the PBC the ‘head’ functionally. That said, I would guess that the charity will be one of the wealthiest charities in the world in short order. I am certain that the strong recommendation from advisory is to have separate, independent boards. Especially with their publ…

I would guess they’re going to put as many expenses as possible on the nonprofit. For example, all the compute used for free tiers of ChatGPT will be charged to the nonprofit despite being a massive benefit to the for-profit. They may even charge the training costs, which will be in the billions, to the nonprofit as well

Simple tax optimization. Like new billionaires promising to significant donations. a) they don't have to donate. b) they can immediately slash those promised donations from taxes.

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

#170

Post by layer8 »

apsec112 wrote: post #71
llm_trw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it. I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open…

We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)

Not that I necessarily disagree on the conclusion, but why should percentage of labor hours constitute a measure for general intelligence?
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