> We are committed to this path of democratic AI.
So were do I vote? How do I became a candidate to be a representative or a delegate of voters? I assume every single human is eligible for both, as OpenAI serves the humanity?
Evolving OpenAI's Structure
291–300 of 746 posts
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4. OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.
There is a pretty significant different between “buy $9 for $4” and selling a service that costs $9 to build and run per year for $4 per year. Especially when some people think that service could be an absolute game changer for the species. It’s ok to not buy into the vision or think it’s impossible. But it’s a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced comparison, especially when we’re talking about a brand new technol…
It's a commodity technology and VCs are investing as if this were still a winner-takes-all play. It's obviously not, if there were any doubt about that, Deepseek's R1 release should have made it obvious.
> But it’s a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced comparison, especially when we’re talking about a brand new technology - who knows what the cost optimization levers are. Who knows what the market will bear after a few more revs.
You're acting as-if OpenAI is still the only player in this space. OpenAI has plenty of competitors who can deliver similar models for cheaper. Gemini 2.5 is an excellent and affordable model and Google has a substantially better capacity to scale because of a multi-year investment in its TPUs.
Whatever first mover advantage OpenAI had has been quickly eliminated, they've lost a lot of their talent, and the chief hypothesis they used to attract the capital they've raised so far is utterly wrong. VCs would be mad to be continuing to pump money into OpenAI just to extend their runway -- at 5 Bln losses per year they need to actually consider cost, especially when their frontier releases are only marginal improvements over competitors.
... this is a bubble despite the promise of the technology and anyone paying attention can see it. For all of the dumb money employed in this space to make it out alive, we'll have to at least see a fairly strong form of AGI developed, and by that point the tech will be threatening the general economic stability of the US consumer.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#293I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…
AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity. Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.
> AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity
The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself are theoretically unsurmountable.
But OpenAI doesn't have a path to AGI any more than anyone else. (It's increasingly clear LLMs alone don't make the cut.) And the market for LLMs, non-general AI, is very much not winner takes all. In this announcement, OpenAI is basically acknowledging that it's not getting to self-improving AGI.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#294So the non-profit retains control but we all know that Altman controls the board of the non-profit and I'd be shocked if he won't have significant stock in the new for-profit (from TFA: "we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock"). Which means that regardless of whether the non-profit has control on paper, OpenAI is now even better structured for Sam Altman's personal enrichment. No more ca…
Or, alternatively, it’s much harder to fight with one hand behind your back. They need to be able to compete for resources and talent given the market structure, or they fail on the mission. This is already impossibly hard. Approximately zero people commenting would be able to win this battle in Sam’s shoes. What would they need to do to begin to have a chance? Rather than make all the obvious comments “bad evil man…
It seems like they lost most of their top talent - probably because of Altman.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common ta…
I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective. Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI. That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to ch…
I won't go too far out on this limb, because I kind of agree with you... but to be fair -- 1980s-1990s nanotech did not attract this level of investment, nor was it visible to ordinary people, nor was it useful to anyone except researchers and grant writers.
It seems like nanotech is all around us now, but the term "nanotech" has been redefined to mean something different (larger scale, less amazing) from Drexler's molecular assemblers.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have seen how much power does the board have after the firing of Altman - none. Let's see how this plays out. PBC effectively means nothing - just take a look at Xai and its purchase of Twitter. I would love to listen reasoning explaining why this ~33 billion USD move is benefiting public.
The board had plenty of power. There was never a coherent explanation of its firing the CEO. But they could have stuck with that decision if they believed in it.
The explanation seemed pretty obvious to me: They set up a nonprofit to deliver an AI that was Open.
Then things went unexpectedly well, people were valuing them at billions of dollars, and they suddenly decided they weren't open any more. Suddenly they were all about Altman's Interests Safety (AI Safety for short).
The board tried to fulfil its obligation to get the nonprofit to do the things in its charter, and they were unsuccessful.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common ta…
Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can see no clear steps towards AGI.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#298So the non-profit retains control but we all know that Altman controls the board of the non-profit and I'd be shocked if he won't have significant stock in the new for-profit (from TFA: "we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock"). Which means that regardless of whether the non-profit has control on paper, OpenAI is now even better structured for Sam Altman's personal enrichment. No more ca…
Isn’t Sam already very rich? I mean it wouldn’t be the first time a guy wanted to be even richer, but I feel like we need to be more creative when divining his intentions
"It's not about the money, it's about winning"
--Gordon Gekko
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
This constant redefinition of what AGI means is really tiring. Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy search engine/auto completer.
It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement. Think about it - the original definition of AGI was basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a human level of intelligence or better. That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in a step change. There would be incremental progress. How do you describe the intermediate stages? What about a machine that can do anything better than the 50th percentile…
> It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement
It's really not. The Space Shuttle isn't an emerging interstellar spacecraft, it's just a spacecraft. Throwing emerging in front of a qualifier to dilute it is just bullshit.
> By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak.
We have no evidence of this. There is a common trope across cultures and history of characterising human intelligence in terms of the era's cutting-edge technology. We did it with steam engines [1]. We did it with computers [2]. We're now doing it with large language models.
[1] http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/a...
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their multimodal models are a rudimentary form of AGI. EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI". https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462
AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI. I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that d…
> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, ...
Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before