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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#111

Post by ndiddy »

Prkasd wrote: post #25

That could be the first step towards a complete takeover by Microsoft, possibly followed by more CEO shuffles. I wonder though whether Microsoft is still interested. The free Bing Copilot barely gets any resources and gives very bad answers now. If the above theory is correct (big if!), perhaps Microsoft wants to pivot to the military space. That would be in line with idealist employees leaving or being fired.

Microsoft already effectively owns OpenAI. Their investments in OpenAI have granted them a 49% stake in the company, the right to sell any pre-AGI OpenAI products to Microsoft's customers, and access to all pre-AGI product research. Microsoft's $10 billion investment in early 2023 (after ChatGPT's launch massively increased OpenAI's operating expenses) was mainly in Azure compute credits rather than cash and delivered in tranches (as of November 2023 they'd only gotten a fraction of that money). It also gives Microsoft 75% of OpenAI's profits until they make their $10 billion back. All of these deals have effectively made OpenAI into Microsoft's generative AI R&D lab. More information: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#113

Post by herval »

bayindirh wrote: post #13
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #11

The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just a for-profit entity beholden to investors and Sam Altman as a shareholder. The non-profit is really just vestigial. I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that g…

> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use. At this point it's not even funny anymore.

openAI converted to evilAI really fast

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#115

Post by sotix »

csomar wrote: post #41
phito wrote: post #20

I know nothing about companies (esp. in the US), but I find it weird that a company can go from non-profit to for-profit? Surely this would be taken advantage of. Can someone explain me how this work?

I am not a tax specialist but from my understanding a non-profit is a for-profit that doesn't pay dividends. Why would the government care?

A non-profit is a company that for accounting purposes does not have shareholders and therefore keeps nothing in retained earnings at the end of the period. The leftover money must be distributed (e.g. as salaries, towards the stated mission, etc.). Their financial statements list net profit for the period and nothing is retained.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#116

Post by lesuorac »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #108
cenamus wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, he is the one that did most of the actual research and work, riiiiight?

I'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me. Why did `AI` happen now? What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden? My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations. If anybody knows, not just the per…

Mostly branding and willingness.

w.r.t. Branding.

AI has been happening "forever". While "machine learning" or "genetic algorithms" were more of the rage pre-LLMs that doesn't mean people weren't using them. It's just Google Search didn't brand their search engine as "powered by ML". AI is everywhere now because everything already used AI and now the products as "Spellcheck With AI" instead of just "Spellcheck".

w.r.t. Willingness

Chatbots aren't new. You might remember Tay (2016) [1], Microsoft's twitter chat bot. It should seem really strange as well that right after OpenAI releases ChatGPT, Google releases Gemini. The transformers architecture for LLMs is from 2014, nobody was willing to be the first chatbot again until OpenAI did it but they all internally were working on them. ChatGPT is Nov 2022 [2], Blake Lemoine's firing was June 2022 [3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT

[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#118

Post by snapcaster »

ben_w wrote: post #109
mattmaroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions. There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.

> Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions No, we're really not all like that. I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point. I can im…

You think buying apple stock and bitcoin would put you on the radar of intelligence agencies? Wouldn't that grouping be some massive number of middle class millennials?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#119

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

lesuorac wrote: post #116
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me. Why did `AI` happen now? What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden? My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations. If anybody knows, not just the per…

Mostly branding and willingness. w.r.t. Branding. AI has been happening "forever". While "machine learning" or "genetic algorithms" were more of the rage pre-LLMs that doesn't mean people weren't using them. It's just Google Search didn't brand their search engine as "powered by ML". AI is everywhere now because everything already used AI and now the products as "Spellcheck With AI" instead of just "Spellcheck". w.r.…

Thanks for the information. I know Google had TPU custom made a long time ago, and that the concept has existed for a LONG TIME. I assumed that a technical hurdle (i.e. VRAM) was finally behind allowing this theoretical (1 token/sec on a CPU vs 100 tokens/sec on a GPU) to become reasonable.

Thanks for the links too!

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#120

Post by neilv »

This post somehow fell off the front page before California wakes up (9:07 ET), but not buried deep like buried posts usually are:

> 57. OpenAI to Become For-Profit Company (wsj.com) 204 points by jspann 4 hours ago | flag | hide | 110 comments

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