That's a lot of words for Micro$oft to say they just love money. Who knew!
OpenAI to become for-profit company
21–30 of 809 posts
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#22Then why keep the name OpenAI?
Microsoft needs to lie due to pervasive ill-will from their previous abuses.
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#23Ahh. What a surprise - no-one could have predicted this
Will they finally rename the company?
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#24Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#25That 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.
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#26Wouldn't surprise me if this was the actual cause of the revolt that led to Altman's short-lived ouster, they just couldn't publicly admit to it so made up a bunch of other nonsensical explanations.
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#27Converting to a for-profit changes the tax status of donations. It also voids plausibility for Fair Use exemptions.
I can see large copyright holders lining up with takedowns demanding they revise their originating datasets since there will now be a clear-cut commercial use without license.
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#28The restructuring is designed in part to make OpenAI more attractive to investors
I'm not surprised in the least.
Who is going to give billions to a non-profit with a bizarre structure where you don't actually own a part of it but have some "claim" with a capped profit? Can you imagine bringing that to Delaware courts if there was disagreement over the terms? Investors can risk it if it's a few million, but good luck convincing institutional investors to commit billions with that structure.
At that point you might as well just go with a standard for-profit model where ownership is clear, terms are standard and enforceable in court and people don't have to keep saying "explain how it works again?".
Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seeing so much money rolling in, hard to not want a slice of the pie.
What money? Aren't most (all?) AI companies are operating at a loss?
The ones selling the shovels are doing well, but otherwise yeah nobody is making any money.
For the true believers that's just a temporary setback on the way to becoming trillionaires though.