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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

281–290 of 809 posts

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. I'm surprised people are surprised. >> 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. a lot of people and entities do this though... openAI is in the spotlight, but scraping everything and selling it is the business model for a lot of companies...

Scraping the web, creating maps and pointing people to the source is one thing; scraping the web, creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another. In my eyes, all genAI companies/tools are the same. I dislike all equally, and I use none of them.

> creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another.

That's the business model of lots of companies. Take, collect and collate data, put it in a new format more useful for your field/customers, resell.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling. It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful mis…

Uber for legalizing your business model

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A short history: 1986: Geoffrey Hinton publishes the backpropagation algorithm as applied to neural networks, allowing more efficient training. 2011: Jeff Dean starts Google Brain. 2012: Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton publish AlexNet, which demonstrates that using GPUs yields quicker training on deep networks, surpassing non-neural-network participants by a wide margin on an image categorization competition. 2013…

This is not accurate. OpenAI and other companies could do it not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware that can compute faster. We've had upgrades to hardware, mostly led by NVidia, that made it possible. New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture, right now it's mostly about compute and the quality of data. I remember seeing some graphs that shows that the who…

> New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture

Don’t they all indicate being based on the transformer architecture?

> not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware

Kaplan et al. 2020[0] (figure 7, §3.2.1) shows that LSTMs, the leading language architecture prior to transformers, scaled worse because they plateau’ed quickly with larger context.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#284

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…

why wouldn't they keep it?

the well known scammer successfully scammed everyone twice. obviously he's keeping it around for the third (and forth...) time

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the assets were sold to the for profit at a fair price I could see this being legal (even if it shouldn't be). At least in that case the value generated by the non-profit tax free would stay locked up in non-profit land. The biggest problem with this is that there's basically no chance that the sale price of the non-profit assets is going to be $150 billion, which means that whatever the gap is between the valuati…

For-profit startups don’t pay taxes while growing either, because they aren’t making any profit during that phase.

Sure. But there are a lot of other tax advantages. For example, at least where I am, non profits don't pay sales tax on purchases, and don't have to pay into unemployment funds. I'm sure there is more, but I'm not super familiar with this world.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling. It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful mis…

To me this is a no brainer. If it’s a choice between having AI and not,

An AI essentially monopolized by one (or even a few) large non-profits is not necessarily beneficial to the rest of us in the grand scheme of things.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the assets were sold to the for profit at a fair price I could see this being legal (even if it shouldn't be). At least in that case the value generated by the non-profit tax free would stay locked up in non-profit land. The biggest problem with this is that there's basically no chance that the sale price of the non-profit assets is going to be $150 billion, which means that whatever the gap is between the valuati…

For-profit startups don’t pay taxes while growing either, because they aren’t making any profit during that phase.

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#288
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well they are spending billions to make shovels that they are selling for millions (roughly).

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#289
post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scraping the web, creating maps and pointing people to the source is one thing; scraping the web, creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another. In my eyes, all genAI companies/tools are the same. I dislike all equally, and I use none of them.

> creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another. That's the business model of lots of companies. Take, collect and collate data, put it in a new format more useful for your field/customers, resell.

Not with copyrighted content, though.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For-profit startups don’t pay taxes while growing either, because they aren’t making any profit during that phase.

Good point. That sounds a lot like fraud.

Not paying taxes while losing money sounds like fraud to you?

What do you propose should be taxed, exactly?

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