Said another way: Sam Altman wants to be as rich as Elon Musk, and he is mad that he isn't.
Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
281–290 of 339 posts
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think this underestimates the degree to which the people on these companies legitimately believe what they’re saying. I’ve worked at one of these companies and absolutely would fall into your category of being a true believer at the time. People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics becau…
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Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#283at this point, why isn't there a Debian for AI?
Because useful AI requires massive spending on compute to train.
resources yes (for now...assuming someone doesn't come up with better algorithms in the future)
But all of the libraries are Facebook/google owned, made free by grace of the executives working there. Why no open source/nonprofit library for all the common things like tensors and such?
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#284“Our plan is to transform our existing for-profit into a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) with ordinary shares of stock…The non-profit’s significant interest in the existing for-profit would take the form of shares in the PBC at a fair valuation determined by independent financial advisors.” The details here matter and is bs. What should take place is this, OpenAI creates a new for profit entity (PBC, or wha…
> Elon Musk strong claim to get a significant portion of the equity owned by the non-profit, given his sizable investment when a contemporaneous valuation of the company would have been small Sorry, what's the path to this? Musk's 'investment' was in the form of a donation, which means he legally has no more claim to the value of the nonprofit than anyone else.
The argument was because they’ve converted the nonprofit to a for profit, which enriches the employees and investors and doesn’t serve the nonprofit or its mission, the nonprofit was only so in disguise and should be viewed as having been a for profit all along. So the donation should be viewed as an investment.
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#285Our 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.
>I kind of thought that was the point of the current structure. Yes, it is but if we only stopped the analysis right there , we could take pleasure in the fact that Sam Altman checkmated himself in his own blog post. "Dude, the non-profit is _supposed_ to control the profit company because that's how you formed the companies in the first place! Duh!!!" To go beyond that analysis, we have to at least entertain (not "a…
> In other words, let's suppose the old Friendster social network was structured as "non-profit-board-controlling-a-for-profit-Friendster" like OpenAI. The ideals of the "non-profit being in control" is a moot point when a competitor like Facebook makes non-profit-Friendster irrelevant.
This feels like it's missing a really really important point, which is that in this analogy, the mission of the non-profit would be something like, "Make social media available to all of humanity without advertising or negative externalities", and the for-profit plans to do advertising to compete with Facebook.
The for-profit's only plan for making money goes directly against the goals of the nonprofit. That's the problem. Who cares if it's competitive if the point of the competition is to destroy the things the non-profit stands for?
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 t…
wait, what? you applied for a job you had just gotten fired from?
No, I applied for a job involving exactly the same duties as a job I had just been fired from. I was not originally (or ever) employed by HackerOne.
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#287Earlier 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…
> 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 a…
And yet when data enters need power all day every day nuclear is the only solution. Even Bill Gates stop selling solar when it wasn't for the poors who probably don't need hot water every day anyway.
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#288Earlier 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.)
AGI isn't until it meets some arbitrary criteria you made up. When it does it's the next arbitrary criteria that you just made up.
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world. Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit’s board is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose even in a decision like this. It is directed at defeating the idea, express…
There are tons of examples of non profit that are run for profit (mostly profit / career advancement of those in charge and their families and friends). Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now the core product lost most matketshare and is not what people want. Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje ts). There are those charities whe…
We should abolish taxes, so real companies won't need to hide behind the non-profit status and real non-profits could shine.
Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we want to make money" isn't legal. To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
If everyone sees it through, does anything else that direct evidence of actions prove otherwise? Explaining just wastes everyone's time.
No matter how obvious a facade is though, there is probably a sizable group that doesn't see through it.