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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#421

Post by hadlock »

Terr_ wrote: post #393
anon7725 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's hugely beneficial to our species. Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.

I can easily imagine people X decades from now discussing this stuff a bit like how we now view teeth-whitening radium toothpaste and putting asbestos in everything, or perhaps more like the abuse of Social Security numbers as authentication and redlining. Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt…

> Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."

We have a term for that, it's called "luddite". Those were english weavers who would break in to textile factories and destroy weaving machines at the beginning of the 1800s. With the extreme rare exception, all cloth is woven by machines now. The only hand made textiles in modern society are exceptionally fancy rugs, and knit scarves from grandma. All the clothing you're wearing now are woven by a machine, and nobody gives this a second thought today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#422

Post by redbell »

It's really hard to stick to your original goals after you achieve unexpected success. It's like a politician making promises before the elections but finding it difficult to keep them once elected.

On March 1st, 2023, a warning was already sounding: OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34979981)

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#423

Post by talldayo »

jstummbillig wrote: post #415
anon7725 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's hugely beneficial to our species. Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.

It does not need a citation. There is no citation. What it needs, right now, is optimism. Optimism is not optional when it comes to doing new things in the world. The "needs citation" is reserved for people who do nothing and chose to be sceptics until things are super obvious. Yes, we are clearly talking about things to mostly still come here. But if you assign a 0 until its a 1 you are just signing out of advancing…

> It would simply shut down 95% of AI, tomorrow, without any other viable alternative around.

Oh, the humanity! Who will write our third-rate erotica and Russian misinformation in a post-AI world?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#424

Post by Drakim »

ceejayoz wrote: post #154
brvsft wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an "artist" or "thinker" stops because of this, I question their motivations and those labels in the first place.

Everyone tends to have "be able to afford basic necessities" as a major motivation. That includes people who work in creative fields.

Several of the agricultural revolutions we went though is what freed up humanity to not spend all of it's work producing sustenance, leaving time for other professions like making art and music. But it also destroyed a lot of jobs for people who were necessary for gathering food the old inefficient way.

If we take your argument to it's logical conclusion, all progress is inherently bad, and should be stopped.

I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#425

Post by seizethecheese »

throwup238 wrote: post #352

I’m confused by this news story and the response here. No one seems to understand OpenAI’s corporate structure or non profits at all. My understanding: OpenAI follows the same model Mozilla does. The nonprofit has owned a for-profit corporation called OpenAI Global, LLC that pays taxes on any revenue that isn’t directly in service of their mission (in a very narrow sense based on judicial precedent) since 2019 [1]. I…

“Decoupling” is such a strange euphemism for removing an asset worth north of $100b from a nonprofit.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#427

Post by username223 »

nikcub wrote: post #175
addedlovely wrote: post #56

In that case, where can I apply for my licensing fee for my content they have scraped and trained on. List of crawlers for those who now want to block: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots

might as well do the full list: https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/blob/main/rob... cloudflare have a button for this: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...

Don't stop at robots.txt blocking. Look through your access logs, and you'll likely find a few IPs generating a huge amount of traffic. Look them up via "whois," then block the entire IP range if it seems like a bot host. There's no reason for cloud providers to browse my personal site, so if they host crawlers, they get blocked.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#428

Post by simantel »

throwup238 wrote: post #352

I’m confused by this news story and the response here. No one seems to understand OpenAI’s corporate structure or non profits at all. My understanding: OpenAI follows the same model Mozilla does. The nonprofit has owned a for-profit corporation called OpenAI Global, LLC that pays taxes on any revenue that isn’t directly in service of their mission (in a very narrow sense based on judicial precedent) since 2019 [1]. I…

> Almost every nonprofit that raises revenue outside of donations has to be structured more or less this way to pay taxes.

I don't think that's true? A non-profit can sell products or services, it just can't pay out dividends.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#429

Post by dartos »

jstummbillig wrote: post #415
anon7725 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's hugely beneficial to our species. Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.

It does not need a citation. There is no citation. What it needs, right now, is optimism. Optimism is not optional when it comes to doing new things in the world. The "needs citation" is reserved for people who do nothing and chose to be sceptics until things are super obvious. Yes, we are clearly talking about things to mostly still come here. But if you assign a 0 until its a 1 you are just signing out of advancing…

Hey, I have some magic beans to sell you.

I don’t think that the consumer LLMs that openai is pioneering is what need optimism.

AlphaFold and other uses of the fundamental technology behind LLMs need hype.

Not OpenAI

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#430

Post by RIMR »

lioeters wrote: post #104
bayindirh wrote: post #13

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…

>How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling.

It's completely unprecedented.

We allowed scraping images and text en masse when search engines used the data to let us find stuff.

We allow copying of style, and don't allow writing styles and aesthetics to be copyrighted or trademarked.

Then AI shows up, and people change lanes because they don't like the results.

One of the things that made me tilt towards the side of fair use was a breakdown of the Stable Diffusion model. The SD2.1 base model was trained on 5.85 billion images, all normalized to 512x512 BMP. That's 1MB per images, for a total of 5.85PB of BMP files. The resulting model is only 5.2GB. That's more than 99.999999% data loss from the source data to the trained set.

For every 1MB BMP file in the training dataset, less than 1byte makes it into the model.

I find it extremely difficult to call this redistribution of copyrighted data. It falls cleanly into fair use.

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