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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#461

Post by Terr_ »

5040 wrote: post #407
Terr_ wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>lots of people suffered As someone surrounded by immigrants using ChatGPT to navigate new environs they barely understand, I don't connect at all to these claims that AI is a cancer ruining everything. I just don't get it.

> immigrants using ChatGPT to navigate new environs

To continue one of the analogies: Plenty of people and industries legitimately benefited from the safety and cost-savings of asbestos insulation too, at least in the short run. Even today there are cases where one could argue it's still the best material for the job--if constructed and handled correctly. (Ditto for ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons.)

However over the decades its production and use grew to be over/mis-used in so very many ways, including--very ironically--respirators and masks that the user would put on their face and breathe through.

I'm not arguing LLMs have no reasonable uses, but rather that there are a lot of very tempting ways for institutions to slot them in which will cause chronic and subtle problems, especially when they are being marketed as a panacea.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#463

Post by SkyPuncher »

lolinder wrote: post #251
kweingar wrote: post #219

Can anybody explain how this actually works? What happens to all of the non-profit's assets? They can't just give it away for investors to own. The non-profit could maybe sell its assets to investors, but then what would it do with the money? I'm sure OpenAI has an explanation, but I really want to hear more details. In the most simple analysis of "non-profit becomes for-profit", there's really no way to square it ot…

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…

You actually don't even need to sell them. Just sign an exclusive, non-revocable license agreement.

Practically the same as selling, but technically not. Non-profit still gets to live up to it's original mission, on paper, but doesn't really do anything internally.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#464

Post by mattmaroon »

mandmandam wrote: post #38
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.

There are many examples through history proving you wrong. * Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for just $1. * Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent the web, making it free for public use. * Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine - "can you patent the sun?" * Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds could have easily sold humanity out for untold billions. * Chuck Feeny silen…

These are all examples of people who were not even remotely looking at the sums of money involved in AGI, both in terms of investment required and reward. I used “trillions” rather than “billions” for a reason. Inflation adjust it all you want, none of these passed up 1/10th of this opportunity.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#465

Post by extr »

ndiddy wrote: post #111
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 delivere…

From the standpoint of today, the deal is so lopsided to Microsoft as to be comical. They basically gave away their prized IP with the assumption they would have more capability leaps (hasn't really happened), and now the brains behind the original breakthroughs are all leaving/left. Microsoft is probably cannibalizing their enterprise sales with Azure. They are clearly middling at shipping actual products. People are acting like it's crazy to see executives leaving - IMO it's the perfect time right now. o1 is clearly wringing the last drops out of the transformer architecture and there is nothing up next.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#467

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

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…

Elon Musk sued over this: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/01/1235159084/elon-musk-openai-s...

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#469

Post by SkyPuncher »

duchenne wrote: post #205
Havoc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the point musk was complaining about. In practice it’s doable though. You can just create a new legal entity and move stuff and/or do future value creating activity in the new co. IF everyone is on board with the plan on both sides of the move then that’s totally doable with enough lawyers and accountants

But, if the non-profit gives all its assets to the new legal entity, shouldn't the new legal entity be taxed heavily? The gift tax rate goes up to 40% in the US. And 40% of the value of openAI is huge.

You don't need to sell/give the assets away to allow the for-profit to use them.

You sign an exclusive, non-revocable licensing agreement. Ownership of the original IP remains 100% with the original startup.

Now, this only works if the non-profit's board is on-board.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#470

Post by dmitrygr »

jwr wrote: post #447

Can we all agree that the next time a company announces itself (or a product) as "open", we'll just laugh out loud? I can't think of a single product or company that used the "open" word for something that was actually open in any meaningful way.

Most of us laughed out loud this time too, for this very same reason. But it is fun to watch the rest of y'all learn :)
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