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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#471

Post by mattmaroon »

Clubber wrote: post #80
mandmandam wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, most of the robber barons of the early Industrial Revolution gave away all or most their wealth. https://factmyth.com/factoids/the-robber-barons-gave-most-of... https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

Giving away much of one’s wealth is very different than choosing not to accumulate it in the first place.

It’s hard to find someone who has gotten to a position where they might have a reasonable shot at becoming the world’s wealthiest person who doesn’t think they’d be a great steward of the wealth. It makes much more sense for a titan of industry to make as much as they can and then give much away than it does to simply not make it.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#472

Post by squigz »

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…

> P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0]

We don't have to imagine such things, really, as that's extremely common with humans. I would argue that fixing such flaws in LLMs is a lot easier than fixing it in humans.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#473

Post by FragrantRiver »

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…

What is the crime?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#474

Post by mpeg »

authorfly wrote: post #433
bdowling wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Corporate tax is always only paid on profit and is usually a minor part of the tax draw for the government from corporations of all sizes. The vast majority of taxes paid in developed nations are employee taxes and whatever national+local sales taxes and health/pension equivalent taxes are (indirectly) levied (usually 60-80% of national income). Asset taxes are a bit different. It's true even in the bootstrapped comp…

Is this a US thing? In the UK employee tax is the employee’s to pay, not the company. Even if the company technically transfers it directly to the tax agency it’s not really their money.

EDIT: I guess we do have employer tax as national insurance contributions too, always forget about that since I’ve always paid myself under that threshold

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#475

Post by swat535 »

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…

If you are going to make a bold assertive claim without evidence to back it up, then change your statement to my assertion requires "optimism.. trust me on this", then perhaps you should amend your original statement.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#476

Post by ang_cire »

seadan83 wrote: post #446
jstummbillig wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Skeptics require proof before belief. That is not mutually exclusive from having hypotheses (AKA vision). I think you raise some interesting concerns in your last paragraph. > enormous amount of societal responsibility this puts on AI makers — which I, as a voter, will absolutely hold them accountable for I'm unsure of what mechanism voters have to hold private companies accountable. Fir example, whenever YouTube use…

People who have either no intention of holding someone/something to account, or who have no clue about what systems and processes are required to do so, always argue to elect/build first, and figure out the negatives later.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#477

Post by swat535 »

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…

If you are going to make a bold assertive claim without evidence to back it up, then change your argument to "my assertion requires optimism.. trust me on this", then perhaps you should amend your original statement.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#479

Post by SkyPuncher »

imranhou wrote: post #313

Based on what I've read it is allowed for a non profit to own a for profit asset. So I'm assuming the game plan here is to adjust the charter of the non profit to basically say we are going to still keep doing "Open AI" (we all know what that means), but through the proceeds it gets by selling chunks of this for-profit entity, so the essence could be the non-profit parent isn't fulfilling its mission by controlling w…

I went through something similar with a prior startup. Though, it wasn't anything nefarious, like this.

Basically, the plan was to create a new for-profit entity then have the not-for-profit license the existing IP to the for-profit. There were a lot of technicalities to it, but most of that was handled by lawyers drawing up the chartering paperwork.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#480

Post by svnt »

Spivak wrote: post #386
svnt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not paying taxes while losing money sounds like fraud to you? What do you propose should be taxed, exactly?

Cash flow. Profit get's taxed at x%, cash flow that was offset with losses/expenses gets taxed at y% < x. Company that does $100Mil of business and makes no money is very different than company that does $10k of business and makes no money.

Your equations do not account for the difference you mention, they only ensure growth will be slower and riskier.
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