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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

481–490 of 809 posts

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#481
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, I think all the non-profit motivated talent has left, and the people left behind are those who stand to (and want to) make a killing when OpenAI becomes a for-profit. And that talent is in the majority - nothing else would explain the show of support for Altman when he was kicked out.

What “show of support”? Not willing to rock the boat is not the same as being supportive.

My dude, it was the biggest, most dramatic crisis in OpenAI’s short history so far. There was no choice, “don’t rock the boat.”

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#482
post #429

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…

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

Pretty sure Alphabet projects don't need hype.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#483

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…

I haven't seen any details, but isn't this a pretty straightforward way of doing it? The non-profit has had majority ownership of the for-profit subsidiary since 2019. The already-for-profit subsidiary has owned all the ChatGPT IP, all the recent models, all the employee relationships, etc etc.

The cleanest way for this to work is the for-profit to just sell more shares at the $150B valuation, diluting the non-profit entity below majority ownership. The for-profit board, which the non-profit could still probably have multiple seats on, would control the real asset, the non-profit would still exist and hold many tens of billions of value. It could further sell its shares in the non-profit and use the proceeds in a way consistent with its mission.

They wouldn't even have to sell that much - I am pretty sure the mega-fundrasing rounds from Microsoft etc brought the non-profit's ownership to just north of 50% anyway.

I don't see how this wouldn't be above board, it's how I assumed it was going to work. It would indeed mean that the entity that controls ChatGPT would now be answerable to shareholders, a majority of which would be profit seeking and a minority of which would be the non-profit with its mission, but non-profits are allowed to invest in for-profits and then sell those shares; all the calls for prosecutions etc seems just like an internet pitchfork mob to me.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people running the show are well connected and stand to make billions as do would be investors. Give a few key players a share in the company and they forget their government jobs to regulate.

More likely the legal system just hasn’t caught up.

Copyright concerns are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about the range of other harms and disruptions for countries and the world.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#485
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes it seems like problem-solving itself is being problematized as if solving problems wasn't an obvious good.

Not everything presented as a problem is, in fact, a problem. A solution for something that is not broken, may even induce breakage.

Some not-problems, presented as though they are:

"How can we prevent the untimely eradication of Polio?"

"How can we prevent bot network operators from being unfairly excluded from online political discussions?"

"How can we enable context-and-content-unaware text generation mechanisms to propagate throughout society?"

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely the legal system just hasn’t caught up.

Maybe, but for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it.

That's an interesting way to look at it, however on reflection I think I usually wanted to "weaken copyright" because it would empower individuals versus entrenched rent-seeking interests.

If it's only OK to scrape, lossy-compress, and redistribute book-paragraphs when it gets blended into a huge library of other attempts, then that's only going to empower big players that can afford to operate at that scale.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#487
post #304
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might be motivated to pay their bills. Weird people.

Right, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people. Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography…

Numerous kinds of artists are feeling the squeeze. Copy writers, stock photographers, graphic designers, UI designers, interior designers, etc.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#488
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What “show of support”? Not willing to rock the boat is not the same as being supportive.

What were all those open letter and "let's jump to Microsoft with Altman" shenanigans that the employees were carrying out then?

I read at the time that there was massive coordinated pressure on the rank and file from the upper levels of the company. When you combine that with OpenAI clawing back vested equity even from people who voluntarily leave, the 95% support means nothing at all.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#489

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…

The non-profit side is just there to attract talent and encourage them to work harder b/c it's for humanity. Obviously people sniffed out the facts, realized it was all for profit and that lead to an exodus.

Kind of like everyone's favorite interior design non-profit, IKEA. (Seriously. It's a non-profit. It's bonkers.)

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#490
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.

A non-profit can't give away its assets to a private entity, but it can exchange its assets for fair value, in this case, equity in the for-profit.
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