Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 809 posts

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#501

Post by jprete »

mlinsey wrote: post #483
lolinder wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The non-profit would have to approve the scheme, and a rational non-profit would not, because it gives up any ability the non-profit has to fulfill its charter.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#502

Post by Terr_ »

squigz wrote: post #472
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…

> 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.

Fixing it with careful application of software-in-general is quite promising, but LLMs in particular are a terrible minefield of infinite whack-a-mole. (A mixed metaphor, but the imagery is strangely attractive.)

I currently work in the HR-tech space, so suppose someone has a not-too-crazy proposal of using an LLM to reword cover-letters to reduce potential bias in hiring. The issue is that the LLM will impart its own spin(s) on things, even when a human would say two inputs are functionally identical. As a very hypothetical example, suppose one candidate always does stuff like writing out the Latin like Juris Doctor instead of acronyms like JD, and then that causes the model to end up on "extremely qualified at" instead of "very qualified at"

The issue of deliberate attempts to corrupt the LLM with prompt-injection or poisonous training data are a whole 'nother can of minefield whack-a-moles. (OK, yeah, too far there.)

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#503

Post by itishappy »

hadlock wrote: post #421
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…

> 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. Wit…

I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons. There were two quotes in the comment you replied to:

> "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over"

> "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."

You response assumes the former, but it's my understanding the Luddite's actual position was the latter.

> Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.

In this sense, "Luddite" feels quite accurate today.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#504

Post by CamperBob2 »

anon7725 wrote: post #377
jstummbillig wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not baffling at all. It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species. The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me. The path trotten is what got us here and obviously nobody could have paid people upfront for the wild experimentation that was necessary. The only alternative is not having done it. Given the path it has put as in, people either are insanely cruel or just completely detached from reali…

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

The burden of proof is on the people claiming that a powerful new technology won't ultimately improve our lives. They can start by pointing out all the instances in which their ancestors have proven correct after saying the same thing.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#505

Post by space_fountain »

mlinsey wrote: post #483
lolinder wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the problem is early employees and investors were convinced to invest their time and money into a non profit. They were told that one of the reasons they should donate/work there as opposed to Google was because they were a non profit focused on doing good. Now when it seems like that non profit is successful that all is being thrown out the window in service of a structure that will result in more profit for the people running the non profit

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#506

Post by CamperBob2 »

archagon wrote: post #442
hadlock wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wit…

As I recall, the Luddites were reacting to the replacement of their jobs with industrialized low-cost labor. Today, many of our clothes are made in sweatshops using what amounts to child and slave labor. Maybe it would have been better for humanity if the Luddites won.

No, it would not have been better for humanity if the Luddites had won. You'd have to be misguided, ignorant, or both to believe something like that.

It is not possible to rehabilitate the Luddites. If you insist on attempting to do so, there are better venues.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#507

Post by nimithryn »

null_investor wrote: post #234
espadrine wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A short history: 1986: Geoffrey Hinton publishes the backpropagation algorithm as applied to neural networks, allowing more efficient training. 2011: Jeff Dean starts Google Brain. 2012: Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton publish AlexNet, which demonstrates that using GPUs yields quicker training on deep networks, surpassing non-neural-network participants by a wide margin on an image categorization competition. 2013…

This is not accurate. OpenAI and other companies could do it not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware that can compute faster. We've had upgrades to hardware, mostly led by NVidia, that made it possible. New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture, right now it's mostly about compute and the quality of data. I remember seeing some graphs that shows that the who…

Also, this sort of thing couldn't be done in the 80s or 90s, because it was much harder to compile that much data.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#509

Post by jll29 »

espadrine wrote: post #256
camjw wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is just a short history but I think it is inaccurate to say "2015: Ilya Sutskever founds OpenAI." I get that we all want to know what he saw etc and he's clearly one of the smartest people in the world but he didn't found OpenAI by himself. Nor was it his idea to?

Short histories remove a lot of information, but it would be impractical to make it book-sized. There were numerous founders, and as another commenter mentioned, Elon Musk recruited Ilya, which soured his relationship with Larry Page. Honestly, those are not the missing parts that most matter IMO. The evolution of the concept of attention across many academic papers which fed to the Transformer is the big missing ele…

> but it would be impractical to make it book-sized

Not really:

History: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11279 (75 pp.)

Survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828 (88 pp.)

Conveniently skim-read over the course of the four weekends on one month.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#510

Post by PlattypusRex »

hadlock wrote: post #421
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…

> 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. Wit…

Incredible to witness someone not only confidently spouting misinformation, but also including a link to the correct information without reading it.
Post reply on HN