Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure about that? AI-powered robotic soldiers are around the corner. What could go wrong...
Robot soldiers != AGI
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Evolving OpenAI's Structure
521–530 of 746 posts
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
ChatGPT was not released to the general public until November 2022, and the mobile apps were not released until May 2023. For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.
LLM AI hype started well before ChatGPT. This site and many others were littered with OpenAI stories calling it the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and other such nonsense going back to 2016. And GPT stories kicked into high gear all over the web and TV in 2019 in the lead-up to GPT-2 when OpenAI was telling the world it was too dangerous to release. Certainly by 2021 and early 2022, LLM AI was being reported on all ove…
> LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.
No, it wasn't.
As a proxy, here's HN results prior to November, 2022 - 13 results.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1667260800&dateRange=custom&...
Here's Google Trends, showing a clear uptick May 2023, and basically no search volume before (the small increase Feb. 2023 probably Meta's Llama).
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
As another proxy, compare Nvidia revenues - $26.91bln in 2022, $26.97bln in 2023, $60bln 2024, $130bln 2025. I think it's clear the hype didn't start until 2023.
You're welcome to point out articles and stores before this time period "hyping" LLM's, but what I remember is that before ChatGPT there was very little conversation around LLM's.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like they lost most of their top talent - probably because of Altman.
Ok cool so what should he do today? Close up shop? Resign? Or try?
Given how they've been losing their lead recently, replacing Sam Altman with someone more innovative might be a good idea.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#524"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE] This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.
Commercial entities aren’t social beings. They’re asocial goal-maximizers.
Threats of legal action are among the only behavioral signals it can act on while staying in its mandate. Others include regulation and the market.
This is all operating as it was designed, by humans, multiple economic cycles ago.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance,…
> That world never existed It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.
Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences.
We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#526I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market: > Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale,…
That is a very obvious thing for them to say though regardless of what they truly believe, because (a) it legitimizes removing the cap , making fundraising easier and (b) averts antitrust suspicions.
> "Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."
One remarkable advantage of being a "Public Benefit Corporation" is this it:
> prevent[s] shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation[1]
In my view, it is their own shareholders that the directors of OpenAI are insulating themselves against.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That world never existed It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.
I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's world; the risk of believing that we never had a better one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people actually believing it was important and acting as such. Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this way. Collectively, w…
You and I are on the same path, just at different points in the journey. Your response is very similar to my own tone and position a decade ago, trying to celebrate what we had before in an attempt to shepherd others towards a better future together. Time wore down that naivety into the cynicism of today, because I’ve come to realize that those celebrations simply coddle those who do not wish to put in the effort for change and yearn for a return to past glories.
We should acknowledge the past flatly and objectively for what it was and spend more time building that future, than listening to the victors of the past brag and boast, content to wallow in their accomplishments instead of rejoining contributors to tomorrow. The good leaders of yesteryear have stepped aside in lieu of championing newer, younger visionaries; those still demanding respect for what they did fifty years ago in circumstances we can only dream about, are part of the problem.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't square how OpenAi can capture users and presumably retain them when the incumbents have been capturing users for multiple decades and why can they not retain them? If every major player had an AI option, i'm just not understanding how because OpenAi moved first or got big first, the hugely massively successful companies that did the same thing for multiple decades don't have the same advantage?
Who knows how this will play out, but user behavior is always somewhat sticky and OpenAI now has 400M+ weekly active users. Currently, I'm not sure there is much of a moat, as many would jump if, say, Google released a model that is 10x better. However, there are myriad ways that OpenAI could slowly try to make their userbase even stickier: 1. OpenAI is apparently in the process of building a social network. 2. OpenA…
6 (can’t export/import chat history) is already a wrap since every user is prohibited from using ChatGPT chat logs to “develop models that compete with OpenAI,” if you export your chats and give it to Gemini or Claude or post it on X and Grok reads it, then you just violated the OpenAI terms, that’s grounds for a permaban or lawsuit for breach of contract (lol) … maybe your companies accept this risk but I’m in malicious compliance mode
Google is alright, but they have similar stupid noncompete vendor lock in rule, and no way to opt out of training, so there’s no real reason to trust Google. Yeah they could ship tool use in reasoning to catch up to o3, but it’ll just be catching up and not passing unless they fix the stupid legal terms.
Claude IDK how to trust, they train on feedback and everything is feedback, and they have the noncompete rule written even more broadly, dumb to use that.
Grok has a noncompete rule but also has a way to opt out of training, so it’s on the same tier of ClosedAI. I use it sometimes for jokey toy image generation crap but there’s no way to use it for anything serious since it has a copypasted closed ai prohibition
Mistral needs better models and simpler legalese, it’s so complicated and impossible to know which of the million legal contracts applies
IMHO meta is the only player, but they shot themselves in the foot by making Llama 4 too big for the local llama community to even use, super dumb, killed their most valuable thing which was the community.
That means the best models we can use for work without needing to worry about a lawsuit, are Qwen, and DeepSeek distills, no American AI is even in the same ballpark, Gemma 3 is refusal king if you even hint at something controversial. basically, America is getting actively stomped by China in AI right now, because their stuff is open and interoperable, and ours is closed and has legal noncompete bullshit, what can we actually build that doesn’t compete with these companies? Nothing
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#529SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now . If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy ph…
Sorry but perhaps you haven't looked at the actual numbers. Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+.
In 2006 IE's market share was higher than current OpenAI's market share.
Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
The EU does and has passed the AI act to reign in the worst consequences of this nuclear weapon. It has not been received well around here. The "digital god" angle might explain why. For many, this has become a religious movement, a savior for an otherwise doomed economic system.
Absolutely. It's frankly quite shocking to see how otherwise atheist or agnostic people have so quickly begun worshipping at the altar of "inevitable AGI apocalypse", much in the same way as how extremist Christians await the rapture.
To be fair many of us arrived at the idea that AI was humanities inevitable endpoint ahead of and independently of whether we would ever see it in our lifetimes. Its easy enough to see how people could independently converge on such am idea. I dont see that view as related to atheism in any way other than it creating space for the belief, in the same way it creates space for many others.
Id love to believe there is more to life than the AI future, or that we as humans are destined to be perpetually happy and live meaningful. However I currently dont see how our current levels of extreme prosperity are anything more than an evolutionary blip, even if we could make them last several millennia more.