Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn’t everything securities fraud though
The only way to truly make a ton of wealth is to break rules that others follow.
The faster you realize this, the better it is for your mental and physical health
Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
531–540 of 1001 posts
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#532Billionaires fighting over trends is peak capitalism.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
didn't Firefox / Mozilla set that precedent already?
I can download the Firefox sources and everything else they produce. That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it provides reasonable funding. What if Firefox made a world beating browser by accident. Would they be justified in closing the source, restricting access and making people pay for it? That's what OpenAI did.
They had one of the best browsers in the world at one point.
Their sell-out path was hundreds of millions of dollars from GOOG to make their search engine the default, and, unspoken: allow FF to become an ugly, insecure, red-headed stepchild when compared to Chrome.
Likely part of what took priority away from Thunderbird, at the time, too.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#534There is a lot in here but turning a non-profit into a for-profit definitely should be challenged. Otherwise why wouldn't everyone start as a non-profit, develop your IP, and then switch to 'for-profit' mode once you got something that works? You don't pay income taxes and your investors get write offs.
The replies that say "well the profits go to the non-profit, all's good" miss the reality of these high profit nonprofits: the profits invariably end up in the pockets of management. Most of those are essentially scams, but it doesn't mean that OpenAI isn't just a more subtle scam. The hype and the credulity of the general public play right into this scam. People will more or less believe anything Sam the Money Gushi…
Non-profits, the big ones at least, are a scam by rich people to privatize what should essentially be nationalized government services. They get to pretend they're helping the public at a fraction of their capability to paper over their ill gotten gains elsewhere. It's like a drug lord buying a church, but they get to take the spend out of their taxes. Alternatively, they are a way to create a tax free pool of money for their children to play with by putting them on the board.
Non-profits weren't really as much of a thing until the neoliberal era of privatizing everything.
Of course, there are "real" non-profits, those kinds of activities are a real thing, such as organizing solely member funded organizations to serve the people, but in America, this is a marginal amount of the money in the system.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#535A NY Times article says "Though Mr. Musk has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for becoming a for-profit company, he hatched a plan in 2017 to wrest control of the A.I. lab from Mr. Altman and its other founders and transform into a commercial operation that would work alongside his other companies, including the electric carmaker Tesla, and make use of their increasingly powerful supercomputers, people familiar with his…
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Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#536Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019, which is when they changed their corporate structure. It's now 2024. If Musk had some ideological issue with OpenAI's new corporate structure then why didn't he sue right away?
He was busy destryoing twitter?
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
The replies that say "well the profits go to the non-profit, all's good" miss the reality of these high profit nonprofits: the profits invariably end up in the pockets of management. Most of those are essentially scams, but it doesn't mean that OpenAI isn't just a more subtle scam. The hype and the credulity of the general public play right into this scam. People will more or less believe anything Sam the Money Gushi…
If your beef with this structure is that executives get paid handsomely I have bad news about the entire category of nonprofits, regardless of whether they have for-profit arms or not.
It has mattered in other cases, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSP_Vision_Care
> In 2003 the Internal Revenue Service revoked VSP's tax exempt status citing exclusionary, members-only practices, and high compensation to executives.[3]
Or later in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSP_Vision_Care#Non-profit_sta...
> In 2005, a federal district judge in Sacramento, California found that VSP failed to prove that it was not organized for profit nor for the promotion of the greater social welfare, as is required of a 501(c)(4). Instead, the district court found, VSP operates much like a for-profit (with, for example, its executives getting bonuses tied to net income) and primarily for the benefit of its own member/subscribers, not for some greater social good and, thereafter, concluded it was not entitled to tax-exempt status under 501(c)(4).[16]
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#538As usual, I find Matt Levine's take on this quite fun and informative, unfortunately HN won't let me include it (comment to long) but it begins thusly;
Elon vs. OpenAI
I wrote yesterday about reports that the US Securities and Exchange Commission might be looking into whether OpenAI or its founder and chief executive officer, Sam Altman, might have misled its investors. Late last year, OpenAI’s board briefly fired Altman for not being “consistently candid,” and then reversed course and fired itself instead. So there is some reason to believe that somebody wasn’t candid about something.
I had my doubts that it would rise to the level of securities fraud, though. For one thing, OpenAI is a nonprofit organization, and even its for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global LLC, which has raised money from investors, isn’t all that for-profit. I wrote:
At the top of OpenAI’s operating agreement, it warns investors: “It would be wise to view any investment in OpenAI Global, LLC in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-[artificial general intelligence] world.” I still don’t know what Altman was supposedly not candid about, but whatever it was, how material can it possibly have been to investors, given what they signed up for? “Ooh he said it cost $50 million to train this model but it was really $53 million” or whatever, come on, the investors were donating money, they’re not sweating the details.
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#539[deleted]
Re: Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
didn't Firefox / Mozilla set that precedent already?
I can download the Firefox sources and everything else they produce. That they make money incidentally to that is really no problem and a positive because it provides reasonable funding. What if Firefox made a world beating browser by accident. Would they be justified in closing the source, restricting access and making people pay for it? That's what OpenAI did.
Anyway, to answer your question, no, not okay to close up the nonprofit and go 100% for-profit in that case.
Concisely, in any human matteres: Do what you say you'll do, or, add qualifiers/don't say it.
Take funds from a subset of users who need support services or patch guarantees of some kind, use that to pay people to continue to maintain and improve the product.