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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#561

Post by unclad5968 »

educasean wrote: post #498
unclad5968 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How has AI benefit or species so far?

How has the Internet? How has automobiles? Feels like a rather aimless question.

The internet has allowed for near instant communication no matter where you are, improved commerce, vastly improved education, and is directly responsible for many tangible comforts we experience today.

Automobiles allow people to travel great distances over short periods of time, increase physical work capacity, allow for building massive structures, and allow for farming insane amounts of food.

Both the internet and automobiles have positively affected my life, and I assume the lives of many others. How are any of these aimless questions?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#562

Post by Thrymr »

moralestapia wrote: post #238
tomp wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dismantling OpenAI is actually a business strategy for many other players now. Which ones exactly? NVIDIA is drinking sweet money from OpenAI. Microsoft & Apple are in cahoots with it. Meta/Facebook seems happy to compete with OpenAI on a fair playing field. Anthropic lacks the resources. Amazon doesn't seem to care. Google is asleep.

>NVIDIA is drinking sweet money from OpenAI. NVIDIA makes money from any company doing AI. I would be surprised if OpenAI was a whole digit percentage of their revenue. >Microsoft & Apple are in cahoots with it. Nope. Apple is using OpenAI to fill holes their current model is not good at. This doesn't sound like a long-term partnership. >Meta/Facebook seems happy to compete with OpenAI on a fair playing field. They w…

> I would be surprised if OpenAI was a whole digit percentage of their revenue.

It is not publicly known how much revenue Nvidia gets from OpenAI, but it is likely more than 1%, and they may be one of the top 4 unnamed customers in their 10Q filing, which would mean at least 10% and $3 billion [0].

That's not nothing.

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nvidia-gets-almost-half-revenue-0...

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#563

Post by sangnoir »

throwup238 wrote: post #437
seizethecheese wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Decoupling” is such a strange euphemism for removing an asset worth north of $100b from a nonprofit.

OpenAI Global LLC is the $100b asset. It’s not being removed, the nonprofit will still own all the shares it owns now until it decides to sell.

The shares will be diluted - the LLC used to be 100% owned by the non-profit; and now there's no bottom.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#564

Post by pj_mukh »

throwaway314155 wrote: post #531
throwup238 wrote: post #352

I’m confused by this news story and the response here. No one seems to understand OpenAI’s corporate structure or non profits at all. My understanding: OpenAI follows the same model Mozilla does. The nonprofit has owned a for-profit corporation called OpenAI Global, LLC that pays taxes on any revenue that isn’t directly in service of their mission (in a very narrow sense based on judicial precedent) since 2019 [1]. I…

It's about the narrative they tried to create. The spin. It doesn't matter much if they were technically behaving as a for-profit entity previously. What matters is that they wanted the public (and likely, their talent) to _think_ that they weren't even interested in making a profit as this would be a philosophical threat to the notion of any sort of impartial or even hopefully benevolent originator of AGI (a goal wh…

Occam's razor: I think Sam's personal narrative is the correct one. He built a non-profit that took off in a way that he didn't expect it and now a for-profit is the best way to run the lightning they've caught.

In terms of profit, AFAICT, Sam doesn't have designs on building extra large yachts and his own space agency but what he wants is to be the one at the stead of building what he considers is world-changing tech. One could rationally call this power-hungry but one could also rationally call this just helicopter parenting of a tech you've helped built. And for that a for-profit that is allowed to maximize profits to re-invest in the tech is the optimal setup (esp if all the competitors are doing the same)

Is this a different org than when it started? Yes. Was this a dupe from the beginning? I don't think so.

"But why can't he have a more worldly-aligned board looking over his shoulder?"

Because we live in California and have a bad taste for governance by committee or worse: governance by constant non-representative democracy (see: Housing).

If this now completely comes off the wheels, I still think Congressional action can be a stopgap, but atleast for now, this restructure makes sense to me.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#565

Post by MaxHoppersGhost »

elAhmo wrote: post #553
thesurlydev wrote: post #278

I can't help but wonder if things would be different if Sam Altman wasn't allowed to come back to OpenAI. Instead, the safeguards are gone, challengers have left the company, and the bottom line is now the new priority. All in opposition to ushering in AI advancement with the caution and respect it deserves.

Similar example can be seen with the demise of Twitter under the new owner, which has no safeguards or guardrails - anyone who opposed him is gone and we can see in what state it is now.

Now Twitter has both left and right propaganda instead of just left wing propaganda. Bummer.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#566

Post by MaxHoppersGhost »

game_the0ry wrote: post #550
peanuty1 wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the 4 million dollar car, Sam already made a ton of money from Reddit and being President of YC.

Liking and buying expensive cars is not wrong. But buying a $4M car while saying you do not car about money is a mis-alignment between words and actions, which comes off untrustworthy.

Maybe he meant he doesn’t care about it so he wastes it on super expensive things. Simple definitional misunderstanding

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#568

Post by stoperaticless »

archagon wrote: post #435
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…

The company spearheading AI is blatantly violating its non-profit charter in order to maximize profits. If the very stewards of AI are willing to be deceptive from the dawn of this new era, what hope can we possibly have that this world-changing technology will benefit humanity instead of funneling money and power to a select few few oligarchs?

Trickle-down effects

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#569

Post by mandmandam »

mattmaroon wrote: post #464
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…

These are all examples of people who were not even remotely looking at the sums of money involved in AGI, both in terms of investment required and reward. I used “trillions” rather than “billions” for a reason. Inflation adjust it all you want, none of these passed up 1/10th of this opportunity.

It's possible Tim Berners-Lee gave up hundreds of billions.

Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.

Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#570

Post by dartos »

0perator wrote: post #482
dartos wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard disagree, in this case.

AlphaFold is a game changer for medical R&D. Everyone should be hyped for that.

They also are leveraging these same ML techniques for detecting kelp forest off the coast of Australia for preservation.

Alphabet isn’t a great company, but that does not mean the good they do should be ignored.

Much more deserving than chatgpt. Productifyed LLMs are just an attempt to make a new consumer product category.

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