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

Evolving OpenAI's Structure

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 746 posts

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#621

Post by jasode »

pdfernhout wrote: post #458
istjohn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the justification they cooked up.

As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves: https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#... "Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great v…

>"Self-dealing [...] convert some government supported PhD thesis work [...] the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work [...]

Your 2001 essay isn't a good parallel to OpenAI's situation.

OpenAI wasn't "publicly funded" i.e. with public donations or government grants.

The non-profit was started and privately funded by a small group of billionaires and other wealthy people (Elon Musk donates $44 million, Reid Hoffman, etc collectively pledging $1 billion of their own money).

They miscalculated in thinking their charity donations would be enough to recruit the PhD machine learning researchers and pay the high GPU costs to create the AI alternative to Google DeepMind, etc. Their 2015 assumptions about future AI development costs were massively underestimated and now they look like bad for trying to convert it to a for-profit enterprise. Instead of a big conversion to for-profit, they now will settle with keeping a subsidiary that's for-profit. Somewhat like other entities structured as a non-profit that owns for-profit subsidiaries such as Mozilla, Girl Scouts, Novo Nordisk, etc.

Obviously with hindsight... if they had to do it all over, they would just create the reverse structure of creating the OpenAI for-profit company as the "parent entity" that pledges to donate money to charities. E.g. Amazon Inc is the for-profit that donates to Housing Equity Fund for affordable housing.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#622

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

anticensor wrote: post #605
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the future AI will be commoditized. You'll be able to buy an inference server for your home in the form factor like a wi-fi router now. They will be cheap and there will be a huge selection of different models, both open-source and proprietary. You'll be able to download a model with a click of a button. (Or just torrent them.)

That can be done with today's desktops already, if you beef up the specs slightly.

Cheap Chinese single-board computers made specifically for inference is the missing puzzle piece. (No, GPU's and especially Nvidia is not that.)

Also the current crop of AI agents are just utter crap. But that's a skill issue of the people coding them, expect actual advances here soon.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#623

Post by throw101010 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #606
thurn wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which of these statements do you disagree with? - Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity - Predicting the future is famously difficult - Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence - Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we shoul…

You could use the exact same argument to argue the opposite. Simply change the first premise to "Super intelligence is the only thing that can save humanity from certain extinction". Using the exact same logic, you'll reach the conclusion that not building superintelligence is a risk no sane person can afford to take. So, since we've used the exact same reasoning to prove two opposite conclusions, it logically follow…

That’s not how logic works. The GP is applying the precautionary principle: when there’s even a small chance of a catastrophic risk, it makes sense to take precautions-like restricting who can build superintelligent AI, similar to how we restrict access to nuclear technology.

Changing the premise to "superintelligence is the only thing that can save us" doesn’t invalidate the logic of being cautious. It just shifts the debate to which risk is more plausible. The reasoning about managing existential risks remains valid either way, the real question is which scenario is more likely, not whether the risk-based logic is flawed.

Just like with nuclear power, which can be both beneficial and dangerous, we need to be careful in how we develop and control powerful technologies. The recent deregulation by the US admin are an example of us doing the contrary currently.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#624

Post by tim333 »

dingnuts wrote: post #26
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #13

I 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,…

to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence! and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's u…

I don't read it that way. It reads more like AGIs will be like very smart people and rather than having one smart person/AGI, everyone will have one. There's room for both Beethoven and Einstein although they were both generally intelligent.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#625

Post by tim333 »

runako wrote: post #66
the_duke wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common ta…

Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised, then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI went into hibernation for 10+ years. There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.

But the Moore's law like growth in compute/$ chugs along, boom or bust.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#626

Post by tim333 »

bdangubic wrote: post #92
the_duke wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AGI is matter of when, not if. It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming. ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall. But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common ta…

AGI is matter of when, not if probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements tha…

If you look at Our World in Data's "Test scores of AI systems on various capabilities relative to human performance" https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/test-scores-ai-capabiliti...

you can see a pattern of fairly steady progress in different aspects, like they matched humans for image recognition around 2015 but 'complex reasoning' is still much worse than humans but rising.

Looking at the graph, I'd guess maybe five years before it can do all human skills which is roughly AGI?

I've got a personal AGI test of being able to fix my plumbing, given a robot body. Which they are way off just now.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#627

Post by blagie »

MrCheeze wrote: post #496
blagie wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this only happens if: 1) You're successful. 2) You mess up checks-and-balances at the beginning. OpenAI did both. Personally, I think at some point, the AGs ought to take over and push it back into a non-profit format. OAI undermines the concept of a non-profit.

With 2, the real problem is that approximately 0% of the OpenAI employees actually believed in the mission. Pretty much every single one of them signed the letter to the board demanding that if the company's existence ever comes into conflict with humanity's survival, the company's existence comes first.

That's the reality of every organization if it survives long enough.

Checks-and-balances need to be robust enough to survive bad people. Otherwise, they're not checks-and-balances.

One of the tricks is a broad range of diverse stakeholders with enforcement power. For example, if OpenAI does anything non-open, you'd like organizations FSF, CC, and similar to be represented on their board and to be able to enforce those rules in court.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#628

Post by rcxdude »

Takennickname wrote: post #604
huijzer wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value investor Mohnish Pabrai once talked about his observation that most companies with a moat pretend they don’t have one and companies without pretend they do.

I don't know how I feel about a tech bro being credit for an idea like this. This is originally from The Art of War.

It's a specific observation that matches some very general advice from The Art of War, it's not like it's a direct quote from it.

Re: Evolving OpenAI's Structure

#630

Post by bonoboTP »

tomnipotent wrote: post #522
asadotzler wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://tre…

If you're in this space and follow it closely, it can be difficult to notice the scale. It just feels like the hype was always big. 15 years ago it was all big data and sentiment analysis and NLP, machine translation buzz. In 2016 Google Translate switched to neural nets (LSTM) which was relatively big news. The king+woman-man=queen stuff with word2vec. Transformer in 2017. BERT and ELMo. GPT2 was a meme in techie culture, there was even a joke subreddit where GPT2 models were posting comments. GPT3 was also big news in the techie circles. But it was only after ChatGPT that the average person on the street would know about it.

Image generation was also a continuous slope of hype all the way from the original GAN, then thispersondoesnotexist, the sketch-to-photo toys by Nvidia and others, the avocado sofa of DallE. Then DallE2, etc.

The hype can continue to grow beyond our limit of perception. For people who follow such news their hype sensor can be maxed out earlier, and they don't see how ridiculously broadly it has spread in society now, because they didn't notice how niche it was before, even though it seemed to be "everywhere".

Post reply on HN