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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#71

Post by cbeach »

cebu_blue wrote: post #45
retskrad wrote: post #42

Altman and OpenAI deserve their success. They’ve been key to the LLM revolution and the push toward AGI. Without their vision to make a product out of an LLM that hundreds of millions of people now use and have greatly enriched their lives, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta wouldn’t have invested so heavily in AI. While we’ve heard about the questionable ethics of people like Jobs, Musk, and Altman, t…

Elon Musk isn't "advancing humanity".

I'm sure there were people that claimed Nikola Tesla or Henry Ford weren't "advancing humanity" at the time.

There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#72

Post by benterix »

upwardbound wrote: post #51

Relatedly, dalant979 found this fascinating bit of history: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the... Yishan Wong describes a series of actions by Yishan and Sam Altman as a "con", and Sam jumps in to brag that it was "child's play for me" with a smiley face. :)

The board drama part and key people leaving seem oddly familiar.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#73

Post by Vespasian »

mandmandam wrote: post #38
mattmaroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions. There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.

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…

I'm very happy that the EU got into the game early and started regulating AI.

It's way easier to adapt an existing framework one way or the other if the political part is already done.

I don't trust the AI industry to be a good stewart even less then the tech industry in general and when the area where I live has a chance at avoiding the worst outcome (even if at a price) in this technological transition I'm taking it.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#74

Post by rdtsc »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #11

The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just a for-profit entity beholden to investors and Sam Altman as a shareholder. The non-profit is really just vestigial. I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that g…

> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore.

As a moral fig leaf. They can always point to it when the press calls -- "see it is a non-profit".

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#75

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

Prkasd wrote: post #25

That could be the first step towards a complete takeover by Microsoft, possibly followed by more CEO shuffles. I wonder though whether Microsoft is still interested. The free Bing Copilot barely gets any resources and gives very bad answers now. If the above theory is correct (big if!), perhaps Microsoft wants to pivot to the military space. That would be in line with idealist employees leaving or being fired.

I don't see the point of anyone acquiring OpenAI - especially not Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, X.ai, all of which have developed the same tech themselves. The real assets are the people, who are leaving ship and potentially hireable. With this much turmoil, its hard to imagine we've seen the last of the high level exits.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#78

Post by PierceJoy »

cebu_blue wrote: post #45
retskrad wrote: post #42

Altman and OpenAI deserve their success. They’ve been key to the LLM revolution and the push toward AGI. Without their vision to make a product out of an LLM that hundreds of millions of people now use and have greatly enriched their lives, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta wouldn’t have invested so heavily in AI. While we’ve heard about the questionable ethics of people like Jobs, Musk, and Altman, t…

Elon Musk isn't "advancing humanity".

I'm very far from a musk fan, and if you want to make the case that musk isn't responsible for Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink I think that's a legitimate argument to be made. But I don't think there's much argument to be made that those 3 companies are not advancing humanity.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#79

Post by bbor »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #11

The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just a for-profit entity beholden to investors and Sam Altman as a shareholder. The non-profit is really just vestigial. I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that g…

Totally agree that it’s “vestigial”, so it’s just like the nonprofits all the other companies run: it exists for PR, along with maybe a bit of alternative fundraising (aka pursuing grants for buying your own stuff and giving it to the needy). A common example that comes to mind is fast food chains that do fundraising campaigns for children’s health causes.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#80

Post by Clubber »

mandmandam wrote: post #38
mattmaroon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions. There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.

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…

Also, most of the robber barons of the early Industrial Revolution gave away all or most their wealth.

https://factmyth.com/factoids/the-robber-barons-gave-most-of...

https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/

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