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Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

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Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#71

Post by apsec112 »

llm_trw wrote: post #38
yalogin wrote: post #4

Is everyone now believing that AGI is within reach? This scrambling to have a non profit based structure is odd to me. They clearly want to be a for profit company, is this the threat of Elon talking?

Open AI has build tools internally that scale not quite infinitely but close enough and they seem to have reached above human performance on all tasks - at the cost of being more expensive than hiring a few thousand humans to do it. I did work around this last year and there was no limit to how smart you could get a swarm of agents using different base models at the bottom end. This at the time was a completely open…

We don't have AGI until there's code you can plug into a robot and then trust it to watch your kids for you. (This isn't an arbitrary bar, childcare is a huge percentage of labor hours.)

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#72

Post by vessenes »

The real news here is two-fold: new governance/recap of the for-profit, and operational shrink at the 501c3.

As people here intuit, I think this makes the PBC the ‘head’ functionally.

That said, I would guess that the charity will be one of the wealthiest charities in the world in short order. I am certain that the strong recommendation from advisory is to have separate, independent boards. Especially with their public feud rolling and their feud-ee on the ascendant politically, they will need a very belt-and-suspenders approach. Imagining an independent board at the charity in exchange for a well funded pbc doesn’t seem like the worst of all worlds.

As a reminder, being granted 501c3 status is a privilege in the US, maintaining that status takes active work. The punishment: removal of nonprofit status. I think if they wanted to ditch the mission they could, albeit maybe not without giving Elon some stock. Upshot: something like this was inevitable, I think.

Anyway, I don’t hate it like the other commenters here do. Maybe we would prefer OpenAI get truly open, but then what? If Sam wanted he could open source everything, resign because the 501c3 can’t raise the money for the next step, and start a newco; that company would have many fewer restrictions. he is not doing that. I’m curious where we get in the next few years,

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#73

Post by butterNaN »

taneq wrote: post #67
Havoc wrote: post #35

The whole thing is a paper thin farce. Strong principled stance until the valuations got big (helped in no small measure by the principled stance)…and then backtracked it when everyone saw the riches there for the taking with a little let’s call it reframing

Everyone has a price, is this meant to be shocking? I mean, I’m disappointed… but I’d have been far more surprised if they’d stood fast with the philanthropic mission once world-changing money was on the table.

No, not everyone has a price. Obviously anecdotal but I have met some truly passionate people in real life who wouldn't compramise their values. Humanity has not lost just yet.

(I would say the same about some people who I haven't personally met, but it would be speculation)

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#75

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

ben_w wrote: post #57
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #45

Used car salesman promises to save humanity. What a bunch of pompous twits. In other news, one of OpenAI's top talents, and first author on the GPT-1 paper, Alec Radford, left a few days ago to pursue independent research. In additional other news, Microsoft and OpenAI have now reportedly agreed on a joint definition of relationship-ending AGI as "whatever makes $100B". Not kidding.

> In additional other news, Microsoft and OpenAI have now reportedly agreed on a joint definition of relationship-ending AGI as "whatever makes $100B". Not kidding. OpenAI did that all by themselves before most people had heard of them. The 100x thing was 2019: https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/ Here's the broadly sarcastic reaction on this very site at the time of the announcement, I'm particularly noticing all the…

I don't think the new $100B=AGI thing is about investment return, but rather about reassuring sugar-daddy Microsoft, and future investors. The old OpenAI-Microsoft agreement apparently gave OpenAI the ludicrous ability to self-define themselves as having reached AGI arbitrarily, with "AGI reached" being the point beyond which Microsoft had no further rights to OpenAI IP.

With skyrocketing training/development costs, and OpenAI still unprofitable, they are still totally dependent on Microsoft, and Microsoft rightfully want to protect their own interests as they continue to expand their AI datacenters. Future investors want the Microsoft relationship to be good since OpenAI are dependent on it.

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#76

Post by tmpz22 »

taneq wrote: post #67
Havoc wrote: post #35

The whole thing is a paper thin farce. Strong principled stance until the valuations got big (helped in no small measure by the principled stance)…and then backtracked it when everyone saw the riches there for the taking with a little let’s call it reframing

Everyone has a price, is this meant to be shocking? I mean, I’m disappointed… but I’d have been far more surprised if they’d stood fast with the philanthropic mission once world-changing money was on the table.

If you sell out humanity for a Gulf Stream 5 private jet when you already have a Gulf Stream 4 it’s not deserving of empathy.

“Somebody please think of the investors they only have 500 years of generational wealth”

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#77

Post by rvnx »

Kinrany wrote: post #68
paxys wrote: post #53

I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.

This is pure speculation but being a nonprofit, there's still a risk of getting sued by the public on the grounds of not following the promises of their work being a public good.

Well it has several tax advantages, and nobody really knows how the GPUs are actually used.

Let's imagine some of these AI companies are actually mining cryptos for the benefits of their owners or their engineers, who would know ?

Re: Why OpenAI's Structure Must Evolve to Advance Our Mission

#79

Post by whamlastxmas »

m_ke wrote: post #49

“ OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of libe…

It’s interesting that their original mission statement is basically their own evaluation that by having to consider financial goals they are detracting from their ability to have positive impacts on humanity. They’ve plainly said there is a trade off.
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