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OpenAI to become for-profit company

reuters.com

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Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#761

Post by pclmulqdq »

mminer237 wrote: post #641
pclmulqdq wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk absolutely has standing, as one of the biggest donors to the nonprofit. I assume he will settle for some ownership in the for-profit, though.

Maybe. In California that has been ruled to not be the case: https://www.thetaxadviser.com/issues/2021/sep/donor-no-stand... I don't know the laws of Delaware well, but I would be surprised if he has standing even as a donor.

That was also specifically about a donor-advised fund, which is different than a nonprofit corporation. Elon Musk's tort would be something like "fraud in the inducement" or some weird theory like that not for a breach of fiduciary duty.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#762

Post by wheels »

apwell23 wrote: post #745
wheels wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weridly this is the second time this has been repeated in this thread, but Sam wasn't even a teenager anymore when he met PG the first time (but would have just turned 20), and was 25 when Stripe was founded, so your story is obviously wrong.

> Sam wasn't even a teenager anymore when he met PG the first time (but would have just turned 20), 20 yr age gap in a relationship is still frowned upon in our society unfortunately. Also I guess you were tracking sam's legal age closer than Sam himself because he mentioned that he was a teenager when he met PG in an interview. SV is creepier than anyone could ever imagine.

I was going based on Wikipedia. Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. But it was close -- a few months, so it wouldn't surprise me if that gets elided in a dramatic retelling.

I'm not sure how it's relevant that you worked in a donut shop? Surely you're aware that isn't the peak of over-achievement at the age of 20? God, watch the Olympics if you want to see a bunch of very determined young people. Or go to an Open Source conference. Or, as it were, YC. Sam was only slightly younger than normal there. Some 20 year olds have accomplished a lot.

You seem to really want to create a villain out of the situation, which is kind of weird. Mentors and investors are usually older, and 20 years isn't rare. That's hardly Silicon Valley specific.

You also repeated the false thing about him getting a stake in Stripe as a teenager again. Again, Stripe came into existence when Sam was 25. There's just no version of that story that works. I don't know about Sam's Stripe investment, but at that point he was already around YC a lot, even though Loopt was still going. He probably just got in with other angel investors. But at that point he was in his mid-20s and running a Sequoia-backed company, so that's not especially weird.

(There's genuine stuff to be critical of in the trajectory of OpenAI, but this seems like a really weird spot to latch onto.)

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#763

Post by apwell23 »

wheels wrote: post #762
apwell23 wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sam wasn't even a teenager anymore when he met PG the first time (but would have just turned 20), 20 yr age gap in a relationship is still frowned upon in our society unfortunately. Also I guess you were tracking sam's legal age closer than Sam himself because he mentioned that he was a teenager when he met PG in an interview. SV is creepier than anyone could ever imagine.

I was going based on Wikipedia. Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. But it was close -- a few months, so it wouldn't surprise me if that gets elided in a dramatic retelling. I'm not sure how it's relevant that you worked in a donut shop? Surely you're aware that isn't the peak of over-achievement at the age of 20? God, watch the Olympics if you want to see a…

> Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview.

PG:

"Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must have been like when he was 19.'"

Are you being sarcastic by comparing sam with olympians?

What exactly did Sam accomplish when he met PG to declared as "bill gates" or to get 50 million for his startup within 15 minutes of meeting PG ?

He was practicing being "Michael jordan of listening" ( another PG quote) since he was 5 like olympians ?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#764

Post by exceptione »

pj_mukh wrote: post #758
exceptione wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funnel $10B in housing to Los Angeles and you'll build less than 100 units of housing, because the inflationary push of that money would balloon the cost of per unit housing. I don't want to imagine the effect of that on middle class housing. Doesn't make sense to me. An uptick in construction work will not be an inflation balloon. More disposable income doesn't mean 1:1 more spending. If you build a lot of (social…

"An uptick in construction work will not be an inflation balloon. " There's a massive shortage in construction workers [1], so yes there will be? The few construction workers we do have can demand higher wages (yay!) but then will they be outbidding other mid-income folks for housing with those increased wages? Sounds like an inflation spiral to me. My statement wasn't against social housing, I love social housing. W…

On a macro scale, that has hardly any impact, and I think it would be even immeasurable.

It is rather the other way around. Higher rents / house prices will make sure only people with higher wages can afford to live there. That means your bagel or coffee will be more expensive there too.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#765

Post by eberfreitas »

grey-area wrote: post #573
pj_mukh wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tec…

He didn’t build it.

Can we please, move this comment to the top?

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#766

Post by consteval »

Sakos wrote: post #620
consteval wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No you can have AI. Just pay a license for people's content if you want to use it in your orphan crushing machine. It's what everyone else does. The entitlement has to stop.

That's just not feasible and you know it. That just means companies like Google and OpenAI (with billions of dollars from companies like MS and Apple) will monopolize AI. This isn't better for everybody else. It just means we're subject to the whims of these companies. You're advocating for destroying all AI or ensuring a monopoly by corporations. Whose side are you actually on?

> That's just not feasible and you know it

Irrelevant. The law does not care about feasibility of breaking it.

If I decide to run a hit man business, that's also infeasible. Dealing with the arrests and fines would be too much. The conclusion then is not to bend the law to make murder legal. The conclusion is my business is illegitimate, and it's the civic duty of my Country to make sure it fails.

> Whose side are you actually on?

The people making the content that corps are profiting big off of. They should pay a license.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#767

Post by wheels »

apwell23 wrote: post #763
wheels wrote: post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going based on Wikipedia. Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. But it was close -- a few months, so it wouldn't surprise me if that gets elided in a dramatic retelling. I'm not sure how it's relevant that you worked in a donut shop? Surely you're aware that isn't the peak of over-achievement at the age of 20? God, watch the Olympics if you want to see a…

> Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. PG: "Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must ha…

You're really just making shit up here. He didn't get $50 million for his startup within 15 minutes of meeting Paul Graham. YC's deal back then was for about $15k per startup for 7%. Loopt didn't even over its several years raise $50 million -- it was around $30 million, and that happened over a space of several rounds over several years.

I was in YC a few batches later and met Paul Graham and Sam in that era. I remember walking around San Fracisco with Sam and him telling me about Loopt. He was a few years younger than me (I was 29, he was 24), and I remember being impressed by him.

And it's possible that Sam listed his age at 19 on his YC application, and that's what PG was going on. He would have probably still been 19 when he filled out the application. Again, this isn't hard to verify -- his birthday is on Wikipedia, and he was in the summer batch of 2005. Interviews are about a month before the batch starts. But there's not really a lot of my point that hinges on if it was a month before or a month after his birthday when they met. More my point was that the stuff about him investing in Stripe as a teenager because PG "gave" it to him is completely bogus.

It really seems like you have an axe to grind here, and I'm not completely sure why. Again, I think some of the stuff that's happened later in OpenAI is worthy of criticism, but that doesn't mean you have to reinterpret everything that happened before that through some bogyman lens.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#768

Post by talldayo »

hackernewds wrote: post #712
talldayo wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I would take a private space agency 7 days out of the week with that kind of capital. We have no fundamental proof that LLMs will scale to the intelligence levels that we imagine in our heads. The industry application for LLMs is even weaker than computer vision, and the public sentiment is almost completely against it. Sam's product is hype; eventually people are going to realize that Q* and Strawberry…

This comment reeks of Steve Ballmer opinion of Apple and the Internet early days. If you work at any decent technology company, you realize AI applications every where and the pending mass layoffs. Or nimbler startups replicating their work more efficiently.

This comment reeks of Tim Cook's opinion of OpenAI in the late days of Apple's inability to create anything innovative in-house.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#769

Post by apwell23 »

wheels wrote: post #767
apwell23 wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sam was 20 when his YC batch started, and also would have already been 20 for the YC interview. PG: "Sam Altman, the co-founder of Loopt, had just finished his sophomore year when we funded them, and Loopt is probably the most promising of all the startups we've funded so far. But Sam Altman is a very unusual guy. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking 'Ah, so this is what Bill Gates must ha…

You're really just making shit up here. He didn't get $50 million for his startup within 15 minutes of meeting Paul Graham. YC's deal back then was for about $15k per startup for 7%. Loopt didn't even over its several years raise $50 million -- it was around $30 million, and that happened over a space of several rounds over several years. I was in YC a few batches later and met Paul Graham and Sam in that era. I reme…

> It really seems like you have an axe to grind here, and I'm not completely sure why.

Yea because ppl getting unfair leg up because they were chosen as the "next bill gates" by a SV white male because they look like them is merely an "axe to grind".

You still haven't answered why you think he is like an olympian when he met PG other than "He is impressive because he is impressive".

I feel like i am in some kind of weirdo land here with totally ridiculous boasts about someone that no one can name an actual accomplishment

> like an olympian

> michaal jordan of listening

> bill gates at 19

> his brain will be cloned by 2029

You guys need to send this to HBO for next Silicon Valley season.

Re: OpenAI to become for-profit company

#770

Post by salad-tycoon »

nejkbnek wrote: post #687
cdchn wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 which is laid plainly in their mission statement) And now they want to cast off any pretense of that former altruistic yolk now that they have a new,…

Just FYI it's "yoke" when it's a burden, "yolk" when it's an egg

Maybe, they do seem to have egg on their face.
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