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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

#91
Hmm, if OpenAI and Sam Altman claim to be a savior of humanity by bringing AGI, but they need enormous amounts of capital, this would be a perfect use case for the world’s largest, most powerful government which flaunts his values of freedom, democracy, and other American values to inject its vast resources. We control the global economy and monetary polices.

The government is supposed to be the entity which invests in the “uninvestable”. Think, running a police department is not a profitable venture (in western societies). There’s no concept of profitability in the public sector, for good reason. And we all benefit greatly from it.

AGI sounds like a public good. This would be putting money where your mouth is, truly.

Unfortunately, many private actors want to control this technology for their own selfish ambitions. Or, the government is too dysfunctional to do its job. Or… people don’t believe in the government doing these kinds of things anymore, which is a shame. And we are must worse off

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

#92
post #42

>> and we raised donations in various forms including cash ($137M, less than a third of which was from Elon) The amount of trashy pique in OpenAI PR against Elon specifically is hilarious. I'm no fan of the way either has behaved, but jesus, can't even skip an opportunity to slight him in an unrelated announcement?

one third nor $137M seems like small thing, this dig is a bit weird.

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

#93

Hmm, if OpenAI and Sam Altman claim to be a savior of humanity by bringing AGI, but they need enormous amounts of capital, this would be a perfect use case for the world’s largest, most powerful government which flaunts his values of freedom, democracy, and other American values to inject its vast resources. We control the global economy and monetary polices. The government is supposed to be the entity which invests…

> this would be a perfect use case for the world’s largest, most powerful government which flaunts his values of freedom, democracy, and other American values to inject its vast resources

https://www.energy.gov/fasst

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security and Technology (FASST)

DOE is seeking public input to inform how DOE can leverage its existing assets at its 17 national labs and partner with external organizations to support building a national AI capability.

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

#94
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Everyone has a price, Speak for yourself.

I’ve thought about this, a lot. My price is way higher than it once was, but still, if someone came along and dropped $10bn on my desk, I’d hear them out. There’s things I’d say no to, regardless of price, but otherwise things are probably negotiable.

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

#95
post #87

As stated in the release that Elon gave Hundreds of Millions dollars to the non profit, it's 1/3 of the early raised fund. So is it basically he gave away money for (ultimately) start up with no benefit for him? Or is it just another tax magic stuff for him?

Less than 1/3rd of 130 million was stated in the release, so < 40 million, not hundreds of millions

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

#96

> Our current structure does not allow the Board to directly consider the interests of those who would finance the mission Why should it? You can't serve two masters. They claim to serve the master of human-aligned AI. Why would they want to add another goal that's impossible to align with their primary one?

I want to put my opinion somewhere and as a reply to this seems like a good option.

I am anti-capitalism and anti-profit and anti-Microsoft, but I can take a step back and recognize the truth to what’s being said here. They give the context that hundreds of billions are being spent on AI right now, and if OpenAI wants to remain competitive, they need significantly more money than they originally anticipated. They’re recognizing they can’t get this money unless there is a promise of returns for those who give it. There any not many people equipped to fork over $50 billion with zero return and I assume of the very few people who can, none expressed interest in doing so.

They need money to stay competitive. They felt confident they’d be surpassed without it. This was their only avenue for getting that money. And while it would have been more true to the original mission to simply let other people surpass them, if that’s what happens, my guess is that Sam is doing some mental gymnastics as to how now letting that happen and at least letting some part of OpenAI’s success be nonprofit is better than the competition who would have 0% be charitable

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

#97
post #67
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.

Yes, likely most here would do the same even if they're not willing to admit it.

I do think part of the price (paid) should be getting bluntly called out for it.

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

#99
post #56
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.

"We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we want to make money" isn't legal. To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.

Is it illegal? If it is, not amount of explaining will make it legal.

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

#100
I think that, even commercially, they haven't gone far enough toward the non-profit's mission. We actually see Meta's Llama's, Databricks MosaicML, HuggingFace, and the open-source community doing what we'd imagine OpenAI's mission to be.

Anyone taking action against their non-profit should point to how Meta democratized strong A.I. models while OpenAI was hoarding theirs. They might point to services like Mosaic making it easy to make new models with pre-training or update models with continuing pretraining. They could point to how HuggingFace made it easier to serve, remix, and distribute models. Then, ask why OpenAI isn't doing these things. (The answer will be the for-profit motive with investor agreements, not a non-profit reason.)

Back when I was their customer, I wanted more than anything for them to license out GPT3-176B-Davinci and GPT4 for internal use by customers. That's because a lot of research and 3rd-party tooling had to use, build on, or compare against those models. Letting people pay for that more like buying copies of Windows instead of per token training would dramatically boost effectiveness. I envisioned a Costco-like model tied to the size or nature of the buyer to bring in lots of profit. Then, the models themselves being low-cost. (Or they can just sell them profitably with income-based discounts.)

Also, to provide a service that helps people continue their pretraining and/or fine-tune them on the cheap. OpenAI's experts could tell them the hyperparameters, proper data mix, etc for their internal models or improvements on licensed models from OpenAI. Make it low or no cost for research groups if they let OpenAI use the improvements commercially. All groups building A.I. engines, either inference or hardware accelerators, get the models for free to help accelerate them efficiently.

Also, a paid service for synthetic, data generation to train smaller models with GPT4 outputs. People were already doing this but it was against the EULA. Third parties were emerging selling curated collections of synthetic data for all kinds of purposes. OpenAI could offer those things. Everybody's models get better as they do.

Personally, I also wanted small, strong models made from a mix of permissive and licensed data that we knew were 100% legal to use. The FairlyTrained community is doing that with one LLM for lawyers, KL3M, claiming training on 350B tokens with no infringement. There's all kinds of uses for a 30B-70B LLM trained on lawful data. Like Project Gutenberg, if it's 100% legal and copyable, then that could also make a model great for reproducible research on topics such as optimizers and mechanistic interpretability.

We've also seen more alignment training of models for less bias, improved safety, and so on. Since the beginning, these models have a morality that shows strong, Progressive, Western, and atheist biases. They're made in the moral image of their corporate creators. Regardless of your views, I hope you agree that all strong A.I. in the world shouldn't have morals dictated by a handful of companies in one, political group. I'd like to see them supply paid alignment which (a) has a neutral baseline whose morals most groups agree on, (b) optional add-ons representing specific moral goals, and (c) the ability for users to edit it to customize alignment to their worldview for their licensed models.

So, OpenAI has a lot of commercial opportunities right now that would advance their mission. Their better technology with in-house expertise are an advantage. They might actually exceed the positives I've cited of Meta, Databricks, and FairlyTrained. I think whoever has power in this situation should push them to do more things like I outlined in parallel with their for-profit's, increasing, commercial efforts.

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