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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

The name "OpenAI" still really bugs me. But it seems likely that turning into a for-profit corporation was critical to OpenAI's subsequent success.

It let them raise enough money to pay for top-tier infrastructure. It also gave them access to stock options, to pay for recruiting a top-tier research and engineering team. I don't think we would have GPT-4 and the OpenAI API if they hadn't turned into a for-profit company.

And honestly, compare what OpenAI has done for AI research to the impact of any nonprofit. What nonprofit has done the most for AI research? Stanford? MIT? I'm not sure what the top AI achievement from any nonprofit is, in the modern era. It's like nonprofits can do a good job of kickstarting a field (AlexNet, early PyTorch), but once enough money and attention goes into it, they have to hand the baton to for-profit companies.

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It seems like most fundamental researches were published by Google, not openai. Transformers architecture is also designed by Google…

These are superficial observations, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

Also, they bought ai.com recently if that makes you feel better :) maybe they will drop the “open” part of their name soon.

I don't disagree, Google has also made great AI advances and arguably more fundamental ones, with the transformer, Tensorflow, and Keras.

But Google is also a for-profit, so that fits in with my thesis here that when corporations start having an incentive to put a lot of money into an area, the cutting edge research starts to happen in for-profit companies, and nonprofits have trouble keeping up.

The problem with for-profit is that it informs priorities and incentives, usually not in the direction of societal benefit. That’s why the phrase “selling one’s soul” is being applied.

Well, Adam Smith argued that companies following selfish priorities and benefits is in the direction of societal benefit. (As long as all externalities like environmental pollution are priced in, but that isn't really relevant for OpenAI.)

It's really the bedrock of modern economics. Invisible hand of the market and all that.

Smith argued that this was in aggregate to the benefit of society, including competition between selfish businesses. He argued that monopolies are ultimately damaging to society.

The entity that first achieves real general AI has the potential to achieve a decisive strategic advantage that will allow it to shape the world in its image, free of competition. Traditional economics might not really apply anymore - the values that are built into the constructed intelligence will be paramount.

It won’t just all work out in the wash if we end up creating a superintelligence with values that are not to the benefit of humanity at-large.

> The entity that first achieves real general AI has the potential to achieve a decisive strategic advantage that will allow it to shape the world in its image, free of competition.

The focus on "general AI" is so so so shortsighted. You don't need general AI. Really, you don't want it. It's far better to have tools that you can control and direct that are specialized in specific areas. Specialized AI tooling is a force multiplier that can be leveraged however you want, general AI is an employee that might disagree with your goals.

I'm not scared of a superintelligence, I'm scared of AI being O'Brien's boot stomping on the face of humanity forever, in service to the corporations that invent it first.

Yes, the guy that hated landlords and considered rent seeking immoral would love the enclosure of the commons of all human knowledge and rent seeking on their imaginary IP rights.

Economics is literally a meme. Major corporations will go out of their way to harm society even if it reduces their profits.

It's not a "for-profit" (at least strictly, unless you are intentionally muddying the waters to support your argument). It's "capped-profit": https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/openai-shifts-from-nonprof...

The cap is so high as to be meaningless. It's for profit.

So high you can see straight through the bs.

I wonder: What’s the cap, and how does it imply behaviour that differs from that of a for-profit?…

Capped at 100x profit from investment...

I'm seeing parallels to the concept of "attention" in AI. Perhaps we can build an attention function that isn't "make the most profit" and have a non-profit follow it.

Since the beginning, I've seen the "OpenAI" name as a giant Open-Washing. That works just like Green-Washing, and that works. I have no respect for this practice.

It would probably be too expensive now to rebrand themselves due to confusion. Honestly maybe they should have called themselves netai or alphaai

idk, 'DarkMoneyAI' has a ring to it :)

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