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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

Is there some other arrangement? It was originally a nonprofit, so there might be something else going on, like board voting rights that he doesn't have to give up - or special voting shares.

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> Is there some other arrangement?

I heard Sam Altman gets to be in the room when the AGI hatches so that it imprints on him. He took that in lieu of equity.

Does he then immediately do an iris scan and sell it some coins?

Tbf those first impressions matter

Better hope it slept through its training on Freud.

Henry, Henry, Henry, why didn't you tell me? I insist on being here when they're born.

Is this a reference to something?

The scene in Jurassic Park where owner John Hammond chides the lead geneticist Henry Wu that he likes to be present when the dinosaurs hatch.

For being a nonprofit, Microsoft has demonstrated pretty well how you can basically do an acquisition non-acquisition. They've got special exclusive rights to certain uses of the models, all the code, and OpenAI dumping cash into Azure.

Isn’t it Microsoft cash that openai is dumping into azure?

Details, details

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft...

Microsoft's margin on Azure spending is around 75%, so their investment may really be 4 times smaller than reported if it all funnels back in to exclusive spending on their high margin datacenter business (I'm sure lots goes to salaries and other expenses too though).

Maybe it is altruistic but their comp structure is bizarre, watch some individual compensation go from millions to $30k and others do almost the inverse:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...

If there's one thing Open AI does not appear to be, it's altruistic. It's just hard, cold business.

Read the article. The non-profit angle was contingent on a $1B donation from Elon Musk. When Musk was rebuffed for the CEO job, he reneged on his donation and they no longer had the available funds to run the business.

"OpenAI"

I guess the name was still fine?

AI is something to be opened, like Pandora's box.

While snarky, this is a pithy comment. You made me chuckle (and wonder what we're in for).

I read the article. I'm not saying that OpenAI didn't start with some sort of altruistic ideals. I'm not saying they did, either -- I don't know either way. But if they did, those ideals appear to be dead and buried now.

I'm certainly not convinced that they are altruistic, but they don't seem to be a hard, cold business either (after all, why would Altman not have taken equity if that was the case).

I don't think that Altman's position about equity means anything about OpenAI.

> why would Altman not have taken equity if that was the case

Because he is already at the more-money-than-god level and it’s more valuable for him to just leverage the “altruism”.

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