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Comment by ftxbro | Hacker News Reader

> Btw I've arrived at a different interpretation of the "Open" in OpenAI.

I don't understand why people have to keep trying to wrap their head around the word 'Open' in OpenAI. If you ever saw a commercial like a product has a 'great new taste' but then you tried it and it tasted bad, would you twist yourself into knots trying to understand how you went wrong in your interpretation of 'great'? No that's ridiculous. Same with 'Open' in 'OpenAI'. It's just some letters that form part of the name that they chose for themselves when they filled the form to incorporate their company.

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You mean when they filled out a form to incorporate their non-profit. Which they later turned into a for-profit company after reaping all the goodwill. The “Open” used to mean something.

That is a bit reductionist. They turned it into a for-profit company controlled by a non-profit entity, with profits / returns being capped for employees / investors.

> Which they later turned into a for-profit company after reaping all the goodwill

Did they have a lot of goodwill attached to their company? What did that give them?

When they founded? Yes. The issue was that the big AI players (Google, Facebook, etc.) were keeping their models and training data secret. People (rightly, IMHO) saw this opaque development style as a risk. The OpenAI founders made a big splash by registering as a non-profit and declaring that they were going to do all their model training in public, and share the weights for everyone to use. In other words they were claiming to do something more like what Stability AI is today, except with a stronger legal non-profit organization.

Because of that framing, they poached a lot of very good talent and built one of the best AI teams that has ever been assembled. Then they perverted their corporate structure to be effective for-profit, and renegaded on open access to their trained models, turning into a bog standard service-oriented company.

All non-profit means is a different tax status. Don't assume they actually don't make money.

Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.

> Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.

What difference does it make for a non-public company? They can pay themselves more salary either way. The shares aren't really valuable until then.

As to a charity - if you really believe so. It doesn't even enter the books. Have you not seen an in-person donation site? Someone gives $100, the staff keeps the $100, takes out $50, records $50 and puts that in the donation box. After a few more layers the actual donation could be just $1. I've seen these at your regular big name charities - all the time.

And let's not get started on the sponsor a child that doesn't exist options...

"Open" means: "Open for business." Not sure how anyone could confuse that.

They are not confused. "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."[1]

[1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

I think the strong connotation of the word "open" in the software community comes from "open source". If OSS was called "great new source" and a new closed source company called itself GreatNewAI you'd have a similar phenomenon of people taking apart the name.

Understandably, people don’t like it when people take the goodwill of an established term and use it to fulfill their directly opposing goals.

'Open Systems' predate 'Open Source' by a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_(computing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Group

That's true but also not relevant to current wide spread use of the term. Concepts and common understanding evolve with language and I'm not even sure what point you're trying to make by pointing this out. Your first link even includes the language:

> "open source" marketed as trumping "open system".

Common use and understanding of the use "open" evolved decades ago.

Your comment also tries to side step the issue at heart people are annoyed and frustrated by. The founding principles of the OpenAI foundation laid out exactly what that usage of "Open" meant for their organization and they have since backtracked on their own principles.

We're discussing the use of the word 'Open'. Which was first applied to systems. Then "source", which actually did in fact argue that openness of source was more important that system open-ness. As to system open-ness, that is well understood as open access to blackbox via open (non-proprietary) APIs. Which is precisely what "OpenAI" is providing.

> Your comment also tries to side step the issue ..

We disagree. Narrowly directed and addressing the "issue", in fact.

This. Exactly.

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