Hacker News Reader

Comment by qarl | Hacker News Reader

> They are putting the company ahead of the goals of the company.

I don't follow your reasoning. The goal of the company is AGI. To achieve AGI, they needed more money. What about that says the company comes before the goals?

View on HN

From their 2015 introductory blog post: “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.”

Today’s OpenAI is very much driven by considerations of financial returns, and the goal of “most likely to benefit humanity as a whole” and “positive human impact” doesn’t seem to be the driving principle anymore.

Their product and business strategy is now governed by financial objectives, and their research therefore not “free from financial obligations” and “unconstrained by a need to generate financial return” anymore.

They are thus severely compromising their alleged mission by what they claim is necessary for continuing it.

Right.

But it seems like everyone agreed that they'd need a lot of money to train an AGI.

Sure, maybe. (Personally I think that’s a mere conjecture, trying to throw more compute at the wall.) But obtaining that money by orienting their R&D towards a profit-driven business goes against the whole stated purpose of the enterprise. And that’s what’s being called out.

Well, I don't think it's a maybe. From the emails it seems clear that even Elon thought the project would flop without a ton of money.

It seems pretty clear that they felt they had to choose between chasing money and shutting down. I'm guessing you'd prefer they went with the latter, but I can entirely understand why they didn't.

I don’t really care what they do. But since they’re now chasing money, they should be honest about it and say they had to give up on the original aspirations and have now become a normal tech company without any noble goals of doing R&D for the most benefit of humanity unconstrained by financial obligations.

I think they're being extremely honest and transparent about needing money to continue to advance their work. I mean, that's the entire message of these emails they quote... right?

I think what he is trying to say is they are compromising their underlying goal of being a non-profit for the benefit of all, to ensure the survival of "OpenAI". It is a catch-22, but those of pure intentions would rather not care about the survival of the entity, if it meant compromising their values.

That may be the goal now as they ride the hype train around “AGI” for marketing purposes. When it was founded the goal was stated as ensuring no single corp controls AI and that it’s open for everyone. They’ve basically done a 180 on the original goal, seemingly existing only to benefit Microsoft, and changing what your goal is to AGI doesn’t disprove that.

I think it works if the goals of the company are to make money, not actually to make agi?

You can say that about any initiative: "to achieve X they need more money". But that's not necessarily true.

But it does seem to be true in this case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com