At least, I trust him as much as any other foreign[0] CEO.
For all the stuff people complain about him doing, almost none of it matters to me, except for the stuff which isn't proven (such as his sister's allegation) where I would change my mind if evidence was presented. What I don't trust is that Californian ethics don't map well enough onto my ethics, which also applies to basically all of Big Tech…
…but I'm not sure any ethics works too well when examined. A while ago I came up with the idea of "dot product morality"[1] — when I was a kid, "good vs evil" was enough, then I realised there were shades of grey, then I realised someone could be totally moral on one measure (say honesty) and totally immoral on another (say you're a vegan for ethical reasons and they're a meat lover), and I figured we might naturally simplify this inside our own minds my saying another person is "morally aligned" (implicitly: with ourselves) when their ethics vectors are pointing the same way as ours.
But more recently I realised that in a high dimensional space, there's a huge number of ways for vectors to be almost the same and yet 90° apart[2].
[0] I'm not American, so to me he's foreign
[1] I really need to move my blog to github, the only search results on Google are the previous times I posted this to HN: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/dot-product...
[2] Via trying to calculate the dot product of two Markov chains: https://github.com/BenWheatley/MarkovChain-Dot-Product-compa...
Also, it tickles me to tell Americans that they are foreign. :P
GPT-2 wasn't marketable. They were mocked for it, even.
So it is, in fact, up for debate. So is much of the rest, that I care about.
Hell, capped-profit is more than you can say for any other tech company.
They are just catching up to GPT-4 which was released a year ago (March 14, 2023). Meanwhile GPT-5 has been through a year of development.
It's difficult to walk away without concluding that "profit secondary" companies are fundamentally incompatible with VC funding. Would that be a pessimistic take? Are there better models left to try? Or is it perhaps the case that OpenAI simply grew too quickly for any number of safeguards to be properly effective?
At the top level, there is the non-profit board of directors (i.e.: the ones Sam Altman had that big fight with). They are not beholden to any shareholders and are directly bound by the company charter: https://openai.com/charter
The top-level nonprofit company owns holding companies in partnership with their employees. The purpose of these holding companies is to own a majority of shares in & effectively steer the bottom layer of our diagram.
At the bottom layer, we have the "capped profit" OpenAI Global, LLC (this layer is where Sam Altman lives). This company is beholden to shareholders, but because the majority shareholder is ultimately controlled by a non-profit board, it is effectively beholden to the interests of an entity which is not profit-motivated.
In order to raise capital, the holding company can create new shares, sell existing shares, and conduct private fundraising. As you can see on the diagram, Microsoft owns some of the shares in the bottom company (which they bought in exchange for a gigantic pile of Azure compute credits).
That's not clever or innovative. That's just plain old oligarchy. Intrigue and infighting is a known feature of oligarchies ever since antiquity.
Whether or not it is “clever”, the idea of a non-profit or charity owning a for-profit company isn’t original. Mozilla has been doing it for years. The Guardian (in the UK) adopted that structure in 1936
As for the whole "cleverness" topic... it wasn't designed as an oligarchy, that's merely what it has devolved into. The saying "too clever by half" exists with good reason
Out of curiousity, with the benefit of hindsight; what would you have tried doing differently to prevent such a coup?
I point out this similarity because I suspect that the corporate solution to such "coups" will mirror the government solution: checks and balances. You build a system which functions by virtue of power conflicts rather than trying to prevent them. I won't pretend to know how such a thing could be implemented in practice, however.
If the corporation fails to do what it was created to do, then I view that as a structural failure. A building may collapse due to a broken pillar, but that doesn't mean we should conclude it is the pillar's fault that the building collapsed -- surely buildings should be able to withstand and recover from a single broken pillar, no?
Surely, anyone taking on and enduring the pain of running a company does so for egoistic reasons.
Your implicit assumption is that altruism exists. In the limit, every living being is egoistic. Anything you do is ultimately for egoistic reasons - even if you do it “for others” at first sight, it ultimately benefits you in some way, even only to make you feel better.
A common misconception is that “egoism is bad”. Egoism doesn’t have to be bad. If the goals align it’s a net benefit for both sides. For example, a child might seek care, while parents seek happiness. Both are egoistic, but both benefit from each other.
If it's not possible maybe they shouldn't have set it up this way, but they did and here they are.
> We’re making our technology broadly usable in ways that empower people and improve their daily lives, including via open-source contributions.
Elon Musk is renowned for being an attention seeker and doing these stunts as a proxy to relevance. It's touring Texas borders wearing a hat backwards, it's messing with Ukraine's access to starlink alongside making statements on geopolitics, it's pretending that he discovered railway and the technology for digging holes in the ground as a silver bullet for transportation problems, it's making bullshit statements on cave rescue submarines followed by attacking actual cave rescuers who pointed out the absurdity of it of being pedophiles... Etc etc etc.
I think it makes no sense at all to evaluate the future of an organization based on what stunts Elon Musk is pulling. There must be better metrics.
Enjoys hearing themselves speak so they can't help themself but to share a speculative idea or opinion on something they have little familiarity with.
High tolerance for being part of the out-group or sharing unpopular takes.
Placing logic (or what is logical by their own judgment) above all else including social niceties.
Musk has a long history of shamelessly lying when it suits his interest, so you should really really not take him at his word.
"I'd like some of your turkey please and in exchange I will offer this half eaten chicken bone."