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Comment by ClarityJones | Hacker News Reader

> more than any charity has ever raised

The Novo Nordisk foundation has a $120 Billion endowment, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has $50 Billion, the Welcome Trust has $42 Billion, ... There are about 19 charities that still have more than $10 Billion, let alone those who have raised (and spent) that during their existence.

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

> an uncommonly huge raise even among _for-profit_ companies where investors expect returns.

So, offer a return on investment. Charities that take loans pay interest. Charities that hire staff pay salaries. What's with this idea that charities cannot pay a reasonable market rate for services (e.g. short-term funding)?

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I stand corrected, as stated my claim about charity OOM was wrong. Still, I don’t think I need to update much.

Because:

> So, offer a return on investment

This is precisely what they did; Microsoft’s investment is an extremely funky capped profit structure. They did it this way to minimize their cost of capital.

I’m not really clear what your concrete proposal is for raising $10b as a non-profit, perhaps you could flesh that out?

If you’re talking about financing a potentially decade- long project on tens of billions of dollars of pure debt, again that is… not a feasible structure.

> I’m not really clear what your concrete proposal is for raising $10b as a non-profit, perhaps you could flesh that out?

OpenAI, Inc. (the nonprofit) could have partnered with Microsoft directly.

To be fair, maybe Microsoft may have required that certain code be kept secret in a way that OpenAI's charitable purpose would not have allowed. However, that would just suggest that the deal was not open and not in the best interests of the charity.

Moreover, I'm skeptical that OpenAI Global LLC paid fair market value to OpenAI, Inc. for the assets it received. Sure, the GPT-2 itself was open sourced, but a lot of the value of the business lied in other things: all of the datasets that were used, the history of training, what worked and what didn't work, the accessory utilities, emails, documents / memos, the brand, etc. The staff is a little tricky, because - sure - they are ostensibly free to leave, but there's no doubt there's a ton of value in the staff.

If OpenAI, Inc. (non-profit) put itself on the open market with the proceeds to go to another charity, what do you think Microsoft would have paid to buy the business? I bet it would have been a lot more than OpenAI Global LLC paid to OpenAI, Inc for the same assets...

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