I'm not necessarily saying they're wrong, but there's really no way to put out a release like this without a "history is written by the victors" vibe coming across.
To use the parlance of this community of people: people's priors here all seem to be that something shady was going on with Altman, but the strat the board took here was so obviously doomed that they should probably be looking for hypos about the board being shady.
Certainly, no one with any sense will be “donating” any money in OpenAI without some strong and specific guarantees of what they’re going to be getting in return. So it can in no way can be considered a non-profit any more.
And if the situation is allowed to stand then I think future donors to any non-profits might think more carefully about what their money will be used for.
And what about the taxpayer? What are these guys/gals fighting over if it isn't future profits?
Has anyone else read the reporting on the non-profit's corp structure?
> OpenAI also created a subsidiary of For-Profit-LP, OpenAI LLC (let’s call that “For-Profit-LLC”), of which Microsoft is a minority owner and For-Profit-LP is the majority owner. For-Profit-LLC’s operating agreement cautions that “it would be wise to view an investment in [For-Profit-LLC] in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI [artificial general intelligence] world.”[0]
I really have no idea why companies like Microsoft are putting so much money into a for profit entity, and calling it like a donation. Am I just skeptical or is everyone winking at each other, and acting too cute by half?
[0]: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2024/03/05/the-untold-no...
All those "donators" went up in arms and threatened to sue/quit when they thought that those "donations" wouldn't return profits. It is a for-profit in all but name today.
this is actually already why non profits have difficulty raising money
many people view charities as unaccountable scams
most non profits are funded solely by the board and the endowment is managed to grow tax free. If you start reading the IRS forms 990 you’ll see pretty wild and inspirational things
While the membership is determined by the executives appointed by the board, there's at least some thought given to the idea of holding the people on the top accountable.
there is a lot wrong with that assumption based on a single anecdote.
private foundations can have a single board member and that board member can be the single donor. although the IRS does not care in granting tax-exempt status, not all states offer a single board member for their own non-profit entity catalogue, but relevant states do like Delaware. of course Delaware does right? additionally, it doesn't matter what a state's non-profit entity selection has as any entity can obtain non-profit tax exempt status from the IRS technically, even unincorporated entities like sole-proprietorships ie. your general person when operating the charitable mission.
there is some transparency of this which is not aggregated, in the 990 series of tax disclosures that non-profits have to provide, this can show how many board members or directors there are, if that's whats important for you to prove. I don't think that's important, but this is about "common" or not and I don't have the aggregate data, that's where to get partial data.
none of these forms tell you the bylaws of the organization, these are still private documents. the bylaws dictate board member selection.
next, if Donor Advised Funds count as non-profits in your mind, that's a slam dunk as those are all pools of capital for grant making run by a single donor.
and where the transparency totally fails is in exempt non-profits, these report only the "postcard" 990-N and is entirely on an honor system that they have less than $50,000 in "annual receipts". these are cheap to create and nobody knows anything about them, what's actually on their balance sheet, there are basically no audits as they are tax exempt and there is no reason to determine what's missing.
I usually don't write this stuff as its more beneficial if the people had more disjointed opinions about tax matters, but I don't think Congress will ever reach consensus on any opinion people harbor so its fine. One of those examples where truth is less familiar than fiction.
The pope is not a model.
They actually do things compared to this "open" and "non profit" front of a technology company.
It would be weird to even ask "How much open source code and research does the Catholic Church publish?"
The church does stuff away for free, sure, but then so too does ChatGPT have this shockingly powerful free tier.
The Catholic church has not only engaged in centuries of religious scholarship, it has given the knowledge freely to anyone. They even set up buildings where you can go and they will teach you what they have found, most people go on Sunday.
That isn't to mention their patronizing of the arts supported the greatest painters and composers that humanity has ever produced.
Now how many hungry has OpenAI fed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Apostolic_Archive
Also, one of the biggest issues that Martin Luther had with Catholicism was that it put the clergy between the faithful and god.
*The Thirty Years' War enters, stage left*.
> Now how many hungry has OpenAI fed?
Around as many as the number of Python programs that the Catholic Church has written with Hindi comments, which was one of the first things I tried on ChatGPT.
There's also a reason why I said "apples (openness) to oranges (doing stuff)".
OpenAI also didn't send nine crusades to liberate the holy lands from the Muslims. Someone probably thinks that makes them "woke" or something.
…as OpenAI is only a few years old, wasn't the first few years of Christianity, before Catholicism split from other denominations, "oh no, we need to stop our converts committing suicide immediately because they want to get out of their awful lives and into the heaven we promised them and they're afraid they might sin again between baptism and death if they don't off themselves"?
Even with the weird end of the "Rapture of the Nerds" (the attitude not the book, I've not read the book), I don't think we're seeing so much of that resulting from AI development. And that's despite more users than there were Europeans in 1500 AD, let alone 1 AD.
And the pope is quite bound by ancient texts and the the pronouncements of previous popes. While no way exists to depose him if he disregards them, having the cardinals declare the current pope was illegitimately appointed and appointing a new one was fairly common back in the days.
A good way to think of it is as the embodiment of its creator. That's OpenAI, and because Sam and the whole staff have publicly acted in what we'll call a "controversial" manner that is in serious tension with the common good of all humanity, folks rightly should view OpenAI's AI black box untrustworthy, a snake oil.
Maybe the AI will habitually pit you against your trusted colleagues when doing so might be profitable to OpenAI staff, the way Sam did. Maybe the AI will claim to be altruistic and then once it's achieved a position of trust it will, when you are most vulnerable, function decisively against users' needs and goals the way OpenAI staff acted against their managers in the OpenAI board.
These people are selling trust when they have decisively demonstrated they are unworthy of it. There are entire professions built on trust that demonstrate this is not a "natural" course, it is instead a path to long-term irrelevance.
You can hire new engineers & they’d have proven they’re working to benefit humanity.
Now it’s owned by Microsoft.
Before the industrial revolution, land was paramount; after, capital. AGI is likely to be as significant a change, and make money (as we understand it today) less important in a similar way.
Even if AGI becomes some form of new capital, it is still the same as capital as we know it today. Until the day humanity transcends and we no longer face the human condition of course.
"Important", but not "just as important". Land used to be synonymous with wealth, because you needed land to support the peasants who grew the surplus that fed your army. Now? Now we have enough spare land to have national parks and substantial re-wilding programs.
Labour is still important, but also not "just as important" — all the improvements from each of the three industrial revolutions to date have been about getting more stuff done per person, and we're starting to get "lights out" factories[0].
My comparison is to say money will be "relatively less", rather than "not" — to the extent that money is a fungible token of power, sure, that's probably still going to be useful to someone at some point — but if we've all got our own personal yachts[1] with all the on-board hydroponics, bioreactors[2], and CNC manufactories needed to meet our material needs, even if money is still around, it becomes no more important to our personal experience of life than it is for people today to be personally concerned that the harvest is brought in on time or that the ore veins in the mine might run out[3].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
[1] Snow-Crash style: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CVN-65)
That said, given we've already got some lights-out factories making more robots, it's a reasonable assumption they'd actually look more like this even without human-level AGI: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/265026/why-dont-th...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aMo2jVKmeoY
[3] Which isn't to say that nobody will worry, just that most won't. Me 15 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil
If humans really do become completely redundant, then maybe we've reached the end state of humanity and might as well just die out.
We're fed to the point we have obesity, but most of us still stop eating at a certain point.
We're oversupplied with material goods to the point that storage lockers for excess stuff is a big industry, but most of us don't hoard to that degree, and it's weird when we see people who do.
We're oversupplied with light to the point that we've got to remind ourselves to turn them down at night, but we do turn them off.
We do reach saturation points with these things, despite over-consumption.
One conclusion I came to was that I didn't respect those people's ability to discern or conclude.
Did you get the argument or not, and did it make sense to you in the situation? That's all that matters.
You know how Hollywood gets computers, coding, and hacking wrong? That's how bad non-lawyers are with law.
Or, pertinently to this case — who knows more law: one of us, or ChatGPT?
We absolutely do make stuff up, we just don't realise we're doing it.
I am fine with people being greedy, but don't say it isn't greed.
A non profit is subject to labor markets just as well. They can't just go back on their implicit payment deals, in this case the payment of equity, and expect that nobody will complain.
Those employees worked under terms of employment that included the expectation that the equity would be worth something.
If openAI didn't like that, then they should have paid them in cash, without the equity.
Its not plundering to use your own labor and market power to collectively bargain for yourself.
“intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power, or food.” (Oxford via Google)
Who doesn’t feel “intense and selfish desire” for money? Who doesn’t feel that going into a performance review?
It’s human nature to feel this feeling, if that’s what we want to call “greed”.
But I don't work at AI or earn that kind of money, so who knows.
but you're not, presumably. And when you _do_ have that sort of salary, your circle of friends and priorities will also change along with it. At least, for the average person who also makes your claim.
I mean, objectively that's what happens to 95% of people in that situation. Hedonic adaptation is a bitch.
Yes, greed is human nature, just like lust etc. We value when people suppress such feelings, but we know everyone has them.
What do you think has kept life procreating on this planet in the face of overwhelming hardship? Lust.
I think it’s one-eye-blind to demonize greed, lust, or any other part of human nature. Those drives are inseparable from us being here in our current state, living reasonably well, conversing over the internet on phones and computers.
A great deal of what has driven civilization forward are the people who are driven by curiosity. People like Archimedes, Plato, Newton, Einstein. Not to mention the millions of curious nameless folks who improved the boat, the spear, the wheel, the book. Folks like RMS without whom I doubt we'd have anything like the current open source ecosystem including Linux. These tend to be people who are not only curious, but whose sense of greed is lower than the average.
Without these folks, it's not clear to me that humanity ratchets forward in progress. If you just have greed and lust, the steady state would be something like power politics of states warring against each other with swords for thousands of years. History has gotten stuck in those states many times, and when we finally break out it's typically the curiosity-driven folks who give the greed-driven folks a reason to invest their money in something other than raising an army for yet another war of honor.
I think the part you're missing is all the brilliant ideas from brilliant people we missed out on over that 2,000+ year from people we never heard of due to science and art being funded only haphazardly by random wealthy patrons.
For almost all of history it was simply not an option to make a living simply by writing or researching. That's still the case in much of the world.
But once we started to systematize it properly, and governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Somebody was paying for Stallman to sit in an MIT lab and write a free compiler. Maybe we don't talk enough about who or why, or how to replicate that kind of success.
if you looked at great inventors say like Nobel, who amassed a fortune based on research and innovation - would you characterize him driven by greed ?
Why ? Is he any different from say Philo Farnsworth, or Louis Pasteur who never became wealthy ? Were they not driven by the same drive as Nobel ?
Is the drive to succeed different for these sets of people?
Truth is in the eye of the beholder
People are very bad at reasoning about motives of others. Faulty syllogism goes: Nobel invented dynamite. He became wealthy. Therefore, he must have been driven by desire for wealth. Same goes for Pasteur, of course. Maybe he was driven by desire for wealth, but couldn't succeed. My Bayesian senses tell me that Pasteur not being driven by greed is more likely, but I digress.
Leaving individuals aside, I believe that a system that doesn't reward greed is a better system. When a system rewards greed, anti-social behavior becomes prevalent, because it's easier to eat others' pie rather than making a bigger cake. In a system that doesn't reward greed, I believe that curious people will make the cake bigger for the sake of it.
I think -but i'm not certain!- that we have english words for those that "eat others' pie rather" vs "making a bigger cake". I think this is greed, and driven, respectively.
But as you say, we are extremely bad at ascertaining motives of others. So either we get lazy and reduce others to bring them to our level, or we are naturally suspicious and do so anyway.
I'd love to know more of a system that doesn't reward greed. We have laws in place to stop outright theft, but at least in countries like USA and Switzerland, laws do an extremely poor job at making certain politicians that come into politics dirt-poor, stay poor, while in office and even afterwards. That to me is exactly one aspect of the system that must change.
Compare, for example, the engineering-focused Roman empire with the idea-focused Greeks.
> governments recognized that technology was a strategic necessity, bam, within a century or two we went from playing with primitive batteries, to nuclear fission, the internet, and now AI.
Governments have recognized this since at least the time of Archimedes, though. A lot of well-known mathematicians worked on things like canons, mines, railroad networks etc. So I think something else is needed to explain the explosion you're talking about other than governments recognizing the strategic importance of technology. Probably computers (and networks of computers) together with the figuring out of quantum mechanics played major roles.
I wasn’t saying greed is the only driver.
Edit: I’d also add, I think it’s a false romanticism to think that people like Einstein and other great thinkers and creators were not without the lower drives like greed and lust. If you think about all of the stages of their lives, and all of the actions and endeavors that led to them advancing their fields, greed and lust would have been interleaved as drivers of many of those actions. Maybe one year Einstein just had a bigger fire lit under his feet because he was trying to impress a girl. Or he worked harder one year because he needed the money.
Then you have people like Edison who were certainly motivated by greed and the lust for power. You have the industrialists like Carnegie who built the railroads. Then you have all of the workers across generations who did all of the work… how much of that work was driven by the “selfish and intense” desire for money?
With respect to lust, I didn't mention it because it was orthogonal, but my understanding is that they're about evenly divided into groups with higher than average lust and lower than average. Paul Erdos is a famous name rumored to be in the latter category.
Restraint and being satisfied with what you already have are the keys to stability.
Life is not overwhelming hardship my friend. It is bliss. At the end is the tiger eating your insides saying what bliss is your life, please become part of me. With words we deceive ourselves, convinced that we are separate from the living world we came out of.
There's a very small positive reward from seeing the number go up, certainly not intense.
* Senior iOS, been doing iOS since the first iPod with retina display, Berlin, details on my website
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a Sam stan or anything.
I think you're forgetting what the entire mission of OpenAI is
Look, the board could have held the line, and then died when every one of their employees jumped ship. But nobody can say OpenAI's labor owed anything to the mission. They're all free agents, just like us. Real easy to say that someone else should take a pay cut to serve a mission you care about. It's good to want things!
Sam, Ilya, Mira, Elon, and the rest of the founding team do.
> Look, the board could have held the line, and then died when every one of their employees jumped ship.
Wouldn't contribute towards the mission, again.
> But nobody can say OpenAI's labor owed anything to the mission.
Sure, they could leave, they're not slaves. But that's the entire problem here, and why the board attempted to fire him. He's subverting the mission by putting in the exact same $ mercenary incentives that cause the whole problem OpenAI's charter is trying to prevent.
OpenAI is founded and led by a charter that profit-focused AGI arms race will lead to dangerous outcomes for all of society. If you wanted to be greedy and max your $ just go work for Meta. Don't be surprised when it's whole axis of control tries to do things that aren't "make my money go up."
Anyhow, the goal of the foundation is AGI, earning the money you need to survive until you manage that does not sound evil.
Immediately reminded me of Succession, where [SPOILER]: Ken initiates a proxy battle for his dad's company, then rejoins the company and attempts to "diffuse the bomb he planted".
I think this is the wrong interpretation. The board had zero financial or power dynamic motivation, as there was nothing to gain. Due to Altman's backdoor dealings and manipulations, it is pretty clear that the board was right to make their decision in terms of being in line with the charter. The non-profit charter is legally binding, and it's possible that the board's action was to protect themselves legally because it's possible that Altman's machinations will bring regulatory action. OpenAI is indeed being investigated. This also explains the board's reasoning to resign if Altman was reinstated. They had zero reason to do that except if it was to protect themselves.
Is it possible the interests of the employees align more with the interests of Altman and that they diverged from the rest of the Board (which the Board did not expect)?
He’s a next level psychopath
I think there were no strategy, they burnt a fuse instead.
- They had a huge funding (>80B?) round planned in which employees could cash-in. Without Sam that round was guaranteed to not happen. So they all had huge financial incentive to support them. Which I guess, characterizes him as a great manager who thinks many steps ahead.
All incentives all different stakeholders (employees, leadership, board, investors) have are all aligned with the full for-profit side of the organization. In fact, that’s the only side.
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome”. Charlie Munger
"Show me the loot, and I'll show you the theft" - Willie Sutton (when asked why he robbed banks, what he actually said was "Because that's where the money is")
why do you presume that there must be a good party here?
Hard to believe this, esp. coming from board members who had experience. Even if they were right, the sudden firing was utterly unprofessional.
Yep, talk about an absolute power flex. You don't have to like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
The only slight downside is his position is evidently dependent on Microsoft's patronage, but I'd rather have one seat in seven and an alternative offer and the ability to threaten to take most of the company with me for the alternative offer than one seat in six with a board that believed they could oust me if they didn't like my decisions.
Note that in the US, private foundations are not permitted to own a controlling interest in a for-profit company, so the example has to be a public charity. IKEA is controlled by a Dutch nonprofit foundation, but it has no obligation to the public except to give away a small portion of the profits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichting_INGKA_Foundation
https://www.economist.com/business/2006/05/11/flat-pack-acco...
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/meet-the-people-taking-over...
Look's like its almost 10 years since he officially joined full-time. We should have a party.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...
Something like announced with this that their new model "Rubicon" had, under the resumed leadership of Altman, crossed a milestone threshold.