OpenAI board shakeup: Microsoft out, Apple backs away | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI board shakeup: Microsoft out, Apple backs away

arstechnica.com

74 pointswhiteboardr16 comments

So the board consists of (former) U.S. Treasury, Gates Foundation, NSA, Sony, Quora, Instacart and Salesforce.

Confidence inspiring indeed. All your data will be totally safe.

> The development comes as regulators in the EU and US increase their scrutiny of Big Tech's investments in AI startups

Done for anti trust reasons, or because they want a bit more deniability when something goes wrong (data leak, copyright issues, NSA connections)?

Hasn't the FTC been fine with the existing structure as long as MSFT/AAPL/GOOGL/NVDA doesn't take ownership? Thats the reason why MSFT made the weird investment+chain to azure compute agreement.

I think the copyright angle is what will continue to cripple true AI since you can't ask it "hey I want like Darth Vader but red suit and slightly more like a power ranger, but still keeping a little bit of the Star Wars asthetic" it starts squaking about copyright issues, I go to a person, ask the same thing, they'll just do it.

Copyright is about blatant copying, deriving from other peoples work has been a thing since the dawn of time, and AI is crippled greatly here.

The other thing is it seems only OpenAI seemingly has scanned as much copyrighted material as they have, arguably more than anyone else. Can others do so legally? It's an entire can of worms. AI is trying to move too fast because of hype, but its not technologically there.

I say it all the time, until it runs locally its not going to truly take off. Nobody wants to fit a billion dollar bill to ask AI to write a screenplay of your uncle Tony's gangster life.

Edit:

Another angle, is the guard rails. I cannot ask AI to give me a regex of slurs so I can filter it out. (An actual positive thing.) It scolds me for even asking when it realizes it could output the nword. This would be a net good thing, and very useful! Hand crafting regex is painful. You learn it for one task, then you forget everything because you don't touch it again for months.

> The other thing is it seems only OpenAI seemingly has scanned as much copyrighted material as they have, arguably more than anyone else. Can others do so legally?

It's not even just about legality. Since everyone became aware of AI platforms are locking down to prevent this kind of scraping (without a fee) again. See: Reddit. There's also the issue of increasing quantities of AI slop that now has to be filtered through.

It almost feels like the early movers in AI are like Napster. They exploited holes in enforcement + new technology to do something that wasn't possible before and that can't be repeated in the same way either.

My thing with AI is, if its smart like a person, it shouldn't have any bariers, just enough of a basis to learn on the fly by using your browser if it needs to. We don't all know "everything" but we can do reasonable research to have some understanding of various topics. Anyway, I agree with you, I also think what we think is AI today is not what we will tomorrow. I also think AI should be just as free as anybody else to read any other content, as long as its not disruptive to other services.

This is going onto be extremely unpopular, but I think an argument could be made that we need to give AI research an exemption from copyright enforcement until we have a significant lead on China in AI development. They sure as hell are not going to obey Western copyright law in training their models.

Time to move AI development to Japan?

https://www.copyright.com.au/2024/05/japan-copyright-office-...

I heard third hand about some concerns that the FCC could get involved for Robocall/anti-Spam/Identity Theft/Identity Spoofing concerns and while most of the offenders are "little bad actors at the bottom", some of those concerns were that a possible starting place could be asking for stricter LLM safety precautions at the top. (An unlikely possible starting place, however, but stock markets trade on unlikelihoods all the time.)

microsoft does have ownership stake

This is boring news. I was really looking forward to another episode of Boardroom Shakeup.

It's interesting that Microsoft and Apple have made such deep integrations and are forgoing any direct control or influence. I am sure there are plenty of nonofficial channels, but it still is surprising.

> It's interesting that Microsoft and Apple have made such deep integrations and are forgoing any direct control or influence.

What do they need board seats for? What happened the last time the board went to war with the money?

Is it plausible both Microsoft and Apple do not see reliance on OpenAI after some not distant future dates?

Arguably Apple does prefer to use in-house models and their OpenAI involvement was said to be more "knowledge transfer" than any concrete plans to rely on OpenAI models. Microsoft definitely heavily uses ChatGPT, but also has their fingers in plenty of pies, including their in-house Phi series of SLM models and rumors of a ChatGPT hard fork (as the one company most allowed to hard fork ChatGPT when they feel like it).

Related/source:

OpenAI board will not have Microsoft and Apple as observers

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40923895

OpenAI board is as odd as the Theranos board. All that's missing at this point is a five star general.

They do have Paul Nakasone on the board now. He was a four star general.

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