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Comment by RivieraKid | Hacker News Reader

What percentage of people who use their products care? 1%?

OpenAI is a brand, not a literal description of the company!

> OpenAI is a brand, not a literal description of the company!

If the brand name is deeply contradictory to the business practices of the company, people will start making nasty puns and jokes, which can lead to serious reputation damages for the respective company.

99% of people don't care. Also, they are in some sense open, ChatGPT is openly available and they're capped-profit.

Far, far more than 1% of people care. Sure, they are open in one sense: for business. But in the tech world, "open" specifically means showing us how you got your final product. It means releasing source code rather than just binaries (even free binaries!), or sharing protocols and standards rather than keeping them proprietary (looking at you Apple and HDMI). It doesn't matter if anyone can use ChatGPT, that has nothing to do with being open.

Not enough people care to make considering a name change worthwhile. The net benefit of changing their name is negative. If I were Sam Altman, I would keep the name, changing it would hurt the company.

Elon Musk (and several others) sued ClosedAI for this very reason. I agree with you that changing their name would hurt their company now, but I also want public sentiment to shift so not changing their name hurts even more.

It won't shift, the vast majority of people couldn't care less. And Elon is just butthurt about OpenAI, he would have made it closed if they allowed him to take over.

I think generally zero business damage in name. Only a vocal minority like to cry about it.

> Only a vocal minority like to cry about it.

A very vocal minority can often have quite some influence on the majority. See for example the Wikipedia article on "Minority influence":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_influence

If you have evidence that’s happening in the case of OpenAI. Let me know. Wiki link is useless.

Would you feel the same about a kill shelter called "save the kittens inc"?

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