OpenAI Discusses Giving Altman 7% Stake in For-Profit Shift
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What a joke.
After all, who cares about nonprofit law in a new era with super high stakes? It’s all about agility now that we’re irreversibly in the Intelligence Age, and if you don’t let us abandon our obligations, we won’t be able to successfully bring about the Intelligence Age!
At most you’ll have like 5 major players.
5 companies doing a repeated leapfrog game where consumers can flip without much effort seems like the opposite of a moat, unless and until they consolidate into a monopoly.
I'm starting to feel some diminishing returns on the new releases, too. The wow moments are still there but fundamentally we're reaching a point wherein even open models can come close enough on some tasks that we can eschew paid models for not-insignificant pieces here and there.
One could say the same about search, browsers, image/video/text sharing, smartphones and yet, moats were built.
Most of these built moats through widespread adoption by being first or best.
And in almost every case adoption requires an investment by a consumer, who is unlikely to switch because there's a cost incurred. Switching phones, browsers, social media platforms come with real costs that we don't see with LLM vendors, where you can switch one with another with twenty minutes of work.
Unfortunately, these LLMs are marketed to enterprise(B2B) and not regular consumers(only beta test at exorbitant costs).
In world of enterprise, switching out to save costs takes many years or even decades as the user of the product is far removed from the decision maker who buys it.
Google has a deal for Reddit’s data, so its models will have that information. I can see this kind of thing being a moat as well.
And yeah obviously you’re going to feel diminishing returns.
Going from 0 to 1 always feels like a bigger step than from 1 to 2.
I don't see this as a silver bullet but let's assume this is true and a differentiator. This kind of validates that building a robust model hits a data saturation wall at some point and the moat dries up.
Imagine OpenAI makes a deal with GitHub, Stack Overflow, and O’Reilly gaining exclusive AI rights to their content.
Now there’s no reason for anyone in software to use someone else’s models.
Anthropic could make a music generation model with an exclusive license from Warner music or whoever and own the music producer market.
This seems like a pretty straightforward plan assuming those rights could be obtained.
- Meta has its own
- Reddit is monetizing its
- Twitter was bought for its
- MS is trying to create one
- Amazon has a funhouse mirror version (reviews)
I don't disagree with this but this is a losing battle assuming the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of web scraping continues to lean to the scrapers.
To beat it means raising the walls of the gardens, making "data deals," hoping users don't move to the next thing, and aggressively protecting data via third party legal action.
This all strikes me as a very vulnerable and complicated moat.
I don't see a way Apple engineers its way out of that -- but they won't need to if open source models are good enough, or if capable models remain accessible (e.g. not first-party locked).
Ironically, it looks a lot like the Maps situation again...
Also let's not forget how corporations invent doublespeak and twist meanings. For example Apple may not resell private data but use it internally. Or it may use it internally only processed by scripts, and claim it is private because other human never saw it. Many other terminology manipulations can be invented if a stake is a few billions in cash.
I expect, if they do find they need it, they'll pitch it as an opt-in paid feature.
Pay us for these extra capabilities, and know that we're training on your data.
Which it is.
The public web is going to turn into even more of a dumpster fire once genai is fully digested by spammers. (Which is to say, once a 14 year old in a random country with third world GDP per capita can use it at scale)
Just my 2c.
“Fifth, the board determines when we've attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology.”
The moat is still the cost.
That being said, most models are based on llama, so it may seem like a lot of movement is happening, but it’s not, really.
RWKV and deepseek are the only LLMs that’re fully open that I’m aware of.
If meta decided to stop releasing llama, that’s that.
Just because they share a near identical interface does not mean they will always have identical capabilities
I was talking purely about reverse situation - when corpos infringe on the copyright of individuals. That is unquestionably abuse of power and in my opinion it is theft. This part at least.
They haven't demonstrated a clear moat yet but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this restructuring occur and then they show the product that justifies the valuation.
Altman equity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
That’s a $7bn stake.
Current OpenAI raise is rumored to be at $150B, so 7% is over $10B.
A businessman lied? Pikachu's everywhere were shocked.
However, OpenAI don't even seem to have the goal of achieving this type of truly human level AGI - their own definition of AGI is along the lines of "able to perform most economically valuable tasks in a mostly autonomous fashion".
source: https://youtu.be/hM_h0UA7upI?t=973
I think the consensus of people with the most valid opinions is that AGI is actually not that far off, definitely in our lifetimes, and likely in the next decade.
I'm personally not concerned if we recreate a human in a computer, in fact we might be better off not doing that. If we can replace nearly all manual labor, all software development, and all driving, then I would be really happy with the state of automation of "AGI" (societal ramifications aside).
It's interesting to see what Noam Shazeer (largely responsible for the transformer design) did with it after leaving Google.. not pursuing AGI but instead entertainment chatbots (character.ai).
AGI may well be achieved in our lifetimes (next 50 years), but 10 seems short considering that it's already been 8 years since "attention is all you need", and so far that's all we've got! Maybe o1 is a baby step beyond transformers (or is it really just an agent?), but I think we need multiple very large steps (transformer-level innovation) to get closer to AGI.
If one wants to appeal to authority, then how about LeCun, privvy to SOTA LLM research at Meta, yet confident this is entirely the wrong approach to achieve animal/human intelligence.
it truly is the ultimate triumph of the VC class.
After all, what are the engineers gonna do? Quit? They’d be replaced in a month, I’m sure every open position OAI posts gets thousands of qualified applicants from people dreaming of FIRE and/or terrified of automation. And obviously they’re way too proud to consider unionization.
It's not rocket science.
He figures out what people want to hear, tells them that, then does whatever he thinks is best regardless of what he said.
When put that way, it does sound a bit sociopathic though...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificia...
Wow.
If the complaints here are because you invested in OpenAI and feel deceived and betrayed, that's one thing. But for everyone here who is just an observer, and didn't contribute to or trade with them, what are your grounds for being upset?
We're talking about a CEO and a company actively trying to usher in a new age of humanity while demonstrating a lack of trustworthiness. I'm supposed to cheer this on?
I agree this move was really the nail in the coffin of trust though. To go from claiming zero financial interest in openai as a reason we should trust him, to (from the sounds of it) about to be nearly ten billion dollars richer from openai, just reeks of bullshit
> I'm worried that this adventure might lead to human extinction
Is buying into Sam’s marketing and selling dreams to MBAs. Recall that, crypto in last decade promised to make global current financial system and banks go extinct… Corona lockdowns were expected to be the new norm… IBM watson was going to solve cancer… we were supposed to go Nuclear+renewable… Internet was going to make everyone own their own little business… Uber was going to make gig economy lucrative… Facebook was going to cure the global loneliness… Theranos was… whelp. Marketers will beat up their drums, money will be made, innovations will go one.
At this moment, at the risk of getting political, OpenAI is at much less potential to extinct human species compared to looming war in EU and ME.