Ahh. What a surprise - no-one could have predicted this
* Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for just $1.
* Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent the web, making it free for public use.
* Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine - "can you patent the sun?"
* Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds could have easily sold humanity out for untold billions.
* Chuck Feeny silently gave away $8bn, keeping only a few million.
... And in any case, this is an extreme situation. AI is an existential threat/opportunity. Allowing it to be sidestepped into the hands of Sam "sell me your retinal scans for $50" Altman is fucking insane, and that's putting it lightly.
It's way easier to adapt an existing framework one way or the other if the political part is already done.
I don't trust the AI industry to be a good stewart even less then the tech industry in general and when the area where I live has a chance at avoiding the worst outcome (even if at a price) in this technological transition I'm taking it.
https://factmyth.com/factoids/the-robber-barons-gave-most-of...
It’s hard to find someone who has gotten to a position where they might have a reasonable shot at becoming the world’s wealthiest person who doesn’t think they’d be a great steward of the wealth. It makes much more sense for a titan of industry to make as much as they can and then give much away than it does to simply not make it.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.
You could prove me wrong easily. Find someone who raised (inflation adjusted) tens of billions, had the opportunity to make trillions, and declined. You can’t. You can likely take that down two orders of magnitude and still not succeed.
People who did some work on their own and open sourced something small that turned into something huge are not even close to what we’re talking here. They didn’t turn down a trillion, they turned down $100k that turned into a trillion later.
It isn’t about integrity. It’s about how humans rationalize. “Nobody is being hurt here.” “This can improve humanity.” “I’ll do good things with the money.”
It’s easy to say people have “integrity” when you just define it as adhering to your belief system when the stakes seem low, not their belief system when the stakes are clearly high.
Oh, but it is. That's exactly what this is about.
As pointed out much earlier in the thread, it's generally the people who lack integrity that fail to acknowledge or recognize it in others.
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
- You don't have to be Jesus to understand the sense of this quote. Just be honest and observant.
They would tell you (and sincerely believe it) that it being a for profit is better for a whole list of reasons. They believe they have integrity. They don’t believe they’ve lost their soul. They believe they’re doing a whole lot of good for the world.
That’s my point. The denizens of HN think they lack integrity for this, I think they just define it differently and anyone playing for trillions would define it their way.
> And those kind of people have difficulty believing this.
No, we're really not all like that.
I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point.
I can imagine a world in which I had made "the right choices" with bitcoin and Apple stocks — perfect play would have had me own all of it — and then I realised this would simply have made me a Person Of Interest to national intelligence agencies, not given me anything I would find more interesting than what I do with far less.
I can imagine a future AI (in my lifetime, even) and a VN replicator, which rearranges the planet Mercury into a personal O'Neill cylinder for each and every human — such structures would exceed trillions of USD per unit if built today. Cool, I'll put a full-size model of the Enterprise D inside mine, and possibly invite friends over to play Star Fleet Battles using the main bridge viewscreen. But otherwise, what's the point? I already live somewhere nice.
> There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.
Does it seem that way to you because you yourself have unbounded desire, or because the most famous business people in the world seem so?
People like me don't make the largest of waves. (Well, not unless HN karma counts…)
> perfect play would have had me own all of it
I meant literally all of it: with perfect play and the benefit of hindsight, starting with the money I had in c. 2002 from summer holiday jobs and initially using it for Apple trades until bitcoin was invented, it was possible to own all the bitcoin in existence with the right set of trades.
Heck, never mind perfect play, at current rates two single trades would have made me the single richest person on the planet: buying $1k of Apple stock at the right time, then selling it all for $20k when it was 10,000 BTC for some pizzas.
(But also, the attempt would almost certainly have broken the currency as IMO there's not really that much liquidity).
Being that rich doesn't lead my imagination to new happiness that I don't already possess, only new stresses that I don't already posess. I don't want a super yacht, a personal jet, nor a skyscraper with my name on it, and a private island is less appealing to me than a tourist destination.
Knowing this about myself, I don't need to chase higher pay or timing the markets to get things I can't currently afford, instead I focus on things that I do like. Those things in aggregate cost less than €12k/year, including travel.
I don't think there's many people out there who would not be tempted at all to take some of that money for themselves. Rather, people are willing and able to rise above that temptation.
For the true believers that's just a temporary setback on the way to becoming trillionaires though.
When/if Altman ever gets out of the way like Travis K did with Uber then the real business people can come in and run the company correctly. Exactly like what happened with Uber - who never turned a profit under that leadership in the US and had their lunch eaten by a Chinese knock-off for years abroad. Can't have spoiled brats in charge, they have no experience and are wasteful and impulsive. Especially like Altman who has no engineering talent either. What is his purpose in OpenAI? He can't do anything.
Or "clopen-source software", projects that claim to be open-source but vital pieces are proprietary.