OpenAI as we knew it is dead | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI as we knew it is dead

vox.com

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> The maker of ChatGPT promised to share its profits with the public. But Sam Altman just sold you out.

How can we still believe that companies are not there to sell us out, really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

you used to believe companies were benevolent?

> sell us out

What's the "us" in the sentence?

Companies exist to make their owners money, by providing goods and services to customers.

Well, it used to be non-profit which should not have goal like that. And changing that was "selling us out".

You are correct that non-profits have different purposes.

Is "us" the 8 billion people on earth, I assume?

Anyone who would want to benefit from their work with reasonable cost and that their work would be for the best of public, not for the owners of the company.

The org has dif't purposes but the people staffing them often don't.

Hopefully the DOJ and the various AGs involved are going to be proactive here and stop this.

If non profits are allowed to become for profit entities it breaks the entire system. Then every startup should start as a non profit, allow everyone to write off all of their investments, operate with no taxes, and once they are big enough switch to a for profit entity.

And claim the copyright abuse is fair use for research purposes.

They were publicly demonstrating the exact same thing now called "copyright abuse" with the Davinci model, nobody seemed to care until ChatGPT came out for free without needing paid API access.

That doesn't make it legally ok, but it does make their initial (though not subsequent) surprise forgivable.

Their own later self, and everyone else copying the same behaviour, not so much.

I got the impression that existing investors were potentially getting screwed here too, but if Altman is getting ownership are they getting chunks as well?

Money always wins.

There’s a sort of irresistible momentum that happens when enough money pools together, and no person can resist it. You see it with apple’s customer-hostile app store policies that are a result of the money being too good, and now with OpenAI.

I wonder how this problem ever gets solved at the level of society. Enough money pooling together always wins out over public interest.

Isn't that basically what antitrust is supposed to solve?

And it works when leaders aren’t completely bought and paid for.

AI is pretty much the culmination of technocapital, so frankly the idea that a nonprofit without deep government support would be the leading AI company is a little unrealistic in the first place. Especially considering the heavy capital requirements to even make this stuff functional in the first place.

I think you’d need a government organization on the level of Manhattan Project to really compete, but unfortunately there don’t seem to be many Robert Oppenheimers and Vannevar Bushes working in the public sector anymore.

None of those people were in the public sector until the project was created and drew them in.

But I agree, leaving this work up to shit eating PE firms and smarmy VC bros is asking for disaster.

That’s a good point, you’d really need a massive government project to be started first in order to draw away the talent. Hopefully that becomes possible without a looming war as impetus…

The public has no stomach for collective action anymore. All for one and one for all? Nah, man, what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine.

Agreed but historically at least this came from a strong executive, not from collective action. FDR, for example.

Government is the avatar of collective action. People vote for and otherwise tolerate a strong executive when they believe in "all for one and one for all". FDR was elected by a landslide on a platform of heavy government interventionism to address the Great Depression.

Totally agree.

I think with the suburban explosion and rise of the personal automobile we’ve seen individualism trump collectivism. I don’t think we’ll ever see a new deal or social security like initiative in America until the power structures in our society are changed fundamentally.

What specifically is the problem you are looking to solve?

Other commenters are quick to point out that commercial interests always win, which is somewhat true, but misses an important point: OpenAI wasn’t originally a commercial company. This is basically someone stealing a nonprofit organization — structurally not dissimilar to someone robbing the funds a charity for children with cancer.

I don’t get why people shrug, or even celebrate this, instead of demanding jail time.

Many people like to think they're on the same team as winners, even if those winners couldn't care less or even have contempt for them. Acknowledging the naked truth of power is too depressing for them.

See also: Sports, politics.

Also in this case, in this forum, I think you also have some people who are suffering from a kind of techno-fetishism that desperately wants to see realized one of the technologies they read about in sci-fi, so they're willing to align with anything or they think will do that.

I honestly wasn't aware that OpenAI was registered as non-profit, and I assumed it's a normal company with a misleading name.

If this is legal than isn't this the best way to do a startup from now on?

OpenAI died when they decided to become ClosedAI, after that point anybody who kept believing it was still working on its advertised grandiose goals was fooling themselves.

Sam Altman looks more and more like Lex Luthor in the last Superman franchise... He is not releasing any kind of alien creature on the world, of course... Wait...

Nah, that's Musk 100%. Sam is still in the small leagues.

AI is a tool which will be weaponized / monetized to its maximum potential against perceived enemies and for the best profits

Just like every other technology ever?

yes

Was it ever truly alive? I guess they released the Whisper weights at one point -- not even the data.

Also it seems the 'muh ai safety' doomerism was indeed just a calculated bit to throw off the competition.

At least the current situation better reflects the reality. They're in it to make money, externalities be damned.

Money over everything.

[flagged]

Can you share a public video that demonstrates this? I've never seen it. Not saying it can't be true.

Here's a Reddit comment! https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

One could argue reclaiming a company from a multinational corporate conglomerate back into founder hands is hardly “evil”.

And breaking a promise, siphoning money from a nonprofit, and making billions in the process.

Just an example of unapologetically going “Founder Mode”.

Wow he is very good at taking over companies

The tone of that comment does sound a bit "dick-ish", but I can't be totally sure without knowing his history with that CEO. Thanks and I'll keep an eye out for more evidence like this. In videos he seems pretty nice to me, although it could of course be a facade.

Did you read the article? The hubris and avarice required here doesn’t develop overnight.

And how is that you know Sam?

One does not need to know someone personally to assess their character based on their public actions.

A typical one sided, opinionated view from Vox that has made modern media the wasteland it is. The article seems to be intent on rewriting history. Apparently due to “Microsoft” Sam Altman came back to OpenAI after his ouster. There was also the added fact that the CTO Greg resigned, quickly followed by the leads of GPT-4, quickly followed by an employee petition that most openAI employees signed. Sam has clearly inspired quite a bit of loyalty from his team (or at least from his top lieutenants that inspired loyalty from the entire team).

Apparently OpenAI needs to be regulated more to ensure AI benefits everybody. As opposed to now where AI only benefits those that can pay 20$ a month? OpenAI has repeatedly stated their goal is “intelligence too cheap to meter”, which seems fine to me with respect to the ephemeral goal of “AI benefitting society”. If they make some profits along the way (which they apparently are not right now), that’s fine too. Compare this to NVIDIA, which is blatantly overcharging 30,000$+ for a single data center GPU when it could be 5000$, and I wouldn’t say OpenAI is even among the most greedy companies in the space.

The spin is going to create a new orbit.

> I wouldn’t say OpenAI is even among the most greedy companies in the space.

Sure, that's unchecked capitalism for you, but it's not a compelling reason for giving them a pass or looking the other way.

From my perspective: another global & critical technology/business with an LGBTQIA+ person in charge -- there are worse things that can happen.

How is that relevant?

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