I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
Most people don’t care.
OpenAI is doing this show because if they don’t they are more vulnerable to law-suits. They need to manufacture a narrative without this exact structure they cannot fulfill their original mission.
People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics because ultimately it enriches them — but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a false belief. An American might sincerely believe that gun proliferation is safe, because the information they process is filtered by their biases as it’s important to their cultural identity.
So when your stock options will pay out big from the company’s success, or even just if your paycheque depends on it — you’re more likely to process information and ideas though the lens of your bias. It’s not just being a gullible true believer tricked by the company’s elite — you’re also just willing to interpret it the same way in no small part because it benefits you.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair (1930's ?)
It's only really an issue if you get tricked by a facade or indoctrinated into a cult. For companies that are honest the dynamic is perfectly fine
First being a non-profit, then taking Microsoft's money, then ditching non-profit status to a for-profit organization and now changing definitions of "Open" and "AGI" to raise more money.
It is a massive scam, with a new level of newspeak.
I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).
I usually feel like these statements are more about the board members and C-suite trying to fool themselves.
The double edge of most companies insulating employees from the actual business is that beyond the maintenance cost employees don't care that the business is doing well because, well, it doesn't affect them. But what does affect them is abandoning the company's values that made them sign on in the first place.
No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to be true believers during interviews.
After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And they rejected me, stating that my description of why I applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing", didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling rather than a place of employment.
Having spend the better part of my life in Silicon Valley my view has been gone are the days of mission. Everybody just wants RSU
You could tell employees they will build software to track lock up immigrants, deplete the world of natural resources, cause harm to other countries and if their RSUs go up 99% will be on board, especially if their H1b is renewed :)
Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit’s board is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose even in a decision like this.
It is directed at defeating the idea, expressed quite effectively in the opening of Musk’s suit, that “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”
Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now the core product lost most matketshare and is not what people want.
Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje ts).
There are those charities where 95% of collected money is spent on own costs and only 5% reaches those in need / the topics that they should solve.
Control over non profits is a joke. People in charge respond to nobody.
To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
Moreover, I don't think a lack of prosecution/enforcement makes something legal. At least, I don't think that defense would hold up very well in court.
It's really not - there is a ton of tax law that relies on e.g. the fair market value of hard-to-price assets or if all else fails and a penalty is due, there's an entire section of the CFR on how circumstances surrounding the underpayment can reduce or eliminate the liability.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.6664-4
If you've only ever filed a personal tax return, you're dramatically under-appreciating how complicated business taxes are and how much grey area there really is. Did you know you can pay your 10-year old to work for you as a means to avoid taxes? Try looking up the dollar amount where avoid turns to evade... there isn't one. The amount paid just has to be "reasonable and justifiable" and the work they perform has to be "work necessary to the business".
Explaining reduces the chance that they're challenged by the IRS or attorney general, since that is a political process.
IANAL though. I assume you can make a case though that says OpenAI needs to be able to raise sufficient capital to maintain its current market position, and these changes are required for that, and without maintaining market position the non-profit arm will not be able to achieve its aims.
As they have to act in the interests of the non-profit arm, I assume there must be an element of mens rea (state of mind) - the same action could probably be illegal or legal depending on why it was done.
Source? The NFL did this because they were already making a lot of money. As I understand it, the tax laws practically required the change.
(Not a lawyer, just someone interested in non-profits. I'm on the board of two, but that doesn't make me an expert in regulation!)
Let's imagine some of these AI companies are actually mining cryptos for the benefits of their owners or their engineers, who would know ?
And then, as others point out, they are also interested in other people believing this, whether for employees or lawsuits. But I think that would not justify saying these same things again and again, when by now they have nothing new to say and people have mostly made up their mind.
I am not entirely sure about this. Before 2012, may be. Somewhere along the line 2012 - 2022 it was all about doing something Good for the world. And "we want to make lots of money" isn't part of that equation. Now the pendulum may be swinging back but it only just started.
Nice point of reference may be Sequoia profile of Sam Bankman-Fried.
Do they? It reads like a very average PR piece that an average PR person can write.
"Under the proposed structure, the public benefit corporation, which is a for-profit corporate entity, will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff for charitable initiatives in sectors such as healthcare, education and science."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/openai-pl...
The non-profit would be relegated to work off to the side to make it's impact in the world, where the new for-profit corporate entity will just focus on profit.
I don’t think sama is motivated much by money.
There’s a simple counter-factual for people with this level of ability:
“Making money” can be easily pursued at BlackRock or any number of PE firms.
Creating historic technology, of unknown difficulty and scale of impact, is not something pure capitalism can or is designed to deliver. What would investors or customers buy at the start of OpenAI?
While OpenAI may end up a corporation like any other, it would not have achieved what it had as one.
I've been looking for my broadbrush. I forgot I loaned it out.
It seems we've yet again forgotten that HN is an echo chamber. Just because the audience here "knows" something does not mean the rest of the vastly greater numbers of people do as well. In fact, so many people I've talked with don't have a clue about who makes/owns/controls ChatGPT nor would they recognize Sam's name if even OpenAI.
The PR campaign being waged is not meant for this audience. It is meant for everyone else that can be influenced.