Bill to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion gets mysteriously gutted
garymarcus.substack.com
garymarcus.substack.com
"92. An amendment to any bill, other than a bill stating legislative intent to make necessary statutory changes to implement the Budget Bill, whether reported by a committee or offered by a Member, is not in order when the amendment relates to a different subject than, is intended to accomplish a different purpose than, or requires a title essentially different than, the original bill."
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/rules/assembly_rules.pdf
That being said, it seems that typically nobody in the legislature ever cares to challenge it. I saw it happen for another bill this session too (an AI bill that became something about commercial fishing).
I say this as a user of AI, I’ve seen the nonprofit structure get abused way too much for my liking. Not that I have any solutions to the problem though.
Instead, they are basically government-codified vehicles for tax, accounting and coordination purposes that allow laundering of money through plausible salaries and plausible expenses in the process of doing their stated "good deed". The "good" they do is secondary, as they are essentially entities that need want and are encouraged to self-perpetuate. Remember, the salaries and expenses go out first before the actual charity portion.
Without quibbling over definitions and tax-terms, I'd say the same essentially applies to "charities" and "churches" and "religious organizations".
Obviously, (1) the purpose of this is to withdraw the bill; and (2) nobody really cares about the adjustment to the sale procedure.
So I can infer that replacing the bill with an unrelated bill of the same name is easier than replacing it with nothing at all. But why is that?
Is that a goal here? I'm hypothesizing that this maneuver has been done in order to withdraw the original bill, not in order to pass the new bill. I assume that if the new bill fails, the maneuver will have succeeded.
The question is why this was easier than actually killing the original bill.
[0] https://capitolweekly.net/the-micheli-files-gut-and-amend-bi...
It is disgusting that he is using someone's suicide as a conspiracy theory though.
There is a real question about copyright that still needs to be answered but I don’t think that discussion needs to be polluted with the tragic suicide if that person. It’s nothing more than a conspiracy at this point, something that Gary likes to do a lot.
Every time his name is in the new I 'like' him less and less.
I hope some 'wise king' will stop him, or at least slow him/them down until controls are in place. We cannot have a "move fast/break things" for _this_ newest technology.
I totally admire the 'setup' that US has, making it the 'best inventor' in the world (gathering talent, giving them the tools/funding/environment to thrive), but this reminds me the Hellhounds from Supernatural. We don't see them, but they are out to get us.
I foresee the future.. Altman will be on Joe Rogan in a couple of years from now stating how he was 'tricked' into making the mistake (a la Zuck), which caused upset, and havoc, and ....
As for Diana Papan.. I will go ahead an imagine that she secured the funding she needs for her next campaigns!! And so the lobbying (aka legal bribing/buying politicians) continues!!!
I really fail to see how converting OpenAI to what it de facto is - a for profit company - places Altman in this group of people.
I do agree that they need to pay taxes, equivalent of what they'd paid had they been a regular corporation all the time, but at worst this amounts to a bit of tax fraud, not genocide.
a. Making a bill that was about AI suddenly only about "airlines"
b. this happened just after an alleged call from Altman to Diane Papan (who introduced the bill)
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The best comment/course of action I have seen on this article is from Bruce Olsen who actually took action to get journalists to notice.
If you care about fairness/the law in AI (& society), and have someone you know in journalism, I would suggest you to do the same. Or even just send an email to the office of Diane Papan (bill owner).
[0] https://a21.asmdc.org/contact-frame
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Appendix: Bruce's letter for reference
> I sent the following note to Phil Matier, GOAT California political reporter. Hope it helps.
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Subject: Who Got To Diane Papan on AB-501?
Phil -
I'm a longtime fan, used to listen on KCBS when I lived in the Bay Area. You, Madden, and Al Hart were my favorites. Great, great analysis, which I sorely miss.
Did Sam Altman get to Diane Papan?
Her bill preventing OpenAI from converting away from a non-profit suddenly became a bill about aircraft liens (!) Sounds like the same kind of billionaire bullshit that's going around these days.
https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/breaking-bill-tha...
It stinks. I'm sure you'll be able to do something with this lead.
I don't have any $kin in this game. I'm retired and follow Marcus's writing, and I'm also a citizen who knows how important this is.
Bruce Olsen
The exact legalese preventing or enabling this is unclear to me, but if it became a norm then basically every for-profit startup would likely start out as a not-for-profit taking advantage of all that offers and then segueing to for-profit when big investment/sales opportunities emerge, and at this point we're making a mockery of everything these classifications are supposed to stand for.
Then plot twist, I turn the non-profit for profit, I avoid releasing the cancer cure I promised and instead I charge you for cure.
If a non-profit promised to cure cancer to help citizens, I would want that at the very-least they remain non-profit.
A peculiarity of US law vs others is it follows letter-of-the-law vs spirit-of-the-law. When there is ambiguity that billionaires try to take advantage of, it helps for legislators to pass laws rather than leave it up to judicial interpretation.
This is not close to true. The US legal system has many bizarre quirks (like elected judges, elected prosecutors, and a politicised judiciary) but this isn't one of them. It is a basic requirement of the rule of law that statutes are construed from their text, and not given meaning based on what judges wish their text instead was. People have the right to be able to have some level of certainty about what the law says.
The issue is when there is ambiguity. Judges must then make their own interpretation, and things get murky. In the US, spirit might be used in a hybrid spirit/letter in practice, though ultimately still grounded in literal text. Either way, my point was the role of people in dealing with ambiguity largely goes away when the law gets updated to be clear. Roe v Wade is a popular example of what happens when lawmakers fail to legislate and leave the law up for grabs.
RE:"Rule of Law", most of Europe is heavier on spirit-of-law. Both the US & EU systems seem historically strong on rule of law, irrespective of their stance on spirit vs letter. I'm not in a position to say being on one side or the other disqualifies a system from being a valid rule of law, that sounds extreme.
There was no legislative gap, by the way. Nobody failed to legislate. There were bans, or not (it was legal in some, and for different reasons) at the state level. Everyone understood states to have the ability to set their own criminal law, with relative freedom. Then "substantive due process" (not in the text of the constitution) came along and a group of judges decided abortion bans weren't in the spirit of the law.
The practice in civil law systems, as I understand it, is that the role of precedent is limited and statutes are more detailed and updated more frequently. In common law systems, statutes tend to be less detailed and judges fill in the gaps--so which of those sounds to you like it focuses judges on the letter of the law and which on the spirit?
RE:Letter vs spirit, the EU interpret statutes more flexibly, even if they're more detailed. In the US, judges do fill gaps (e.g. precedent), but are more rigid in applying the letter when clear. That literalism extends to precedent too. E.g., they rather pedantically follow a past interpretation rather than make a new one.
That literal predictability makes it damning for US legislators refusing to legislate. If Roe was clear via federal law, then US judges either have to follow it literally or declare it unconstitutional, and there's little room inbetween. In the EU, judges can more easily go for the spirit.
Imagine a world where random crusading busybodies were actually given the power to interfere with every random business deal that made them feel sad, like some sort of HOA for the economy.
Now that the donations are in, the goodwill from users and regulators have been harvested. It seems like open ai is effectively pulling the rug on everyone who acted on the assumption that open ai was a non profit. The system should, generally, prevent rug pulls.
Besides, the most charitable reading here is "if we can't distribute profits, we can't fund ourselves" which doesn't fit the 100x payput cap. It seems instead a mix of the potential profit being too juicy, and a desire to change course to less ethical operation.
It certainly isn't obvious the system should allow this. Nor is it obvious this is just 'a business deal'.
Imagine if... Congress had the power to regulate commerce?
I really can't tell if you're joking.
No the view is that there are some necessary forms of regulatory intervention, some that are harmful, and a grey area where it depends on your priorities (are you optimising for economic growth, or are you optimising for, say, environmental protection at the cost of growth; both are valid.)
Only a tiny fringe of weirdo anarcho-capitalists think there should be zero government intervention in the economy. Treating any free market liberal as having equivalent views is a ridiculous straw man.
>This belief is totally free-standing, built on rhetoric alone, and obviously wrong (you literally cannot make a free market, it's not a coherent concept).
God talk about the irony. You haven't made a single logical argument in your whole post. Your post is pure ideology. Making bare assertions like "you literally cannot make a free market" or "policies inspired by this are uniformly disastrous" isn't an argument. It is unsubstantiated rubbish.
>Policies inspired by this thinking are uniformly disastrous
People that say this sort of thing have no idea how horrible life was when everything in society was heavily regulated. Do you have any idea how inefficient goods delivery across the US was before trucking was deregulated? Sadly it didn't get done at the state level to the same extent. The result is that it is now cheaper in many cases to have things delivered from outside your state even though it is further away.
>and we've finally begun buckling under the weight of the wealth gap it created.
Nothing is buckling. A "wealth gap" doesn't matter. What matter is absolute levels of wealth. It sounds like you would rather everyone be equally impoverished than for some to be rich and others to be extremely rich.
The average person today - even the average poor person today - is extraordinarily rich by historical standards. That is entirely because of free markets. This is economic history 101.