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Comment by xgolwks | Hacker News Reader

What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.

This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.

How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.

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> Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast

Relevant thread where Sam acknowledges the plan.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...

it’s not true, contemporaneous accounts disprove it (although that’s not to say Sam Altman is not a snake, Sam Altman is a snake that nobody should trust)

Hear hear. If the AGI doesn't work out, as it likely won't, he can always run for mayor of Wexford Town

The only thing I still find good about SA is his opposition to Musk.

Eh. The petty squabbles of the wealthy usually aren't for the right reasons. Rich dicks just don't like people they view as competitors.

True… but do reasons matter in that case?

the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend :)

> Other than that, child's play for me.

Such an insufferable response.

Conner Omalley character stuff

whoa!!

Posted by former CEO Yishan Wong, no less.

Am I the only one who read samaltman's comment as obvious sarcasm?

Or they're bragging.

I mean no, but it could also be plausible deniability?

What the fuck

Just remember, AI is real, next token predictors are a thing of the past. SA doesn’t care about control, this is for the good of all mankind.

_vomit face_

Sam also ran a crypto scam called WorldCoin. Their secret sauce was tricking poor people in Africa.

Runs, I think. WorldCoin is still around, just re-branded as 'World Network'. I didn't spot the usual leadership bios on a quick search.

Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.

Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!

[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.

Signing posts with a hash tied to a thing that might prove you are human instead of a LLM astroturfing might actually be a good value proposition for blockchain.

Why would I trust the entry on the blockchain? I'd rather just trust the government body issuing my ID. Estonia has had it for years, it's amazing that here in USA people send contracts over email and just click a button to "sign" it - Adobe at least allows actual PKI signatures but there's not really a registry to verify it against so useless in most cases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card

Yeah, the US is a backwards economy and clearly isn't successful with all it's rules and that silly Bill Clinton era digital signature law isn't pulling it's weight. It's been solidly eclipsed by Estonian technical superiority.

I would trust a blockchain more than my government. My government has clearly been shown to be vulnerable to a < 51% attack. Blockchains don't change every 4 years and decide habeas corpus no longer applies to me because my skin is the wrong color either.

You don't need a blockchain for that, just cryptographic signatures and PKI. The EU is implementing a system for national IDs that would enable this, and could be done with perfect privacy through zero-knowledge proofs.

Yes, if every government was reliably incorruptible, they could also work together to build a global human verification network.

I predict that Worldcoin will get it done first, and will be more dependable than most countries. But it could turn out otherwise. In the end, services that need humanity verification will have multiple provider options and the market will decide.

Worldcoin is and always will be opt-in.

Government solutions will be opt-out, and only in the most tedious way: Leaving the country, burning your passport and becoming a stateless person. Not recommended.

If there ever was a moat, government has it.

That doesn't really scale to the 3rd world as a form of identity validation. I'm sure there is more than one way to do it, I'm just saying it's a way to do it.

My body does that for me…

Nope, this is the internet. I know you are a cat in a tube. The internet is full of them, like dump trucks.

HN is dead

september is the cruelest month

It’s so much longer than the other months!

Came here to agree.

Initially I thought it's a bloody stupid idea, however at this stage I reckon we need it or a lot of boomers are going to be ones hotted into singing away all their wealth away.

Aaah, now you see the plan clearly.

Yeah same here. My dad has been talking about the End Times and the Mark of the Beast for 40 years now. Now, in addition to all that, it's Q-ANON and MAGA. Fun times. Liberal police are coming for your guns and your Bible, you heard it here first.

Also a plot point in Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day, where his eyeballs get scanned as a matter of course before transporting a VIP, (sign here, eyeballs here please, thank you) and later used to clone him.

John Hagee is very much alive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee

I mean, on the one hand, sure, but on the other hand - the "anointed one" himself, DJT, is pushing AI, so I'm sure it will be fine. Unlike that heathen Joe Biden who attends more church services in a month than DJT in a year. And as I eventually learned (grew up similar to yourself, but german pentecostal in canada, also exvangelical now), if they are against helping people and against welfare/basic human rights/basic income/equality, they're truly christians in the eyes of those telegelicals. I guess somehow the "you will always have the poor among you, me you will not always have" quote from Jesus means that to be "a biblical nation", we have to ensure there are always poor people..

>ran

Nope [1].

1: https://world.org/

How did they trick them by giving them free money?

They are paying 'one worldcoin' (I've read sold about $50) to places that give zero value to their privacy (too difficult to care for privacy when starving to death and the monthly salary is $10). They are targeting poor countries (South America, Africa).

Once they have collected 'enough' faces to use on their AI, they could possibly pull the plug or keep it as a social experiment.

I was thinking, there is no way Russia or China will allow them to operate in their countries, and (combined) they got 1.5bn people.

I can also see them trying that to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other autocratic ..stan places, where the local dictator would only allow this if they got to use the data for their own nefarious purposes.

I signed up in London. It's coming to the US shortly. You give up very little privacy - you don't even have to give your name.

Most people calling it a scam don't know much about it.

You just give up a little freedom for a little security?

I'm not aware of giving up any freedom. Or getting security. I got about $300 in cash equivalent in their cryptocoins and a tech toy - it's basically a combo app and crypto wallet.

Free crypto. There's a difference.

They don't know how but they know it has to be a scam because it's crypto. That's all the thought that's gone into it.

It’s not a scam because it’s a cryptocurrency, it’s a scam because it works like one. This has been covered at length by multiple investigative journalists.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

TINSTAAFL

That is interesting given that reddit has gone from a cultural powerhouse to something most people talk about shamefully, if at all.

>something most people talk about shamefully, if at all

Only if you go there for rage bait content.

Small subs are better than ever. And no Lemmy is not an alternative.

> And no Lemmy is not an alternative.

Which is sad - I've been using Lemmy exclusively for 5ish years now and the smaller communities haven't really taken root. Reddit still controls the long tail of internet discourse

> Only if you go there for rage bait content

The app is not impartial in the content it chooses to push. I got identified as a target for very specific content and in the context of this discussion, it's the polar opposite of what reddit used to be.

I don't know if reddit is better than ever, but the continued existence and popularity of old.reddit.com seems to be a sign that it is not well-run. (in the sense of they wrecked their UX years ago and never fixed it).

No, Reddit is still shameful. The central issue ruins everything, moderation is placed on a pedestal beyond reproach even when it's trying to sabotage it's own community! The only point Reddit staff will ever step in is when these subreddits try to protest and threaten their bottom-line. They would rather run a pyramid scheme that's profitable, than address the central governance crisis.

You can't "no true scotsreddit" your way out of this issue because it's an overarching issue with the platform itself. Even 4chan has more better protection against influence campaigns, it's pathetic how Reddit's own administration lets itself be defined by it's lowest-common-denominator.

until you get shadowbanned. my 15+ year account is dead because I logged-out of the iOS app and logged-in to the web app on my phone, it triggered the suspicious/spam filter and boom I am dead. tried many times to get it restored, no dice.

the funny thing is the only indication that this happened was keybase alerting me that my proof was gone.

I can login and use reddit as usual, but nothing I do has any effect. It's like I am in a sandbox. Try to view my profile publicly and it does not exist.

I am a serial account-hopper, so this couldn't happen to me, so perhaps I don't understand the point at all.

But what is keeping you from making a new account and rejoining the same subreddits, except perhaps losing a hundred million magic internet points?

Usually, if you have an account that old, you built up enough karma, especially in subs you’re a regular on, to speak your mind and absorb being downvoted heavily multiple times over. Its not worth it spending time to be able to do that again on a site that is increasingly astroturfed.

Small subs are worse than ever IMO. Either totally dead or they hit a critical mass where product shills have come in and established the dogma of the subreddit.

> And no Lemmy is not an alternative.

Depends on the community we're talking about here but I found Lemmy to be a great alternative for tech communities.

[flagged]

Please don't fulminate.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It has gone from a cultural powerhouse for a niche audience to something most people talk about.

Culture powerhouse? Lol, for nerds maybe. I'm pretty sure most of my non tech friends have never visited the site.

The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.

The organizations/nation states/whatever who astroturf on reddit disagree with you. It definitely matters in shaping opinions. It's not as influential as tiktok of course, but that doesn't mean it's not influential.

For mass shaping tiktok is probably more effective, but Reddit probably shapes people more deeply, since there's actual discussion.

I think people are more critical in this discussion though, so that an apparent consensus may be interpreted by the user as the thread being bot-infested rather than there being a consensus. Thus it may be harder to get a result there, and the really interesting people that you may want to affect might actually be immune because they approach the medium as critically as it should be.

On reddit opposing point of views get instabanned. The discussion is just between people who already agree.

Only in places like /r/worldnews.

Also r/sverige r/sweden r/italy are very one sided. The right wing governments of those countries are finally now having some useless words about israel, but it will take a long time before the mods adapt.

/r/Sverige is absolutely astroturfed, but if you ignore the obvious astroturfers you can have real discussion there, because you won't be banned.

/r/Sweden bans people, but is less astroturfed and you can still have real discussion there, except when the drug-liberals (for Americans speakers, think drug-libertarians) and other goons come out of their hiding holes.

I don't think either subreddit cares about Israel stuff at all, and they certainly don't care about what any Swedish government thinks. In both, everyone gets to have their say, whether he's Israeli public diplomacy or Qatari public diplomacy, although bots will of course downvote, and Reddit itself will sometimes remove comments.

*on/from particular subreddits

By that measure, the benches on my local sidewalks are of cultural importance.

You can spew ads and shit wherever they’ll let you, doesn’t enrich the environment by default.

I get what you mean, but I’m still unconvinced of Reddit as a meaningful platform.

what happens on the street is obviously of cultural importance

Yeah? I saw a homeless guy shit into the storm drain the other day. I’ll send you the picture… since it’s so culturally important

Yes, TikTok and Instagram...some of the most valuable media, entertainment and communication businesses in history.

I can't tell. Are you countering OP's point or pointing out that slop is a lucrative business?

Look the reality is yes Instagram and TikTok have extremely problematic incentives built into their products. But they're also remarkably useful, entertaining, and fun products too. Both are true.

Do you think multi-billion-user products can exist without "slop"? What do you think the average person wants to consume? The equivalent of salad? Have you met the average person?

I think people have fundamental misconceptions of the average person's desire.

>The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere.

Most of reddit doesn't read HN, and there 100s of millions of people on reddit, so your perspective seems a bit narrow.

> The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere.

They said the same thing about Quora and 3d TV.

That being said, TikTok and Instagram matter. Reddit probably matters more because it's so easy for motivated people and corporations to manipulate discussions on it; it's even weaker than Wikipedia.

50x as many people read Reddit than post on Reddit, and 10x as many people as read Reddit have gotten their opinions indirectly from people passing on stuff they (can't remember that they) saw on Reddit (but think they learned somewhere legitimate.)

I find this perspective bizarre. Though I'm not happy about it all being centralized, the closest thing we have these days to the very niche phpBB forums of the 2000s is various subreddits focused on very specific topics. Scrolling through the front page is slop, sure, but whenever I'm looking for perspectives on a niche topic, searching for "<topic> reddit" is the first thing I do. And I know many people without any connection to the software industry who feel the same way.

I would love to have some directory with all kinds of active (PHP) web forums. That was the heyday of the open web for me.

Major advertisers are trying to figure out Reddit now, but it's a mixed bag and the costs are high compared to other platforms. It's no longer a niche.

I think they've found it in the form of astroturfing. A medium length post hyping up some brand is so common you've probably seen thousands

> In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram

Insane take. Reddit hosts deep threaded discussions on almost any topic imaginable. In its prime it was the best forum on the internet. There’s a reason people commonly add “reddit” to the end of their search queries.

Unfortunately it feels like the community has gotten much dumber after they banned third party apps and restricted API access. It’s also lost almost all of its Aaron Swartz style hacktivist culture.

Reddit, in its prime, was incredible and beloved by almost everyone I know (most of which are far outside the HN sphere)

It feels like all those hacktivists moved to Discord... Which is even more "locked away" than Reddit.

I miss the old skool php web forums.

There are still many around - most of them die because admins give up or users leave - if you actually miss them it should be easy to find some for your interests

I would love to have some directory with all kinds of active (PHP) web forums. That was the heyday of the open web for me.

Do you have any tips on how to specifically search for these forums? Without just googling for topics and browsing hours to find some. When I think about it, just googling/searching might be the only way.

https://www.google.com/search?q="powered+by+vbulletin"

Nice one, thanks!

I have no idea how anyone could have seriously tried to use reddit and be on HN and come to that conclusion. Yes some of the reddit defaults are slop but many clearly have significantly more value than short form video, and that's before you start discussing the niche communities that live there.

Odd. Your take is the one I see most common on HN. My experience has been that Reddit has gone mainstream and most people find it quite valuable

Really? My perception (and their metrics seem to back this up) is that “normal people” are really on Reddit now. It’s the #7 most visited site in the world. It exploded during the pandemic - not just a site for internet nerds anymore.

Not even a site for internet nerds anymore.

Reddit isn’t for me any longer, when they break old.reddit.com I’m done with it, I go weeks without commenting as it is.

yeah I thought it was going to break during the API scandal and ended up quitting then. I noticed an immediate improvement in my day to day mood when I wasn't consuming rage/cringe/sorrow bait.

It DID break.

A significant amount of the current content is literally bots posting old threads! Whether those bots are run by reddit itself or unaffiliated parties I don't know, but they are there, on most threads, including some threads that are ONLY bots reposting a 3 year old thread that did well, verbatim.

My tinfoil hat theory is that all the "Explain this (very obvious) joke to me" subreddits are trying to create training data for some AI and that a significant amount of the content that makes it to the front page is designed to elicit "Good Training Data" for whatever AI company they sold the rights to.

My perception is that the site is horrifically partisan and punishing for average users.

The key is to not mistake your social circle with "normal".

Truth be told, according to stats, 90+% of the people barely post anything, if at all. To experience the horrific moderation, you need to get actively involved. Otherwise, the site looks like organic consensus, when you don't see the deleted posts and people who got disappeared or driven away.

My dangerous question.... how much of those 'visits' are AI bot crawlers?

Based on their other behavior, it wouldn't surprise me if Reddit both used crawler hits to pump up numbers while decrying AI bots and doing things that broke long-standing community tooling and apps....

Everyone ads reddit to their searches to get human generated information these days. Not sure if that's still a guarantee, but it's a funny irony IRT what this thread is about...

Which is why it's garbage these days.

My understanding is that there are two types of stock, and the non profit controls the voting stock majority. This cannot be diluted. All other stock gives a (capped) fraction of the profits. This cannot be diluted by these operations, but the cap also can be a bad deal.

This is news to me. Do you have any reference for this? FWIW they did a restructuring that got rid of the capped-profit regime very recently.

Ah right, the restructuring seems to change some things:

From here: https://openai.com/index/evolving-our-structure/

The nonprofit will continue to control the PBC, and will become a big shareholder in the PBC, in an amount supported by independent financial advisors, giving the nonprofit resources to support programs so AI can benefit many different communities, consistent with the mission. And as the PBC grows, the nonprofit’s resources will grow, so it can do even more. We’re excited to soon get recommendations from our nonprofit commission on how we can help make sure AI benefits everyone—not just a few. Their ideas will focus on how our nonprofit work can support a more democratic AI future, and have real impact in areas like health, education, public services, and scientific discovery.

The previous structure is here: https://openai.com/our-structure/

I don't interpret that paragraph as non-dilutive. It's to say that the parent is just a regular shareholder currently holding the majority and then weasels away with "more resources as valuation growth" which is true in absolute mark-to-market sense, not relative ownership, but I don't think they have free cash to pony up and exercise any first right of refusal even if they have something like that on a pro-forma basis, so unless the non-profit board is adamant on voting against all capital raises and stock-based acquisitions and employee stock (they won't), their ownership share will be diluted.

Yes, that is the new one.

From what I understand reading Mat Levine explanation of the topic, the non-profit controls the board and has supervoting rights, so it cannot be diluted to be outed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2025-05-06/ope...

Gosh, that was a very hard article to decipher for me, initially consisting of the author's own view on what should've been, old conversion plans that did not happen, and in the end alluding to what actually happened, except he also has no additional facts to offer, and it is his own speculation that the non-profit holds supervoting shares. I would totally not base an analysis on the author's mere educated guesses.

The gist is that the nonprofit still controls the board. The details of course are surely full of technicalities I cannot find anywhere. At least to me, the walkthrough was useful to see what changed.

"Still" == as of the conversion date. We don't know as of today since have been additional capital raises and acquisitions.

That's an interesting point about the different stock classes and voting rights. It adds another layer to how these kinds of acquisitions and valuations might play out in the long run, especially concerning the non-profit's influence. How often are such dual-class stock structures truly effective in maintaining the original mission when large sums and external valuations come into play?

The case of OpenAI is very unique. The structure is very successful. See Meta, Google, Palantir.

Some take the form of different stock classes, with some classes having voting rights, and others no vote at all; other schemes are stock with supervoting rights.

This is 100% definitely how it works. The number of board seats the non-profit gets is not dependent on how many outstanding shares there are.

One of the most informative posts here. I thought that since Altman's coup the no profit status wouldn't be a problem.

It's interesting I posted exactly this hypothesis an hour or so ago and immediately got flagged despite not being manifestly offensive or anything. Very suspicious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054452

Yeah, that is extremely suspect...

Like posting something minimally critical of AWS in its subreddit

interesting, but not surprising

Who actually did the purchasing, the non-profit or the for-profit? They have similar names (OpenAI Inc vs OpenAI LLC), and the article isn't clear.

Did the non-profit buy io using shares of the for-profit that it owns? Or did the for-profit buy io using its own shares?

I want to know why a burner account posted this comment. There could be many reasons, some more entertaining than others. Of course the answer could be boring, but do you care to elaborate?

All that YC/VC experience paid off, they're the masters of gutting things from the inside out in the name of growth.

Man, I remember the absolute hysteria here over the non-profit trying to reign Altman in. You'd have thought they were murdering babies.

I agree with your analysis, but it's hilarious that it's now top-voted, when the sentiment was so negative when the board saw the same thing coming ages ago.

> This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals

I'll add that conventional finance wisdom says that you should only buy companies using stock when you believe your stock is overvalued. That way you get more bang for your buck than cash or undervalued stock.

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