Seriously, is there anyone naive enough to have swallowed any of their trips? Corporations don't have ethical compasses, much less corporations founded by VCs aka professional salesmen.
I (parent commenter) may be naive but I actually believe the original intent was probably sincere; I suspect either political shenanigans, greed, gatekeeping or any number of other vices have come rushing with success and shedloads of money, and the original ethical stance was not accompanied by the significant moral courage needed to sustain purity under enormous pressure from either less principled stakeholders, or temptation and ego.
All of the corrupting forces you listed are foreseeable, even inevitable given a certain corporate structure and position in a market. It is simply bad business, naivete, that made them think they could realistically achieve what they wanted with a company that survives by making money.
Maybe, just maybe, it's not always wise to blindly take people, in positions of power, with much to gain from your believing them, at their word...?
(And if it was true naivete, I don't understand why the consensus isn't "let the company die, a better one will take its place, these people can't run a company" a la the vaunted free market principles that imbue the community of sycophants rooting for Musk et al.)
Seriously, OpenAI is far more open than people talk here. They’ve published all the RLHF protocols, their models are open to use and they are doing more than anyone else on the alignment problem.
It actually feels like all the other projects (including open source ones) seem to be there for short term fame and profits. While it is OpenAI that is playing on the side of long term alignment of AI and humans.
"Non-profit" refers to the tax-exempt status. "Corporation" is an organizational structure. The designations do not have to overlap but sometimes do. [1] It isn't clear from the wiki page whether it was founded as a corporation or not. The content of the filings are the only way to tell.
I agree, but I am curious and have a question for the less cynical: how could it have gone another way? How does one run a company that requires surviving in a harsh market that avoids these seeming inevitabilities? And in the case of the people running it, what made you think it would be different from their other ventures?
You make it an employee owned cooperative and not a for-profit company and have opt-in to the data collection with profits going to employees and data providers instead of investors.
If your model relies on the existence of a few rich people then is it generally applicable? Or does it only work in a world where most people don't follow that model?
Public research. The only reason it went this way is because it is run by people who have a singular goal in their mind: see the number in their bank account get one more zero. I'm sure Sam Altman loves AI, but ultimately, it's not him working on it, he just sees it as a way to make more money. To paraphrase someone else, don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing VCs.
An equally talented team of researchers and engineers (which, you know, we could actually pay well if the money wasn't being concentrated in these billionaires) could make ChatGPT, Bard or anything else. Hell, they could even make it something useful. This technology is too important to be left in the hands of a few.
OpenAI's existence doesn't stop any government funding equivalent research.
> (which, you know, we could actually pay well if the money wasn't being concentrated in these billionaires)
No. The government prints money and writes down rules that mean it can take money from people who've earned it. Most billionaires are paper billionaires. Their worth based on shares would not pay many bills, and it would certainly not exist once a government started seizing shares from people, as no one would buy them.
You take loans out using your shares as collateral. Why do you think Musk is panicking about Twitter being dogshit ? His shares are on the line. Their worth based on shares, converted to cash is the exact same number. Except that by taking a loan against it, they evade taxes at the same time.
> You take loans out using your shares as collateral.
Think for a second about the context from your previous comment, which is what I'm replying to.
You say if billionaires didn't exist we'd have money to pay for everything. Your latest comment makes no sense in light of this. Who is taking out these loans to pay for everything?
They make these loans to banks. Since they are, according to you, "paper" billionaires, clearly these banks do not have their money, so the money being lended either belongs to you, me or your neighbor, or is part of the money they create out of thin air on the daily (which ends up still being your money, since the state guarantees that this money will exist in the case of a crash). Since it is unlikely that a bank has, say, $40 billion in cash, it is pretty much all created out of thin air, which ends up costing you, and society in general.
Additionally, the focus on "but they don't ackshually have the money" is harmful at best, and a poor misdirection at worst. If I come in at a restaurant with only 3 bucks in my pocket, they're going to laugh me out the door. If Peter Thiel does the same (since he is after all a paper billionaire, he clearly doesn't have that money, right?), suddenly, it miraculously works out. Money is a proxy for influence. Cash is its physical representation, but it doesn't need to physically exist to influence you. If I promise you to wire you a hundred bucks, you'll happily mow my lawn, even though you'll never see a single bill.
Any cursory glance at their funding streams makes it pretty obvious how the underlying business incentives express themselves.
This isn't an "all companies are bad" argument, it's a "duh, that's how business works" argument. If your founding team is full of VCs and they decide they need to pay top wages using other VCs' money, well, maybe you can take it from there.
That's the great thing about VCs and sociopaths, you can swap their titles around and it still works! But, in this case, it was in the order given by the previous comment.
