The current deal with MSFT is cut by Sam is in such a way that Microsoft has huge leverage. Exclusive access, exclusive profit. And after all the profit limit is reached OpenAI sill need to be sold to msft to survive. This is like a worst deal for OpenAI whose goal is to do stuff open source way and it can’t do so due to this deal. If it is not for the MSFt deal, OpenAI could have open sourced and might have resorted to crowdsourcing which might have helped humanity. Also, quickly reaching profit goals is only for good for MSFT. There is no need to actually send money to OpenAI team, just provide operating expenses with 25% profit and take 75% profit. OpenAI has built a great software due to years of work and is being simply being milked by MSFt when the time comes for taking profit.
And SAM allowed all this under his nose. Making sure OpenAI is ripe for MSFT takeover. This is a back channel deal for takeover. What about the early donors who donated with humanity goal whose funding made it all possible?
I am not sure Sam has any contribution to the OpenAI Software but he gives the world an impression that he owns that and built the entire thing by himself and not giving any attribution to fellow founders.
I'm just curious how you envision ai helping people in the future? There are countless technologies that are amazing in scope but never get any traction due to not being able to market, sustain and promote themselves properly.
Additionally, how do we get there and who funds it in the long term? When you actually consider how much compute power is required to get us to this point of a "pretty decent chat bot/text generator". It doesn't really seem like we are even 20% of the way to agi. If that's true then no amount of crowdfunding is going to get it even remotely close to providing the resources to power something truly revolutionary.
Don't get me wrong I agree with some of the points you've made and Microsoft are certainly in it for themselves but I also believe that they would like to avoid owning Openai as they'd not want to position themselves clearly as the sole caretaker of ai due to the amount of scrutiny they'd be under.
All that is to say, whether you like him or not, he has taken interest in ai and Openai as well as being a leader on discussing the ethics of developing ai to stratospheric levels that has made many industries and governments take notice.
Sam definitely discussed about ethics and stuff (at stratospheric level) but when it comes to actually implementing those ethic or when someone tried to implement it in product, he was instrumental in getting rid of respective scientists (whom inturn went on to create claude). And currently was trying to get rid off another director who is trying to voice out opinion in this regard. That is exactly what I am pointing out, he gave such impressions to the rest of the world.
Microsoft never intended or assumed OpenAI will turnout like this great. It just did a small hedge of $1B to a promising tech and will very much like to takeover OpenAI if given a chance and they can afford all the lawyers needed to keep up with govt regulations.
Anthropic was able to create a comparable product to openai with out all the fuss that sam has created. I agree Sam might have had some significant contributions but they are not as much as it seem to be. I am sure OpenAI will keep on progressing as it does now with or without Sam.
