Interesting that gwern predicted this as well yesterday
> Translation for the rest of us: "we need to fully privatize the OA subsidiary and turn it into a B-corp which can raise a lot more capital over the next decade, in order to achieve the goals of the nonprofit, because the chief threat is not anything like existential risk from autonomous agents in the next few years or arms races, but inadequate commercialization due to fundraising constraints".
> It's about laying the groundwork for the privatization and establishing rhetorical grounds for how the privatization of OA is consistent with the OA nonprofit's legally-required mission and fiduciary duties. Altman is not writing to anyone here, he is, among others, writing to the OA nonprofit board and to the judge next year.
Gwern's more novel prediction track record is calling everyone leaving from OpenAI (Mira was not expected) and general bullishness on scaling years ago. His post from 2 years ago (https://old.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/uznkhw/gpt3_2nd_...) is mostly correct, though incorrectly believed large companies would not deploy user-facing LLMs (granted I think much of this is reasonably obvious?). And Gato2 seems to have never happened.
His overall predictions? I can find his prediction book which he heavily used in 2010 (https://predictionbook.com/users/gwern/page/2?filter=judged&... Brier score of 0.16 is quite good, but this isn't superforecaster level (there's people with Brier scores below 0.1 on that site).
Overall, I see no reason to believe Gwern's numbers over say the consensus prediction at metaculus, even though yes, I do love reading his analysis.
Sensible move since most of the competition is operating under a more normal corporate model. I think the non profit thing at this point might be considered a failed experiment.
It didn't really contain progress or experimentation. Lots of people are at this point using open source models independently from OpenAI. And a lot of those models aren't that far behind qualitatively from what OpenAI is doing. And several of their competitors are starting to compete at the same level; mostly under normal corporate governance.
So, OpenAI adjusting to that isn't that strange. It's also going to be interesting to see where the people that are leaving OpenAI are going to end up. My prediction is that they will mostly end up in a variety of AI startups with traditional VC funding and usual corporate legal entities. And mostly not running or setting up their own foundations.
This is it. Loss of trust and disagreements on money/equity usually lead to breakups like this. No one at the top level wants to be left out of the cash grab. Never underestimate how greed can compromise one’s morals.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548