Given that Sam Altman was involved in OpenAI, I'm not sure why people are surprised that he has interests in making money, becoming powerful & getting attention. He's an one-trick pony, like many entrepreneurs in Sillicon Valley, their interests and decision-making patterns are really predictable.<p>The same is true for the people working in OpenAI. Everybody wants to make their million comp + potential huge cash out with their options. But is this worrisome? I don't think it is, competition is catching up, if they haven't already.<p>With the recent Claude 3 release(amazing!), Gemini and open models, which are most akin to GPT-4.<p>Unless OpenAI releases AGI on GPT-5, I don't really care about what happens to OpenAI. It is still really relevant, but we know by now that there is no moat in AI built.<p>OpenAI releases a new model, and 6 months later, others catch up with it; unless they would have a huge advantage, I don't care if they are all tied up with Microsoft and want to make money. Nobody wins, nobody loses anything.
It's there a law that states that whatever values an organisation puts in its name are the opposite of that organizations actual values?<p>Seems like there should be, but I haven't heard of it. If there isn't I'm coining "Amarants Law" in this post.<p>Open-AI being closed is a decent example of this law. A far better example is any nation with the word "democratic" in its name.
> But seen from another perspective, releasing that email was a massive fuckup—because it shows decisively that OpenAI knew for years that they had no intention of being as open as their name or public statements suggested.<p>It would have been nice to have the top company share the details of their work, but I don't quite get the community outrage over this. There are companies formed around volunteer driven open-source projects that eventually move towards closed development model. This however is not a case like that, they never took volunteer work. I don't think they have any real external obligations outside of their investors.
Jürgen Schmidhuber is complaining that he already invented being an AI troll years ago and now Gary Marcus is brazenly using his techniques without giving him credit.
<i>Never forget</i>. Ultimately, the only goal of a company of this size is to make money. That’s an obligation they have towards their shareholders. Other goals are marketing or, in this case, open-washing.
IMO the question for me is how close OpenAI is to controlling their destiny. They raised $11.3B over 6 rounds at current valuation of ~$80B.<p>It could go into the trillions if they were the first to invent AGI and ensure no one else gets it for a few years.<p>To me OpenAI is really an extension of MSFT.<p>Big AI is really now a game between META/Fair, GOOG/Deepmind, MSFT/OpenAI and to some degree Amazon/Anthropic.<p>Those 4 have the capital, compute, data & ML researches.<p>Sure Nvidia is hot right now but I kinda feel they don't have long term moat. Apple dropped to #2. My prediction is they will slowly drop to #3 unless they innovate.
"What is news is an email to Musk that they foolishly made public yesterday, in their counterattack."<p>The folks at OpenAI are not fools. According to these SBF-like geniuses with cash-stuffed pockets, everyone else on the planet, except computer nerds, are the fools. Including those silly lawyers advising to keep quiet. Don't listen to them. They only know what they know. We know computers! We know everything!<p>Yeah, well the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank. Because the more these nerds want to cat fight with each other, the more money the lawyers can make.<p>This stuff is only interesting to normal people as long as there's milions, billions or trillions of dollars at stake. Otherwise it just looks idiotic and pathetic.
Here’s the thing.<p>OpenAI decided they needed to be closed to be attractive for funding to get the money they needed for AGI. That aim is clear in the emails.<p>To them, all that matters is reaching AGI, so holding themselves to the standards of their worst critics is irrelevant. It’s all about making it to the finish line in one piece.
I honestly don't get the outrage THAT MUCH...<p>"we want to be as open as possible but we fear there are dangers so we'll just close it at some point but make it as benefitting to everybody as possibe"<p>seem to really be both what they agreed on and are currently doing, especially with GPTs and such.<p>Of course open source would have been better but even if you disagree on the assessment of the danger, you can respect the fact they still indeed try to make it as cheap / useful as possible.<p>There's always a question that who is in control of a tech when themselves claim it can be dangerous, but what institution can pretend to be completely democratic / not prone to abuse by bad actors ? What model could have been better ?<p>I also don't get the profit angle... they need cash to train stuff so it's normal to monetize.
It does feel like OpenAI is the perfect encapsulation of the silicon valley playbook. Step 1: Claim some ridiculous altruistic vision. Step 2: Identify that murdering puppies is really profitable. Step 3: Set up a global scale mechanised puppy murdering organisation whilst continuing to talk about your incredible altruistic vision.
I have no problem with whatever OpenAI does with its own business. If they want to convert to a closed-source for-profit, I'm fine with that. I never expected them to remain fully open and non-profit, given 1) they believe AGI/ASI is an x-risk and that sharing their tech could lead to proliferation of x-risk, and 2) they won't be able to hire or retain top scientists and engineers if there's no asymmetric payoff to working there.<p>What I do have a problem with is them lobbying for laws restricting what everyone else does, like making open source LLMs illegal and whatnot. They need to cut that out. It's not even a certainty that LLMs are a pathway to AGI/ASI anyway, since they're plagued with problems like model collapse, hallucinations, and still appear to be sophisticated stochastic parrots incapable of reason, self-awareness, and wisdom.