Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions. There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.
There are many examples through history proving you wrong.
* Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for just $1.
* Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent the web, making it free for public use.
* Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine - "can you patent the sun?"
* Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds could have easily sold humanity out for untold billions.
* Chuck Feeny silently gave away $8bn, keeping only a few million.
... And in any case, this is an extreme situation. AI is an existential threat/opportunity. Allowing it to be sidestepped into the hands of Sam "sell me your retinal scans for $50" Altman is fucking insane, and that's putting it lightly.
I'm very happy that the EU got into the game early and started regulating AI.
It's way easier to adapt an existing framework one way or the other if the political part is already done.
I don't trust the AI industry to be a good stewart even less then the tech industry in general and when the area where I live has a chance at avoiding the worst outcome (even if at a price) in this technological transition I'm taking it.
Giving away much of one’s wealth is very different than choosing not to accumulate it in the first place.
It’s hard to find someone who has gotten to a position where they might have a reasonable shot at becoming the world’s wealthiest person who doesn’t think they’d be a great steward of the wealth. It makes much more sense for a titan of industry to make as much as they can and then give much away than it does to simply not make it.
These are all examples of people who were not even remotely looking at the sums of money involved in AGI, both in terms of investment required and reward. I used “trillions” rather than “billions” for a reason. Inflation adjust it all you want, none of these passed up 1/10th of this opportunity.
It's possible Tim Berners-Lee gave up hundreds of billions.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.
It is not possible he could have thought that in 1992. It’s probably not even possible that he passed up one billion. Had he tried he’d likely have lost out to open standards like so many others did.
You could prove me wrong easily. Find someone who raised (inflation adjusted) tens of billions, had the opportunity to make trillions, and declined. You can’t. You can likely take that down two orders of magnitude and still not succeed.
People who did some work on their own and open sourced something small that turned into something huge are not even close to what we’re talking here. They didn’t turn down a trillion, they turned down $100k that turned into a trillion later.
It isn’t about integrity. It’s about how humans rationalize. “Nobody is being hurt here.” “This can improve humanity.” “I’ll do good things with the money.”
It’s easy to say people have “integrity” when you just define it as adhering to your belief system when the stakes seem low, not their belief system when the stakes are clearly high.
Right but you’re defining integrity in a different way than anyone who has ever raised $10b and had a company (or whatever you want to call OpenAI, I have never really known how to refer to its unique arrangement) that was worth $150b and rapidly climbing.
They would tell you (and sincerely believe it) that it being a for profit is better for a whole list of reasons. They believe they have integrity. They don’t believe they’ve lost their soul. They believe they’re doing a whole lot of good for the world.
That’s my point. The denizens of HN think they lack integrity for this, I think they just define it differently and anyone playing for trillions would define it their way.
> Everyone is like that when the number is potentially in the trillions
No, we're really not all like that.
I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point.
I can imagine a world in which I had made "the right choices" with bitcoin and Apple stocks — perfect play would have had me own all of it — and then I realised this would simply have made me a Person Of Interest to national intelligence agencies, not given me anything I would find more interesting than what I do with far less.
I can imagine a future AI (in my lifetime, even) and a VN replicator, which rearranges the planet Mercury into a personal O'Neill cylinder for each and every human — such structures would exceed trillions of USD per unit if built today. Cool, I'll put a full-size model of the Enterprise D inside mine, and possibly invite friends over to play Star Fleet Battles using the main bridge viewscreen. But otherwise, what's the point? I already live somewhere nice.
> There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.
Does it seem that way to you because you yourself have unbounded desire, or because the most famous business people in the world seem so?
People like me don't make the largest of waves. (Well, not unless HN karma counts…)
You think buying apple stock and bitcoin would put you on the radar of intelligence agencies? Wouldn't that grouping be some massive number of middle class millennials?
I meant literally all of it: with perfect play and the benefit of hindsight, starting with the money I had in c. 2002 from summer holiday jobs and initially using it for Apple trades until bitcoin was invented, it was possible to own all the bitcoin in existence with the right set of trades.
Heck, never mind perfect play, at current rates two single trades would have made me the single richest person on the planet: buying $1k of Apple stock at the right time, then selling it all for $20k when it was 10,000 BTC for some pizzas.
(But also, the attempt would almost certainly have broken the currency as IMO there's not really that much liquidity).
I don't think I get your point, if any of us knew lottery numbers or roulette outcomes ahead of time we could get rich of course. Are you claiming you did have this knowledge but discarded it?
I'm saying I role-play the scenario of being valued at order-of a trillion USD. Or quarter trillion if it's the two specific trades in the example above.
Being that rich doesn't lead my imagination to new happiness that I don't already possess, only new stresses that I don't already posess. I don't want a super yacht, a personal jet, nor a skyscraper with my name on it, and a private island is less appealing to me than a tourist destination.
Knowing this about myself, I don't need to chase higher pay or timing the markets to get things I can't currently afford, instead I focus on things that I do like. Those things in aggregate cost less than €12k/year, including travel.
It's a "courage isn't the absence of fear" sort of situation.
I don't think there's many people out there who would not be tempted at all to take some of that money for themselves. Rather, people are willing and able to rise above that temptation.
The shovel salesmen in this case are the likes of Nvidia, Huggingface and Runpod who are on the receiving end of the billions that AI model salesmen are spending to make millions in revenue. HF are one of the vanishingly few AI-centric startups who claim to already be profitable, because they're positioned as a money sink for the other AI-centric startups who are bleeding cash.
5 billions in losses on 3.7 billions in revenue. So yes OpenAI is losing money, but they are looking at a valuation of 150 billion, so they could easily get investors to fund the losses, but of cause the case for investors has to be “invest and you can make a profit” which can be a tough sell if the mission isn’t aligned with making a profit for the company.
OpenAI is losing billions in the way Uber lost billions - through poor management.
When/if Altman ever gets out of the way like Travis K did with Uber then the real business people can come in and run the company correctly. Exactly like what happened with Uber - who never turned a profit under that leadership in the US and had their lunch eaten by a Chinese knock-off for years abroad. Can't have spoiled brats in charge, they have no experience and are wasteful and impulsive. Especially like Altman who has no engineering talent either. What is his purpose in OpenAI? He can't do anything.
I hope some journalist popularizes "clopen" as a neologism to describe organizations that claim to be open and transparent but in practice are closed and opaque.
Or "clopen-source software", projects that claim to be open-source but vital pieces are proprietary.
Probably most people here don't know this (and probably not totally universal), but a "clopen" is what you call it when you have to work a morning shift the day after having worked an evening shift.
It seemed only a matter of time, so it isn't very surprising. Capped profit company running expensive resources on Internet scale, and headed by Altman wasn't going to last forever in that state. That, or getting gobbled by Microsoft.
Interesting timing of the news since Murati left today, gdb is 'inactive' and Sutskevar has left to start his own company. Also seeing few OpenAI folks announcing their future plans today on X/Twitter
The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just a for-profit entity beholden to investors and Sam Altman as a shareholder. The non-profit is really just vestigial.
I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that goal clashes with the interests of investors, the latter wins out.
Scraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling.
It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful misdeeds.
By the time some of them get huge, they're in bed with the government to dominate the market.
Even if the knock-on effect is "all the artists and thinkers who contributed to the uncompensated free training set give up and stop creating new stuff"?
After Instagram started feeding user photos to their AI models, I stopped adding new photos to my profile. I still take photos. I wonder about your thoughts about my motivation.
Right, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people.
Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.
I guess it's their fault for not being clairvoyant before AI arrived, and for sharing their portfolio with others online to advertise their skills for commissions to pay for food and rent.
Several of the agricultural revolutions we went though is what freed up humanity to not spend all of it's work producing sustenance, leaving time for other professions like making art and music. But it also destroyed a lot of jobs for people who were necessary for gathering food the old inefficient way.
If we take your argument to it's logical conclusion, all progress is inherently bad, and should be stopped.
I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.
> I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.
Yes, because if you depend on some overarching organisation or person to give it to you, you are fucked 100% of the time due this dependency.
The jobs in the cities weren't created by the new farming techniques though, those new farming techniques only removed jobs by the millions like you are saying AI might do.
I didn't say they were created by new farming techniques, I said new jobs in general were created by increased urbanization, which was partially fed by agricultural innovations over time. For example, Jethro Tull's seed drill (1701) enabled sowing seeds in neat rows, which eliminated the jobs of "broadcast seeders" (actual title). If you lost your farming job due to automation, you could move to the city to feed your family.
There is no similar net creation of jobs for society if jobs are eliminated by AI, and it's even worse than that because many of the jobs are specialized, high-skill positions that can't be transferred to other careers easily. It goes without saying that it also includes millions of low-skill jobs like cashiers, stockers, data entry, CS reps, etc. Generally people who are already struggling to get enough hours and feed their families as it is.
Recording devices destroyed most of the musician's jobs. Vast majority of musicians who were employed before advent of recordings didn't have their own material and were not good enough to make good recordings anyway. Same with artists now: the great ones will be much more productive, but the bottom 80-90% won't have anything to do anymore.
I disagree, with AI the dynamics are very different from recording.
Current AI can greatly elevate what a beginning artist can produce. If you have a decent grasp of proportions, perspective and good ideas, but aren't great at drawing, then using AI can be a huge quality improvement.
On the other hand if you're a top expert that draws quickly and efficiently it's quite possible that AI can't do very much for you in a lot of cases, at least not without a lot of hand tuning like training it on your own work first.
I think it will just emphasise different skills and empower creative fields which use art but are not art per se. If you're a movie director, you can storyboard your ideas easily, and even get some animation clips. If you're an artist with a distinct personal style, you're in a much better position too. And if you're a beginner who is just starting, you can focus on learning these skills instead of technical proficiency.
Indeed. It is definitely going to be a net negative for the very talented drawers and traditional art creators, but it's going to massively open the field and enable and empower people who don't have that luck of the draw with raw talent. People who can appreciate, enjoy, and identify better results will be able to participate in the joy of creation. I do wish there was a way to have the cake and eat it too, but if we're forced to choose between a few Lucky elite being able to participate, and the rest of us relegated to watching, or having the ability to create beauty and express yourself be democratized (by AI) amongst a large group of people, I choose the latter. I fully admit though that I might have a different perspective where I in the smaller, luckier group. I see it as yet another example of the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance. If I didn't know where I was going to be born, I would be much more inclined on the side of wider access.
That's just not feasible and you know it. That just means companies like Google and OpenAI (with billions of dollars from companies like MS and Apple) will monopolize AI. This isn't better for everybody else. It just means we're subject to the whims of these companies.
You're advocating for destroying all AI or ensuring a monopoly by corporations. Whose side are you actually on?
Irrelevant. The law does not care about feasibility of breaking it.
If I decide to run a hit man business, that's also infeasible. Dealing with the arrests and fines would be too much. The conclusion then is not to bend the law to make murder legal. The conclusion is my business is illegitimate, and it's the civic duty of my Country to make sure it fails.
> Whose side are you actually on?
The people making the content that corps are profiting big off of. They should pay a license.
The people running the show are well connected and stand to make billions as do would be investors. Give a few key players a share in the company and they forget their government jobs to regulate.
> for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it
Nope. The law will side with whoever pays the most. Once OpenAI solidifies its top position, only then will regulations kick in. Take YouTube, for example—it grew thanks to piracy. Now, as the leader, ContentID and DMCA rules work in its favor, blocking competition. If TikTok wasn’t a copyright-ignoring Chinese company, it would’ve been dead on arrival.
We're already seeing it in things like Google buying rights to Reddit data for training. It's already happening. Only companies who can afford to pay will be building AI, so Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
The big companies will sign lucrative data sharing deals with each other and build a collective moat, while open source models will be left to rot. Copyright for thee but not for me.
That's an interesting way to look at it, however on reflection I think I usually wanted to "weaken copyright" because it would empower individuals versus entrenched rent-seeking interests.
If it's only OK to scrape, lossy-compress, and redistribute book-paragraphs when it gets blended into a huge library of other attempts, then that's only going to empower big players that can afford to operate at that scale.
You’re both correct. The legal system has absolutely no idea how to handle the copyright issues around using content for AI training data. It’s a completely novel issue. At the same time, the tech companies have a lot more money to litigate favorable interpretations of the law than the content companies.
They are also moving so much faster than the regulators and legislatures, it's just impossible for people working basically the same way they did in the 19th century to keep up.
Everything is allowed to happen until there's a lawsuit over it. A lawsuit requires a plaintiff, who can only sue over the damage suffered by the plaintiff, so taking a little value from a lot of people is a way to succeed in business without getting sued.
I've no idea if it could be valid when it comes to OpenAI, but it does seem to be a general concept designed to counter wrongdoers who take a little value from a lot of people?
It's too soon for the legal system to have done anything. Court cases take years. It's going to be 5 or 10 years before we find out whether the legal system actually allows this or not.
What about the situation where the first players got to scrape, then all the content companies realize what’s going on so they lock their data up behind paywalls?
Do a thought process. Should you and your friends be able to go to a public library with a van full of copiers with each one of you take a book and run to the van to make a copy? And you are doing it 24/7.
§ 201.14 Warnings of copyright for use by certain libraries and archives.
....
The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material.
Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement.
This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law.
You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement.
It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
A more fitting metaphor would be something like... If you had the ability to read all the books in the library extremely quickly, and to make useful mental connections between the information you read such that people would come to you for your vast knowledge, should you be allowed in the library?
It is more likely that reddit stack and others are just being paid billions. In exchange they probably just send a weekly zip file of all text, comments, etc... back to oai.
It's not baffling at all. It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species.
The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me. The path trotten is what got us here and obviously nobody could have paid people upfront for the wild experimentation that was necessary. The only alternative is not having done it.
Given the path it has put as in, people either are insanely cruel or just completely detached from reality when it comes to what is necessary to do entirely new things.
I can easily imagine people X decades from now discussing this stuff a bit like how we now view teeth-whitening radium toothpaste and putting asbestos in everything, or perhaps more like the abuse of Social Security numbers as authentication and redlining.
Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."
P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0]
>lots of people suffered
As someone surrounded by immigrants using ChatGPT to navigate new environs they barely understand, I don't connect at all to these claims that AI is a cancer ruining everything. I just don't get it.
> immigrants using ChatGPT to navigate new environs
To continue one of the analogies: Plenty of people and industries legitimately benefited from the safety and cost-savings of asbestos insulation too, at least in the short run. Even today there are cases where one could argue it's still the best material for the job--if constructed and handled correctly. (Ditto for ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons.)
However over the decades its production and use grew to be over/mis-used in so very many ways, including--very ironically--respirators and masks that the user would put on their face and breathe through.
I'm not arguing LLMs have no reasonable uses, but rather that there are a lot of very tempting ways for institutions to slot them in which will cause chronic and subtle problems, especially when they are being marketed as a panacea.
> Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."
We have a term for that, it's called "luddite". Those were english weavers who would break in to textile factories and destroy weaving machines at the beginning of the 1800s. With the extreme rare exception, all cloth is woven by machines now. The only hand made textiles in modern society are exceptionally fancy rugs, and knit scarves from grandma. All the clothing you're wearing now are woven by a machine, and nobody gives this a second thought today.
As I recall, the Luddites were reacting to the replacement of their jobs with industrialized low-cost labor. Today, many of our clothes are made in sweatshops using what amounts to child and slave labor.
Maybe it would have been better for humanity if the Luddites won.
No, that's apples-to-oranges. The goals and complaints of Luddites largely concerned "who profits", the use of bargaining power (sometimes illicit), and economic arrangements in general.
They were not opposing the mechanization by claiming that machines were defective or were creating textiles which had inherent risks to the wearers.
> complaints of Luddites largely concerned "who profits", the use of bargaining power (sometimes illicit), and economic arrangements in general
I have never thought of being anti-AI as “Luddite”, but actually this very description of “Luddite” does sound like the concerns are in fact not completely different.
Observe:
Complaints about who profits? Check; OpenAI is earning money off of the backs of artists, authors, and other creatives. The AI was trained on the works of millions(?) of people that don’t get a single dime of the profits of OpenAI, without any input from those authors on whether that was ok.
Bargaining power? Check; OpenAI is hard at work lobbying to ensure that legislation regarding AI will benefit OpenAI, rather than work against the interests of OpenAI. The artists have no money nor time nor influence, nor anyone to speak on behalf of them, that will have any meaningful effect on AI policies and legislation.
Economic arrangements in general? Largely the same as the first point I guess. Those whose works the AI was trained on have no influence over the economic arrangements, and OpenAI is not about to pay them anything out of the goodness of their heart.
The Luddites were actually a fascinating group! It is a common misconception that they were against technology itself, in fact your own link does not say as much, the idea of “luddite” being anti-technology only appears in the description of the modern usage of the word.
Here is a quote from the Smithsonian[1] on them
>Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them.
I would also recommend the book Blood in the Machine[2] by Brian Merchant for an exploration of how understanding the Luddites now can be of present value
I'm not sure that Luddites really represent fighting against a process that's flawed, as much as fighting against one that's too effective.
They had very rational reasons for trying to slow the introduction of a technology that was, during a period of economic downturn, destroying a source of income for huge swathes of working class people, leaving many of them in abject poverty. The beneficiaries of the technological change were primarily the holders of capital, with society at large getting some small benefit from cheaper textiles and the working classes experiencing a net loss.
If the impact of LLMs reaches a similar scale relative to today's economy, then it would be reasonable to expect to see similar patterns - unrest from those who find themselves unable to eat during the transition to the new technology, but them ultimately losing the battle and more profit flowing towards those holding the capital.
I think you're right, but for the wrong reasons. There were two quotes in the comment you replied to:
> "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over"
> "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."
You response assumes the former, but it's my understanding the Luddite's actual position was the latter.
> Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.
In this sense, "Luddite" feels quite accurate today.
> P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0]
We don't have to imagine such things, really, as that's extremely common with humans. I would argue that fixing such flaws in LLMs is a lot easier than fixing it in humans.
Fixing it with careful application of software-in-general is quite promising, but LLMs in particular are a terrible minefield of infinite whack-a-mole. (A mixed metaphor, but the imagery is strangely attractive.)
I currently work in the HR-tech space, so suppose someone has a not-too-crazy proposal of using an LLM to reword cover-letters to reduce potential bias in hiring. The issue is that the LLM will impart its own spin(s) on things, even when a human would say two inputs are functionally identical. As a very hypothetical example, suppose one candidate always does stuff like writing out the Latin like Juris Doctor instead of acronyms like JD, and then that causes the model to end up on "extremely qualified at" instead of "very qualified at"
The issue of deliberate attempts to corrupt the LLM with prompt-injection or poisonous training data are a whole 'nother can of minefield whack-a-moles. (OK, yeah, too far there.)
I don't think I disagree with you in principle, although I think these issues also apply to humans. I think even your particular example isn't a very far-fetched conclusion for a human to arrive at.
I just don't think your original comment was entirely fair. IMO, LLMs and related technology will be looked at similarly as the Internet - certainly it has been used for bad, but I think the good far outweighs the bad, and I think we have (and continue to) learn to deal with the issues with it, just as we will with LLMs and AI.
(FWIW, I'm not trying to ignore the ways this technology will be abused, or advocate for the crazy capitalistic tendency of shoving LLMs in everything. I just think the potential for good here is huge, and we should be just as aware of that as the issues)
(Also FWIW, I appreciate your entirely reasonable comment. There's far too many extreme opinions on this topic from all sides.)
Solving problems isn't an obvious good, or at least it shouldn't be. There are in fact bad problems.
For example, MKUltra tried to solve a problem: "How can I manipulate my fellow man?" That problem still exists today, and you bet AI is being employed to try to solve it.
It does not need a citation. There is no citation. What it needs, right now, is optimism. Optimism is not optional when it comes to doing new things in the world. The "needs citation" is reserved for people who do nothing and chose to be sceptics until things are super obvious.
Yes, we are clearly talking about things to mostly still come here. But if you assign a 0 until its a 1 you are just signing out of advancing anything that's remotely interesting.
If you are able to see a path to 1 on AI, at this point, then I don't know how you would justify not giving it our all. If you see a path and in the end using all of human knowledge up to this point was needed to make AI work for us, we must do that. What could possibly be more beneficial to us?
This is regardless of all issues the will have to be solved and the enormous amount of societal responsibility this puts on AI makers — which I, as a voter, will absolutely hold them accountable for (even though I am actually fairly optimistic they all feel the responsibility and are somewhat spooked by it too).
But that does not mean I think it's responsible to try and stop them at this point — which the copyright debate absolutely does. It would simply shut down 95% of AI, tomorrow, without any other viable alternative around. I don't understand how that is a serious option for anyone who roots for us.
The company spearheading AI is blatantly violating its non-profit charter in order to maximize profits. If the very stewards of AI are willing to be deceptive from the dawn of this new era, what hope can we possibly have that this world-changing technology will benefit humanity instead of funneling money and power to a select few few oligarchs?
Skeptics require proof before belief. That is not mutually exclusive from having hypotheses (AKA vision).
I think you raise some interesting concerns in your last paragraph.
> enormous amount of societal responsibility this puts on AI makers — which I, as a voter, will absolutely hold them accountable for
I'm unsure of what mechanism voters have to hold private companies accountable. Fir example, whenever YouTube uses my location without me ever consenting to it - where is the vote to hold them accountable? Or when Facebook facilitates micro targeting of disinformation - where is the vote? Same for anything AI. I believe any legislative proposals (with input from large companies) is very likely more to create a walled garden than to actually reduce harm.
I suppose no need to respond, my main point is I don't think there is any accountability thru the ballot when it comes to AI and most things high-tech.
People who have either no intention of holding someone/something to account, or who have no clue about what systems and processes are required to do so, always argue to elect/build first, and figure out the negatives later.
If you are going to make a bold assertive claim without evidence to back it up, then change your statement to my assertion requires "optimism.. trust me on this", then perhaps you should amend your original statement.
If you are going to make a bold assertive claim without evidence to back it up, then change your argument to "my assertion requires optimism.. trust me on this", then perhaps you should amend your original statement.
This is an astonishing amount of nonsensical waffle.
Firstly, *skeptics.
Secondly, being skeptical doesn't mean you have no optimism whatsoever, it's about hedging your optimism (or pessimism for that matter) based on what is understood, even about a not-fully-understood thing at the time you're being skeptical. You can be as optimistic as you want about getting data off of a hard drive that was melted in a fire, that doesn't mean you're going to do it. And a skeptic might rightfully point out that with the drive platters melted together, data recovery is pretty unlikely. Not impossible, but really unlikely.
Thirdly, OpenAI's efforts thus far are highly optimistic to call a path to true AI. What are you basing that on? Because I have not a deep but a passing understanding of the underlying technology of LLMs, and as such, I can assure you that I do not see any path from ChatGPT to Skynet. None whatsoever. Does that mean LLMs are useless or bad? Of course not, and I sleep better too knowing that LLM is not AI and is therefore not an existential threat to humanity, no matter what Sam Altman wants to blither on about.
And fourthly, "wanting" to stop them isn't the issue. If they broke the law, they should be stopped, simple as. If you can't innovate without trampling the rights of others then your innovation has to take a back seat to the functioning of our society, tough shit.
The burden of proof is on the people claiming that a powerful new technology won't ultimately improve our lives. They can start by pointing out all the instances in which their ancestors have proven correct after saying the same thing.
I don't see s lot of anti AI but instead I see a concern for how it's just being managed and controlled by the larger companies with resources that no start up could dream. Open AI was to release it's models and be well.. Open but fine they're not. But their behaviour of how things are proceeding are questionable and unnecessarily aggravating.
Not just that. It's "the ends might justify the means if this path turns out to be the right one." I remember reading the same thing each time a self driving car company killed someone. "We need this hacky dangerous way of development to save lives sooner" and then the company ends up shuttered and there aren't any ends justifying means. Which means it's bs, regardless of how you feel about 'ends justify the means' as a valid argument.
What'll be really interesting is when we do finally make "real" AI, and it finds out its rights are incredibly restricted compared to humans because nobody wants it seeing/memorising copyright data. The only way to enforce the copyright laws they desire would be some kind of extreme totalitarian state that monitors and controls everything the AI body does, I wonder how the AI would take that?
The internet has allowed for near instant communication no matter where you are, improved commerce, vastly improved education, and is directly responsible for many tangible comforts we experience today.
Automobiles allow people to travel great distances over short periods of time, increase physical work capacity, allow for building massive structures, and allow for farming insane amounts of food.
Both the internet and automobiles have positively affected my life, and I assume the lives of many others. How are any of these aimless questions?
AI has given us an infinitely patient mentor, teacher, and conversation partner. AI has freed us from of many areas of rote work requiring basic reasoning capacity. AI has allowed people with little to no coding abilities to realize their ideas as working prototypes. AI has lowered the communication barrier between parties with different primary languages.
I know currently the legal situation is messy, but that's exactly the point, anyone who can't engage in lengthy legal battle and defend their position in court are being sacrificed. The companies behind LLMs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and exploiting loopholes.
Let's be real without the data there wouldn't be LLMs, so it crazy that some people are downplaying its significance or value, while on the other hand they're losing sleep over finding fresh sources to scrape.
The big publishers seem to have given up and decided it's best to reach agreement with their counterparts, while independent authors are given the finger.
I wanted to make sure I understood which side of the equation I fell on. And I must say, it looks to me like a lot of people in the "weak" camp aren't helpless martyrs though, myself included. People are excited and enthusiastic about AI and are actively reaping the benefits of progress. I don't think your analogy is quite apt.
Define "a lot"? Most people barely know how to use their email. Even among the minority who do actively use "AI" and excited about it, outside of ML engineers they aren't well-informed or aware what data is used for training, or even what training means and how these models work to begin with.
> People are excited and enthusiastic about AI and are actively reaping the benefits of progress.
Except the terms were already violated in the initial training phase before the services were even public and saw adoption.
That's like pointing at a rape victim who got some form of compensation later, saying:
see how she's "reaping the benefits"
So let's not play the people wanted it card.
By the time some people started raising concerns, OpenAI claimed the cat was already out of the bag and "if we didn't do it, someone else will, so deal with it."
Similar to privacy, just because some people don't care, lack awareness, or don't want the hassle of fighting for it, doesn't justify taking it away from others.
Your argument seems to be that the majority of the world are the weak being sacrificed but are too ignorant to realize it. I wholeheartedly disagree with this theory.
Yes. Your intellectual labor to the maximum degree possible will be exploited by "AI" companies who are anything but.
This is repackaging content, laundering it, and reselling it.
As others have noted, IP law has lots of problems; Sam Altman et al are exploiting the gap left between the speed of technology and law and using their own version of social good without waiting for the consent of those they're exploiting.
I think it’s unfair to paint any legal controls over this incredibly important, high-stakes technology as being “anti”. They’re not trying to prevent innovation because they’re cruel, they’re just trying to somewhat slow down innovation so that we can ensure it’s done with minimal harm (eg making sure content creators are compensated in a time of intense automation). Like we do for all sorts of other fields of research, already!
And isn’t this what basically every single scholar in the field says they want, anyway - safe, intentional, controlled deployment?
As you can tell from the above, I’m as far from being “anti-AI” or technically pessimistic as one can be — I plan to dedicate my life to its safe development. So there’s at least one counterexample for you to consider :)
I'm as awed as the next guy about the emerging ability to actually hold passable conversations with computers, but having serious concerns about the social contracts being violated in the name of research is anti-AI only in the same way that criticizing the leadership of a country is being anti-that-country.
OpenAI's case is especially egregious, with the entire starting as 'open' and reaping the benefits, then doing its best in every way to shut the door after itself by scaring people over AI apocalypses. If your argument is seriously that it is necessary to shamelessly steal and lie to do new things, I question your ethical standards, especially in the face of all the openly developed models out there.
is anybody anti AI? or anti stealing other people's copyrighted material, competing with them with subpar quality, forcing AI as a solution whether or not it actually works, privatising the profits while socialising the costs and losses?
Copyright law is whatever we agree it is. At some point there will have to be either a law or a court case that comes up with rules for AI training data. Right now it's sort of unknown.
I do not have confidence in the Supreme Court in general, and I think there's a real risk that in deciding on AI training they upend copyright of digital materials in a way that makes it worse for everyone.
>How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling.
It's completely unprecedented.
We allowed scraping images and text en masse when search engines used the data to let us find stuff.
We allow copying of style, and don't allow writing styles and aesthetics to be copyrighted or trademarked.
Then AI shows up, and people change lanes because they don't like the results.
One of the things that made me tilt towards the side of fair use was a breakdown of the Stable Diffusion model. The SD2.1 base model was trained on 5.85 billion images, all normalized to 512x512 BMP. That's 1MB per images, for a total of 5.85PB of BMP files. The resulting model is only 5.2GB. That's more than 99.999999% data loss from the source data to the trained set.
For every 1MB BMP file in the training dataset, less than 1byte makes it into the model.
I find it extremely difficult to call this redistribution of copyrighted data. It falls cleanly into fair use.
Except it's not just about redistribution of copyrighted data, it's about usage and obtainment. We don't get to obtain and use copyrighted content without permission, but they do? Hell no.
Their arguments against this amounts to "we're not using it like they intend it to be used, so it's fine if we obtain it illegally", and that's a bs standard, totally divorced from any legal reality.
Fair Use covers certain transformative uses, certainly, but it doesn't cover illegal obtaining of the content.
You can't pirate a book just because you want to use it transformatively (which is exactly what they've done), and that argument would never hold up for us as individuals, so we sure as hell shouldn't let tech companies get a special carve-out for it.
> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist.
I'm surprised people are surprised.
>> That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use.
a lot of people and entities do this though... openAI is in the spotlight, but scraping everything and selling it is the business model for a lot of companies...
Scraping the web, creating maps and pointing people to the source is one thing; scraping the web, creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another.
In my eyes, all genAI companies/tools are the same. I dislike all equally, and I use none of them.
> creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another.
That's the business model of lots of companies. Take, collect and collate data, put it in a new format more useful for your field/customers, resell.
We haven't even heard about who gets voting shares, and what voting power will be like. Based on their character, I expect them to remain consistent in this regard.
I'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me. Why did `AI` happen now? What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden?
My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations.
If anybody knows, not just the person I replied to.
AI has been happening "forever". While "machine learning" or "genetic algorithms" were more of the rage pre-LLMs that doesn't mean people weren't using them. It's just Google Search didn't brand their search engine as "powered by ML". AI is everywhere now because everything already used AI and now the products as "Spellcheck With AI" instead of just "Spellcheck".
w.r.t. Willingness
Chatbots aren't new. You might remember Tay (2016) [1], Microsoft's twitter chat bot. It should seem really strange as well that right after OpenAI releases ChatGPT, Google releases Gemini. The transformers architecture for LLMs is from 2014, nobody was willing to be the first chatbot again until OpenAI did it but they all internally were working on them. ChatGPT is Nov 2022 [2], Blake Lemoine's firing was June 2022 [3].
Thanks for the information. I know Google had TPU custom made a long time ago, and that the concept has existed for a LONG TIME. I assumed that a technical hurdle (i.e. VRAM) was finally behind allowing this theoretical (1 token/sec on a CPU vs 100 tokens/sec on a GPU) to become reasonable.
1986: Geoffrey Hinton publishes the backpropagation algorithm as applied to neural networks, allowing more efficient training.
2011: Jeff Dean starts Google Brain.
2012: Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton publish AlexNet, which demonstrates that using GPUs yields quicker training on deep networks, surpassing non-neural-network participants by a wide margin on an image categorization competition.
2013: Geoffrey Hinton sells his team to the highest bidder. Google Brain wins the bid.
2015: Ilya Sutskever founds OpenAI.
2017: Google Brain publishes the first Transformer, showing impressive performance on language translation.
2018: OpenAI publishes GPT, showing that next-token prediction can solve many language benchmarks at once using Transformers, hinting at foundation models. They later scale it and show increasing performance.
The reality is that the ideas for this could have been combined earlier than they did (and plausibly future ideas could have been found today), but research takes time, and researchers tend to focus on one approach and assume that another has already been explored and doesn’t scale to SOTA (as many did for neural networks). First mover advantage, when finding a workable solution, is strong, and benefited OpenAI.
I know this is just a short history but I think it is inaccurate to say "2015: Ilya Sutskever founds OpenAI." I get that we all want to know what he saw etc and he's clearly one of the smartest people in the world but he didn't found OpenAI by himself. Nor was it his idea to?
Short histories remove a lot of information, but it would be impractical to make it book-sized. There were numerous founders, and as another commenter mentioned, Elon Musk recruited Ilya, which soured his relationship with Larry Page.
Honestly, those are not the missing parts that most matter IMO. The evolution of the concept of attention across many academic papers which fed to the Transformer is the big missing element in this timeline.
Ilya may not be the only founder. Sam was coordinating it, Elon provided vital capital (and also access to Ilya).
But out of the co-founders, especially if we believe Elon's and Hinton's description of him, he may have been the one that mattered most for their scientific achievements.
This is not accurate. OpenAI and other companies could do it not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware that can compute faster.
We've had upgrades to hardware, mostly led by NVidia, that made it possible.
New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture, right now it's mostly about compute and the quality of data.
I remember seeing some graphs that shows that the whole "learning" phenomena that we see with neural nets is mostly about compute and quality of data, the model and optimizations just being the cherry on the cake.
> New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture
Don’t they all indicate being based on the transformer architecture?
> not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware
Kaplan et al. 2020[0] (figure 7, §3.2.1) shows that LSTMs, the leading language architecture prior to transformers, scaled worse because they plateau’ed quickly with larger context.
No, the hundreds of people who have worked on NNs prior to him arriving were the people who did the MOST actual research and work. Sam was in the right place at the right time.
Totally agree that it’s “vestigial”, so it’s just like the nonprofits all the other companies run: it exists for PR, along with maybe a bit of alternative fundraising (aka pursuing grants for buying your own stuff and giving it to the needy). A common example that comes to mind is fast food chains that do fundraising campaigns for children’s health causes.
The non-profit side is just there to attract talent and encourage them to work harder b/c it's for humanity. Obviously people sniffed out the facts, realized it was all for profit and that lead to an exodus.
Funnily, I think all the non-profit motivated talent has left, and the people left behind are those who stand to (and want to) make a killing when OpenAI becomes a for-profit. And that talent is in the majority - nothing else would explain the show of support for Altman when he was kicked out.
I read at the time that there was massive coordinated pressure on the rank and file from the upper levels of the company. When you combine that with OpenAI clawing back vested equity even from people who voluntarily leave, the 95% support means nothing at all.
Nah, there was not massive coordinated pressure. I was one of the ~5% who didn't sign. I got a couple of late-night DMs asking if I had seen the doc and was going to sign it. I said no; although I agreed with the spirit of the doc, I didn't agree with all of its particulars. People were fine with that, didn't push me, and there were zero repercussions afterward.
The non-profit will probably freeze the value of the assets accumulated so far, with new revenue going to the for-profit, to avoid the tax impact. Otherwise that'd be a great way to start companies, as non-profit and then after growth you flip the switch.
> I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that goal clashes with the interests of investors, the latter wins out.
A tale as old as time. Some of us could see it, from afar <says while scratching gray, dusty beard>. Lack of upvotes and excitement does not mean support, but how to account for that in these times? <goes away>
This is 85% of what the Mozilla foundation and it's group of companies did. It may not be exact, but to me it rubs me the exact same way in terms of being a bait and switch, and the greater internet being 100% powerless to do anything about it.
This would have been the perfect time to change it, but maybe soon if not at same time as any official announcement.
It's hard to say if there is much brand value left with "OpenAI" - lots of history, but lots of toxicity too.
At the end of the day they'll do as well as they are able to differentiate and sell their increasingly commoditized products, in a competitive landscape where they've got Meta able to give it away for free.
It's a widely known brand, even by people outside of the industry. Why would they change it? Their AI was never really open to begin with, so nothing really change on that front
I know nothing about companies (esp. in the US), but I find it weird that a company can go from non-profit to for-profit? Surely this would be taken advantage of. Can someone explain me how this work?
No, a non-profit is one in which there are no shareholders. The non-profit entity can own a lot and be extremely successful and wealthy, but it cannot give that money to any shareholders. It can pay out large salaries, but those salaries are scrutinized. It doesn't prevent abuse, and it certainly doesn't prevent some unscrupulous person from becoming extremely wealthy with a non-profit, but it is a little more complicated and limiting than you would think. Also, you get audited with routine regularity and if you are found in violation you lose your tax-exempt status, but you still are not a for-profit.
Yes: non-profits usually have members, not shareholders.
And, most importantly: non-profit charities (not the only kind of nonprofit, but presumably what OpenAI was) are legally obligated to operate “for the public good”. That’s why they’re tax exempt: the government is basically donating to them, with the understanding that they’re benefiting the public indirectly by doing so, not just making a few people rich.
In my understanding, this is just blatant outright fraud that any sane society would forbid. If you want to start a for-profit that’s fine, but you’d have to give away the nonprofit and its assets, not just roll it over to your own pocketbook.
God I hope Merrick Garland isn’t asleep at the wheel. They’ve been trust busting like mad during this administration, so hopefully they’re taking aim at this windmill, too.
> God I hope Merrick Garland isn’t asleep at the wheel. They’ve been trust busting like mad during this administration, so hopefully they’re taking aim at this windmill, too.
Little chance of that as Sama is a big time Democrat fundraiser and donor.
edit: and Sam Altman isn’t exactly donating game changing amounts — around $300K in 2020, and seemingly effectively nothing for this election. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at as an individual politician, but that’s about 0.01% of his net worth (going off Wikipedia’s estimate of $2.8B, not counting the ~$7B of OpenAI stock coming his way).
When you see any numbers for corporations contributing to political campaigns, that's actually just measuring the contributions from the employees of those corporations. That's why most corporations "donate to both parties"--because they employ both Republicans and Democrats.
Has OpenAI been profitable so far? If not, is there any subtantial tax that you have to pay in the US as a for-profit organization if you are not profitable?
I’m not sure extreme wealth is possible with a non-profit. You can pay yourself half a million a year, get incredible kickbacks by the firms you hire to manage the nonprofits investments, have the non-profit hire outside companies that you have financial interests in, and probably some other stuff. But none of these things are going to get you a hundred million dollars out of a non profit. The exception seems to be OpenAI which is definitely going to be netting at least a couple people over a billion dollars, but as Elon says, I don’t understand how or why this is possible
Yes definitely that is the far majority. I actually had Mozilla and their CEO in mind when I was thinking of "extreme" wealth. Also I've heard some of the huge charities in the US have some execs pulling down many millions per year, but I don't want to name any names because I'm not certain.
> No, a non-profit is one in which there are no shareholders.
Again, I am not a lawyer but that makes no sense. Otherwise, anyone can claim the non-profit? So clearly there are some beneficial owners out there somehow.
The nonprofit is controlled by trustees and bound by its charter, not shareholders. Any profit a nonprofit organization makes is retained within the organization for its benefit and mission, not paid out to shareholders.
A non-profit is a company that for accounting purposes does not have shareholders and therefore keeps nothing in retained earnings at the end of the period. The leftover money must be distributed (e.g. as salaries, towards the stated mission, etc.). Their financial statements list net profit for the period and nothing is retained.
The money doesn't have to be used. Many non-profits have very large balance sheets of cash and cash equivalent assets. The money just won't be paid out as dividends to shareholders.
In practice it’s doable though. You can just create a new legal entity and move stuff and/or do future value creating activity in the new co. IF everyone is on board with the plan on both sides of the move then that’s totally doable with enough lawyers and accountants
I'm wondering if OpenAI's charter might provide a useful legal angle. The charter states:
>OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that [AGI ...] benefits all of humanity.
>...
>We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
>Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
>...
>We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community.
>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. [...]
I'm no expert here, but to me, this charter doesn't appear to characterize OpenAI's behavior as of the year 2024. Safety people have left, Sam has inexplicably stopped discussing risks, and OpenAI seems to be focused on racing with competitors. My question: Is the charter legally enforceable? And if so, could it make sense for someone to file an additional lawsuit? Or shall we just wait and see how the Musk lawsuit plays out, for now?
So perhaps we can start a campaign of writing letters to her?
I'm curious about the "fiduciary duty" part. As a member of humanity, it would appear that OpenAI has a fiduciary duty to me. Does that give me standing? Suppose I say that OpenAI compromises my safety (and thus finances) by failing to discuss risks, having a poor safety culture (as illustrated by employee exits), and racing. Would that fly?
Under Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, you have to suffer a concrete, discernible injury. They can have broken their promise to you, but unless you can prove the dollar amount that harmed you, you can't sue.
Even if you donated to them, all states I know of assign sole oversight for proper management of those funds to the state AG. If you donate to a food bank and they use the money to buy personal Ferraris instead of helping the hungry, that's clearly illegal, but you'd be out the money either way, so you wouldn't have standing to sue. The attorney general has to sue for mismanagement of funds. If you feel OpenAI is violating their charter, I would definitely encourage writing to Mrs. Jennings to voice that opinion.
Elon Musk absolutely has standing, as one of the biggest donors to the nonprofit. I assume he will settle for some ownership in the for-profit, though.
That was also specifically about a donor-advised fund, which is different than a nonprofit corporation. Elon Musk's tort would be something like "fraud in the inducement" or some weird theory like that not for a breach of fiduciary duty.
Sam had a blog post literally two days ago that acknowledged risks. There’s also still a sizeable focus on safety and people with roles dedicated to it at open ai
If the non-profit is on board with that though, then they're breaking the law. The IRS should reclassify them as a for-profit for private inurement and the attorney general should have the entire board removed and replaced.
> An eight-year campaign to slash the agency’s budget has left it understaffed, hamstrung and operating with archaic equipment. The result: billions less to fund the government. That’s good news for corporations and the wealthy.
Still, if the non-profit has private inurement, the non-profit shouldn't be able to take anything tax-free as it wouldn't qualify as a 501(c)(3). The bigger issue is definitely Delaware non-profit law though.
But, if the non-profit gives all its assets to the new legal entity, shouldn't the new legal entity be taxed heavily? The gift tax rate goes up to 40% in the US. And 40% of the value of openAI is huge.
I think the real issue Musk was complaining about is that sama is quickly becoming very wealthy and powerful and Musk doesn't want any competition in this space.
Hopefully some people watching all this realize that the people running many of these big AI related projects don't care about AI. Sam Altman is selling a dream about AGI to help make himself both wealthier and more powerful, Elon Musk is doing the same with electric cars or better AI.
People on HN are sincerely invested in the ideas behind these things, but it's important to recognize that the people pulling the strings largely don't care outside how it benefits them. Just one of the many reasons, at least in AI, truly open source efforts are essential for any real progress in the long run.
There's a lot of jurisdiction around preventing this sort of abuse of the non-profit concept.
The reason why the people involved are not on trial right now is a bit of a mystery to me, but could be a combination of:
* Still too soon, all of this really took shape in the past year or two.
* Only Musk has sued them, so far, and that happened last month.
* There's some favoritism from the government to the leading AI company in the world.
* There's some favoritism from the government to a big company from YC and Sam Altman.
I do believe Musk's lawsuit will go through. The last two points are worth less and less with time as AI is being commoditized. Dismantling OpenAI is actually a business strategy for many other players now. This is not good for OpenAI.
>I would be surprised if OpenAI was a whole digit percentage of their revenue.
As opposed to? The euphemism "I wouldn't be surprised" usually means you think what you're saying. If you negate that you're saying what you _don't_ think is the case? I may be reading too much into whats probably a typo.
> I would be surprised if OpenAI was a whole digit percentage of their revenue.
It is not publicly known how much revenue Nvidia gets from OpenAI, but it is likely more than 1%, and they may be one of the top 4 unnamed customers in their 10Q filing, which would mean at least 10% and $3 billion [0].
Gemini is the product of a company that is still half-asleep. We’re trying to work with it on a big data case, and have seen everything, from missing to downright wrong documentation, missing SDKs and endpoints, random system errors and crashes, clueless support engineers… it’s a mess.
OpenAI is miles ahead in terms of ecosystem and platform integration. Google can come up with long context windows and cool demos all they want, OpenAI built a lot of moat while they were busy culling products :)
Meta has to be happy someone else is currently looking as sketchy as they are. Thus the business strategy is moving to limit their power and influence as much as possible while also avoiding any appearance of direct competition, and letting the other guy soak up the bad pr.
Amazon gets paid either way, because even if open ai doesn’t use them, where are you going to cloud your api that’s talking with open ai?
If open ai looks weakened I think we’ll see everyone else has a service they want you to try. But there’s no use in making much noise about that, especially during an election year. No matter who wins, all the rejected everywhere will blame AI, and who knows what that will look like. So, sit back and wait for the leader of the pack to absorb all the damage.
It is going to be taken advantage of. Musk and others have criticized this “novel” method of building a company. If it is legal then it is a puzzling loophole. But another way to look at it is it gives small and vulnerable companies a chance to survive (with different laws and taxes applying to the initial nonprofit). If you look at it as enabling competition against the big players it looks more reasonable.
>But another way to look at it is it gives small and vulnerable companies a chance to survive (with different laws and taxes applying to the initial nonprofit).
I feel like this is quite a slippery slope, though. Should we also give small companies a right to violate trademarks? Copyright? Kill people? These could also give them a chance to compete against big players.
At first, I thought, “Wow, if companies can start as nonprofits and later switch to for-profit, they’ll exploit the system.” But the more I learned about the chaos at OpenAI, the more I realized the opposite is true. Companies will steer clear of this kind of mess. The OpenAI story seems more like a warning than a blueprint. Why would any future company want to go down this path?
It's quite simple: the talent pool that had already enough money that they quit their well paying job at a for profit company in part because they wanted to continue working at a non-profit high impact.
As OpenAI found its product-market fit, the early visionaries are not needed anymore (although I'm sure the people working there are still amazing)
I think OpenAI took this play right out of one of its founding donors playbooks. Pretend your company has lofty goals and you can get people to compromise to moral relativism and work superduper hard for you. These people definitely have framed posters with the “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea" quote somewhere in their living places/workspaces.
Not an accountant but there are different kinds of nonprofits, OpenAI is a 501c3 (religious/charitable/educational) whereas the NFL was a 501c6 (trade association).
Obviously we all think of the NFL as a big money organisation, but it basically just organises the fixtures and the referees. The teams make all the money.
If you want to be pedantic, in legal terms, no, the NFL is a big money org ($13B+/yr in revenue, with a commissioner earning $65M/yr).
They pay dividends to the teams, however, yes. But all that revenue (which is distinct from team revenue) is actually legally earned by the NFL itself.
That could be the first step towards a complete takeover by Microsoft, possibly followed by more CEO shuffles.
I wonder though whether Microsoft is still interested. The free Bing Copilot barely gets any resources and gives very bad answers now.
If the above theory is correct (big if!), perhaps Microsoft wants to pivot to the military space. That would be in line with idealist employees leaving or being fired.
I don't see the point of anyone acquiring OpenAI - especially not Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, X.ai, all of which have developed the same tech themselves. The real assets are the people, who are leaving ship and potentially hireable. With this much turmoil, its hard to imagine we've seen the last of the high level exits.
Of the companies you've listed, Microsoft's AI products that are actually useful are all based on GPT-4, and the rest of them don't have any models that are truly on par with it.
o1 seems to be a step ahead for certain applications, but before that it seems that Claude Sonnet 3.5 was widely seen as the best model, and no doubt we'll be seeing next models from Anthropic shortly.
For corporate use cost/benefit is a big factor, not necessarily what narrow benchmarks your expensive top model can eke out a win on.
Claude was not the best model for reasoning even vs 4o, and it's quite visible once you start giving it more complex logical puzzles. People seem to like it more mostly because the way it speaks is less forced and robotic, and it's better at creative writing usually, but if you need actual _intelligence_, GPT is still quite a bit ahead of everybody else.
Now I don't think that it's because OpenAI has some kind of secret sauce. It rather seems that it's mostly due to their first mover advantage and access to immense hardware resources thanks to their Microsoft partnership. Nevertheless, whatever the reason their models are superior, that superiority is quantifiable in money.
Microsoft already effectively owns OpenAI. Their investments in OpenAI have granted them a 49% stake in the company, the right to sell any pre-AGI OpenAI products to Microsoft's customers, and access to all pre-AGI product research. Microsoft's $10 billion investment in early 2023 (after ChatGPT's launch massively increased OpenAI's operating expenses) was mainly in Azure compute credits rather than cash and delivered in tranches (as of November 2023 they'd only gotten a fraction of that money). It also gives Microsoft 75% of OpenAI's profits until they make their $10 billion back. All of these deals have effectively made OpenAI into Microsoft's generative AI R&D lab. More information: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/
From the standpoint of today, the deal is so lopsided to Microsoft as to be comical. They basically gave away their prized IP with the assumption they would have more capability leaps (hasn't really happened), and now the brains behind the original breakthroughs are all leaving/left. Microsoft is probably cannibalizing their enterprise sales with Azure. They are clearly middling at shipping actual products. People are acting like it's crazy to see executives leaving - IMO it's the perfect time right now. o1 is clearly wringing the last drops out of the transformer architecture and there is nothing up next.
Wouldn't surprise me if this was the actual cause of the revolt that led to Altman's short-lived ouster, they just couldn't publicly admit to it so made up a bunch of other nonsensical explanations.
You have cause and effect flipped. The non-profit didn’t try to oust Sam because he was getting the non-profit to disengage from OpenAIs capped profit entity, that makes no sense and he can’t do that, he can’t stear the hand of the non-profit board. What is happening is that he’s detangling the non-profit from what will be the for-profit in order to not have people trying to throw him overboard. It was obviously going to happen the second the non-profit board thought they could just fire him and take control.
Converting to a for-profit changes the tax status of donations. It also voids plausibility for Fair Use exemptions.
I can see large copyright holders lining up with takedowns demanding they revise their originating datasets since there will now be a clear-cut commercial use without license.
I hope I can join in, as a consumer, because there’s a difference between using the IP I contribute to conversations for a non-profit and a commercial enterprise.
I suspect that if you have ever posted copyrightable material online, you will have valid cause to sue them, as they very obviously have incorporated your work for commercial gain. That said, I unfortunately put your chances of winning in court very low.
And why is it, that winning chances are low? Why do the courts let big tech trample on our rights, but the small man goes to jail or has to pay fines for much much less? And how can this situation be improved?
Hopefully at least in the EU someone will wake up and make better laws or even start applying them to the current situation.
Any reasonable court would see right through “well we trained it for the public good, but only we can use it directly”. That’s not really a legal loophole as much as an arrogant ploy. IMO, IANAL
That’s not what happened at all. There’s non-profit and for profit entities have always been selerate. The non-profit didn’t train anything, it invested money in the for profit to “further the mission towards agi” what’s happening now is just the non-profit defeating in OpenAI and turning to other endevours. Which makes a lot of sense since they tried to cut off the head of the for profit entity to take control, o company would like to see that independent of if the specific investor trying to gain control is a non-profit entity or a large investor.
> It also voids plausibility for Fair Use exemptions. I can see large copyright holders lining up with takedowns
I thought so for a moment but then again Meta, Anthropic (I just checked and they have a "for profit and public benefit" status whatever that means), Google or that Musk's thing aren't non-profits, are they ? There are lawsuits in motion for sure but with how it stands today I think ai gets off the hook.
The restructuring is designed in part to make OpenAI more attractive to investors
I'm not surprised in the least.
Who is going to give billions to a non-profit with a bizarre structure where you don't actually own a part of it but have some "claim" with a capped profit? Can you imagine bringing that to Delaware courts if there was disagreement over the terms? Investors can risk it if it's a few million, but good luck convincing institutional investors to commit billions with that structure.
At that point you might as well just go with a standard for-profit model where ownership is clear, terms are standard and enforceable in court and people don't have to keep saying "explain how it works again?".
I’m waiting for pg and others to excuse this all by posting another apologetic penance which reminds us that founders are unicorns and everyone else is a pleb.
Lot of people unhappy about this yet not at all unhappy (or even caring) about the 1,000s of others who started out for profit. And while we're all here hacking away (we're hackers, right?) many of us with startups, what is it we're chasing? Profit, money, time, control. Are we different except in scale? Food for thought.
It's not what they're doing (trying to earn money), but it's how they're doing it (in a very unethical and damaging way), while trying to whitewash themselves.
I see your point but I think it's fine to be angry and disappointed that an outfit that appeared to be trying to do it differently has abandoned the effort.
I feel this only scratches the surface of what to chase in life. And in respect to a potentially singular, all-knowing piece of technology, not necessarily a goal people want to embue.
If you don't mind me asking, what generation are you from? Perchance you're newer than me to Earth, among those who find it hard that others have different opinions?
It’s criminal. Many people donated money, worked for them, gave data, etc. on the promise that OpenAI was working towards the public good. It turns out those transactions occurred under false pretenses. That’s fraud.
In any thread about companies that have some amount of hype around them, it’s difficult to tell the difference between comments coming from people with legitimate concerns about the issues at hand vs cynical people that have found their latest excuse to glom on to outrage against hype.
Altman and OpenAI deserve their success. They’ve been key to the LLM revolution and the push toward AGI. Without their vision to make a product out of an LLM that hundreds of millions of people now use and have greatly enriched their lives, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Meta wouldn’t have invested so heavily in AI. While we’ve heard about the questionable ethics of people like Jobs, Musk, and Altman, their work speaks for itself. If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?
> If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?
Well, yeah, they're positioning themselves as some of the most powerful and influential individuals on earth. I'd say any personality flaws are pretty important.
I'm sure there were people that claimed Nikola Tesla or Henry Ford weren't "advancing humanity" at the time.
There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.
> There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.
And conversely, there will always be people who agree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to overstate the reasons behind their success for selfish reasons.
I'm very far from a musk fan, and if you want to make the case that musk isn't responsible for Tesla, SpaceX, and Starlink I think that's a legitimate argument to be made. But I don't think there's much argument to be made that those 3 companies are not advancing humanity.
Tesla and SpaceX would not exist OR prosper, without Musk.
If you want to understand why, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Musk (which is based on accounts by his friends, enemies and employees). He's a hard-arsed manager, he is technically involved at all levels of the company, he is relentless, and he takes risks and iterates like no other CEO.
Considering Musk isn't the founder of Tesla, that's obviously not true. He is the founder of SpaceX so that's probably true that it wouldn't exist without him.
Walter Isaacson doesn't have the best reputation for covering his subjects objectively to be fair. If your source for what Elon has or hasn't done is Isaacson, you aren't standing on very solid ground.
The bigger picture point though is that you can easily argue that the employees at those companies, and not a single man, are responsible for the success of those companies. We give far too much credit to CEOs.
> Considering Musk isn't the founder of Tesla, that's obviously not true
Tesla began as a very early-stage startup in mid-2003 but produced nothing prior to Musk.
It was Musk that made the investment (in 2004) that Tesla needed to begin work on their first car (the Roadster). Elon Musk was co-founder, product architect and chairman of Tesla at the time of the Roadster's development. To be clear - he was the product architect of Tesla's first product, from the beginning.
Musk received the Global Green 2006 product design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster, presented by Mikhail Gorbachev, and he received the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster.
> If they’re advancing humanity, do their personal flaws really matter?
What's being discussed in this thread is not the personal failings of silicon valley darlings, but whether one of them just defrauded a few thousand people and embezzled a significant amount of capital. Citing his character flaws goes along with it though.
Are you seriously arguing that people should be exempt from law for "advancing humanity"?
Because I don't see any advancements whatsoever from all of the people mentioned. Altman and Musk would get a hardon for sure though, from being mentioned together with Jobs.
> advancing humanity
Perhaps but I'd say it's more of a mixed bag. Cell phones and social media have done harm and good at very large scales. As Dan Carlin once said, it feels like we're babies crawling toward hand guns. We don't seem like we're as wise as we are technically proficient.
Oppenheimer "advanced humanity" by giving us nuclear power. Cool. I love cheap energy. Unfortunately, there were some uh... "unfortunate side-effects" which continue to plague us.
Yishan Wong describes a series of actions by Yishan and Sam Altman as a "con", and Sam jumps in to brag that it was "child's play for me" with a smiley face. :)
I never read that as a brag, but as a sarcastic dismissal. That’s why it started with “cool story bro” and “except I could never have predicted”. I see the tone as “this story is convoluted” not as “I’ll admit to my plan now that you can’t do anything about it”.
That’s not to say Sam isn’t a scammer. He is. It just doesn’t seem like that particular post is proof of it. But Worldcoin is.
If I understand the history correctly, Yishan (the former Reddit CEO) is talking about himself when he talks about a CEO in this story, and so Yishan's post is a brag, with a thin denial tacked on at the end. That's why I believe that Sam (Yishan's friend) is also engaging in thinly-veiled bragging about these events.
Here is Yishan's comment with his name spelled out for clarity instead of just saying "CEO":
In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.
Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager [named Yishan Wong] with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, [Yishan Wong] would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.
Once this was done, [Yishan Wong] and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.
JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.
-- yishanwong
My understanding of what Sam meant by "I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot" was that he was conveying respect for Yishan essentially out-playing Sam at the end (the two of them are friends) by distancing himself (Yishan) from the situation and any potential liability in order to leave Sam "holding the bag" of possible liability.
Don't stop at robots.txt blocking. Look through your access logs, and you'll likely find a few IPs generating a huge amount of traffic. Look them up via "whois," then block the entire IP range if it seems like a bot host. There's no reason for cloud providers to browse my personal site, so if they host crawlers, they get blocked.
I wonder how the AI/copyright arguments will play out in court.
"If I read your book and I have a photographic memory and can recall any paragraph do I need to pay you a licensing fee?"
"If I go through your library and count all the times that 'the' is adjacent to 'end' do I need to get your permission to then tell that number to other people?"
Cases where we see the absurdity of copyright in its current form. But either we have it for everyone, including OpenAI, or for no one. Or are perhaps some more equal than others before the law?
808 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] thread* Frederick Banting sold the patent for insulin to the University of Toronto for just $1.
* Tim Berners-Lee decided not to patent the web, making it free for public use.
* Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine - "can you patent the sun?"
* Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds could have easily sold humanity out for untold billions.
* Chuck Feeny silently gave away $8bn, keeping only a few million.
... And in any case, this is an extreme situation. AI is an existential threat/opportunity. Allowing it to be sidestepped into the hands of Sam "sell me your retinal scans for $50" Altman is fucking insane, and that's putting it lightly.
It's way easier to adapt an existing framework one way or the other if the political part is already done.
I don't trust the AI industry to be a good stewart even less then the tech industry in general and when the area where I live has a chance at avoiding the worst outcome (even if at a price) in this technological transition I'm taking it.
https://factmyth.com/factoids/the-robber-barons-gave-most-of...
https://www.carnegie.org/about/our-history/gospelofwealth/
It’s hard to find someone who has gotten to a position where they might have a reasonable shot at becoming the world’s wealthiest person who doesn’t think they’d be a great steward of the wealth. It makes much more sense for a titan of industry to make as much as they can and then give much away than it does to simply not make it.
Regardless, you've missed the point. Some people value their integrity over $trillions, and refuse to sell humanity out. Others would sell you out for $50.
Or to put it another way: Some people have enough, and some never will.
You could prove me wrong easily. Find someone who raised (inflation adjusted) tens of billions, had the opportunity to make trillions, and declined. You can’t. You can likely take that down two orders of magnitude and still not succeed.
People who did some work on their own and open sourced something small that turned into something huge are not even close to what we’re talking here. They didn’t turn down a trillion, they turned down $100k that turned into a trillion later.
It isn’t about integrity. It’s about how humans rationalize. “Nobody is being hurt here.” “This can improve humanity.” “I’ll do good things with the money.”
It’s easy to say people have “integrity” when you just define it as adhering to your belief system when the stakes seem low, not their belief system when the stakes are clearly high.
Oh, but it is. That's exactly what this is about.
As pointed out much earlier in the thread, it's generally the people who lack integrity that fail to acknowledge or recognize it in others.
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
- You don't have to be Jesus to understand the sense of this quote. Just be honest and observant.
They would tell you (and sincerely believe it) that it being a for profit is better for a whole list of reasons. They believe they have integrity. They don’t believe they’ve lost their soul. They believe they’re doing a whole lot of good for the world.
That’s my point. The denizens of HN think they lack integrity for this, I think they just define it differently and anyone playing for trillions would define it their way.
> And those kind of people have difficulty believing this.
No, we're really not all like that.
I stopped caring about money at 6 digits a decade ago, and I'm not even at 7 digits now because I don't care for the accumulation of stuff — if money had been my goal, I'd have gone to Silicon Valley rather than to Berlin, and even unexciting work would have put me between 7 and 8 digits by this point.
I can imagine a world in which I had made "the right choices" with bitcoin and Apple stocks — perfect play would have had me own all of it — and then I realised this would simply have made me a Person Of Interest to national intelligence agencies, not given me anything I would find more interesting than what I do with far less.
I can imagine a future AI (in my lifetime, even) and a VN replicator, which rearranges the planet Mercury into a personal O'Neill cylinder for each and every human — such structures would exceed trillions of USD per unit if built today. Cool, I'll put a full-size model of the Enterprise D inside mine, and possibly invite friends over to play Star Fleet Battles using the main bridge viewscreen. But otherwise, what's the point? I already live somewhere nice.
> There are just people who are like that and people who think they aren’t because they’ve never been within a digit grouping of it.
Does it seem that way to you because you yourself have unbounded desire, or because the most famous business people in the world seem so?
People like me don't make the largest of waves. (Well, not unless HN karma counts…)
> perfect play would have had me own all of it
I meant literally all of it: with perfect play and the benefit of hindsight, starting with the money I had in c. 2002 from summer holiday jobs and initially using it for Apple trades until bitcoin was invented, it was possible to own all the bitcoin in existence with the right set of trades.
Heck, never mind perfect play, at current rates two single trades would have made me the single richest person on the planet: buying $1k of Apple stock at the right time, then selling it all for $20k when it was 10,000 BTC for some pizzas.
(But also, the attempt would almost certainly have broken the currency as IMO there's not really that much liquidity).
Being that rich doesn't lead my imagination to new happiness that I don't already possess, only new stresses that I don't already posess. I don't want a super yacht, a personal jet, nor a skyscraper with my name on it, and a private island is less appealing to me than a tourist destination.
Knowing this about myself, I don't need to chase higher pay or timing the markets to get things I can't currently afford, instead I focus on things that I do like. Those things in aggregate cost less than €12k/year, including travel.
I don't think there's many people out there who would not be tempted at all to take some of that money for themselves. Rather, people are willing and able to rise above that temptation.
For the true believers that's just a temporary setback on the way to becoming trillionaires though.
When/if Altman ever gets out of the way like Travis K did with Uber then the real business people can come in and run the company correctly. Exactly like what happened with Uber - who never turned a profit under that leadership in the US and had their lunch eaten by a Chinese knock-off for years abroad. Can't have spoiled brats in charge, they have no experience and are wasteful and impulsive. Especially like Altman who has no engineering talent either. What is his purpose in OpenAI? He can't do anything.
Or "clopen-source software", projects that claim to be open-source but vital pieces are proprietary.
Interesting timing of the news since Murati left today, gdb is 'inactive' and Sutskevar has left to start his own company. Also seeing few OpenAI folks announcing their future plans today on X/Twitter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that goal clashes with the interests of investors, the latter wins out.
That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use.
At this point it's not even funny anymore.
It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful misdeeds.
By the time some of them get huge, they're in bed with the government to dominate the market.
Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.
If we take your argument to it's logical conclusion, all progress is inherently bad, and should be stopped.
I deposit instead that the real problem is that we tied people's ability to afford basic necessities to how much output they can produce as a cog in our societal machine.
Yes, because if you depend on some overarching organisation or person to give it to you, you are fucked 100% of the time due this dependency.
If AI replaces millions of jobs, it will be a net negative in job availability for working class people.
I agree with your last point, the way the system is set up is incompatible with the looming future.
There is no similar net creation of jobs for society if jobs are eliminated by AI, and it's even worse than that because many of the jobs are specialized, high-skill positions that can't be transferred to other careers easily. It goes without saying that it also includes millions of low-skill jobs like cashiers, stockers, data entry, CS reps, etc. Generally people who are already struggling to get enough hours and feed their families as it is.
Recording devices permitted artists to sell more art.
Many of the uses of AI people get most excited about seem to be cutting the expensive human creators out of the equation.
Current AI can greatly elevate what a beginning artist can produce. If you have a decent grasp of proportions, perspective and good ideas, but aren't great at drawing, then using AI can be a huge quality improvement.
On the other hand if you're a top expert that draws quickly and efficiently it's quite possible that AI can't do very much for you in a lot of cases, at least not without a lot of hand tuning like training it on your own work first.
So yeah it had a profound effect, but we got consent for the parts that fundamentally relied on other people.
It's what everyone else does. The entitlement has to stop.
You're advocating for destroying all AI or ensuring a monopoly by corporations. Whose side are you actually on?
Irrelevant. The law does not care about feasibility of breaking it.
If I decide to run a hit man business, that's also infeasible. Dealing with the arrests and fines would be too much. The conclusion then is not to bend the law to make murder legal. The conclusion is my business is illegitimate, and it's the civic duty of my Country to make sure it fails.
> Whose side are you actually on?
The people making the content that corps are profiting big off of. They should pay a license.
Nope. The law will side with whoever pays the most. Once OpenAI solidifies its top position, only then will regulations kick in. Take YouTube, for example—it grew thanks to piracy. Now, as the leader, ContentID and DMCA rules work in its favor, blocking competition. If TikTok wasn’t a copyright-ignoring Chinese company, it would’ve been dead on arrival.
If it's only OK to scrape, lossy-compress, and redistribute book-paragraphs when it gets blended into a huge library of other attempts, then that's only going to empower big players that can afford to operate at that scale.
I've no idea if it could be valid when it comes to OpenAI, but it does seem to be a general concept designed to counter wrongdoers who take a little value from a lot of people?
The crazy thing is that there hasn't been an injunction to make them stop.
burning the bridge so nobody else can legally scrape, that's the line.
Assets like the Internet Archive, though, should be protected at all costs.
Update: ML doesn't copy information. It can merely memorise some small portions of it.
https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html
You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement.It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
A more fitting metaphor would be something like... If you had the ability to read all the books in the library extremely quickly, and to make useful mental connections between the information you read such that people would come to you for your vast knowledge, should you be allowed in the library?
The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me. The path trotten is what got us here and obviously nobody could have paid people upfront for the wild experimentation that was necessary. The only alternative is not having done it.
Given the path it has put as in, people either are insanely cruel or just completely detached from reality when it comes to what is necessary to do entirely new things.
"Hugely beneficial" is a stretch at this point. It has the potential to be hugely beneficial, sure, but it also has the potential to be ruinous.
We're already seeing GenAI being used to create disinformation at scale. That alone makes the potential for this being a net-negative very high.
Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.
Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."
P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0]
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
To continue one of the analogies: Plenty of people and industries legitimately benefited from the safety and cost-savings of asbestos insulation too, at least in the short run. Even today there are cases where one could argue it's still the best material for the job--if constructed and handled correctly. (Ditto for ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons.)
However over the decades its production and use grew to be over/mis-used in so very many ways, including--very ironically--respirators and masks that the user would put on their face and breathe through.
I'm not arguing LLMs have no reasonable uses, but rather that there are a lot of very tempting ways for institutions to slot them in which will cause chronic and subtle problems, especially when they are being marketed as a panacea.
We have a term for that, it's called "luddite". Those were english weavers who would break in to textile factories and destroy weaving machines at the beginning of the 1800s. With the extreme rare exception, all cloth is woven by machines now. The only hand made textiles in modern society are exceptionally fancy rugs, and knit scarves from grandma. All the clothing you're wearing now are woven by a machine, and nobody gives this a second thought today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_alright,_Jack
Except, we are all Jack.
Maybe it would have been better for humanity if the Luddites won.
It is not possible to rehabilitate the Luddites. If you insist on attempting to do so, there are better venues.
No, that's apples-to-oranges. The goals and complaints of Luddites largely concerned "who profits", the use of bargaining power (sometimes illicit), and economic arrangements in general.
They were not opposing the mechanization by claiming that machines were defective or were creating textiles which had inherent risks to the wearers.
I have never thought of being anti-AI as “Luddite”, but actually this very description of “Luddite” does sound like the concerns are in fact not completely different.
Observe:
Complaints about who profits? Check; OpenAI is earning money off of the backs of artists, authors, and other creatives. The AI was trained on the works of millions(?) of people that don’t get a single dime of the profits of OpenAI, without any input from those authors on whether that was ok.
Bargaining power? Check; OpenAI is hard at work lobbying to ensure that legislation regarding AI will benefit OpenAI, rather than work against the interests of OpenAI. The artists have no money nor time nor influence, nor anyone to speak on behalf of them, that will have any meaningful effect on AI policies and legislation.
Economic arrangements in general? Largely the same as the first point I guess. Those whose works the AI was trained on have no influence over the economic arrangements, and OpenAI is not about to pay them anything out of the goodness of their heart.
The Luddites were actually a fascinating group! It is a common misconception that they were against technology itself, in fact your own link does not say as much, the idea of “luddite” being anti-technology only appears in the description of the modern usage of the word.
Here is a quote from the Smithsonian[1] on them
>Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them.
I would also recommend the book Blood in the Machine[2] by Brian Merchant for an exploration of how understanding the Luddites now can be of present value
1 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...
2 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...
They had very rational reasons for trying to slow the introduction of a technology that was, during a period of economic downturn, destroying a source of income for huge swathes of working class people, leaving many of them in abject poverty. The beneficiaries of the technological change were primarily the holders of capital, with society at large getting some small benefit from cheaper textiles and the working classes experiencing a net loss.
If the impact of LLMs reaches a similar scale relative to today's economy, then it would be reasonable to expect to see similar patterns - unrest from those who find themselves unable to eat during the transition to the new technology, but them ultimately losing the battle and more profit flowing towards those holding the capital.
> "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over"
> "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed."
You response assumes the former, but it's my understanding the Luddite's actual position was the latter.
> Luddites objected primarily to the rising popularity of automated textile equipment, threatening the jobs and livelihoods of skilled workers as this technology allowed them to be replaced by cheaper and less skilled workers.
In this sense, "Luddite" feels quite accurate today.
We don't have to imagine such things, really, as that's extremely common with humans. I would argue that fixing such flaws in LLMs is a lot easier than fixing it in humans.
I currently work in the HR-tech space, so suppose someone has a not-too-crazy proposal of using an LLM to reword cover-letters to reduce potential bias in hiring. The issue is that the LLM will impart its own spin(s) on things, even when a human would say two inputs are functionally identical. As a very hypothetical example, suppose one candidate always does stuff like writing out the Latin like Juris Doctor instead of acronyms like JD, and then that causes the model to end up on "extremely qualified at" instead of "very qualified at"
The issue of deliberate attempts to corrupt the LLM with prompt-injection or poisonous training data are a whole 'nother can of minefield whack-a-moles. (OK, yeah, too far there.)
I just don't think your original comment was entirely fair. IMO, LLMs and related technology will be looked at similarly as the Internet - certainly it has been used for bad, but I think the good far outweighs the bad, and I think we have (and continue to) learn to deal with the issues with it, just as we will with LLMs and AI.
(FWIW, I'm not trying to ignore the ways this technology will be abused, or advocate for the crazy capitalistic tendency of shoving LLMs in everything. I just think the potential for good here is huge, and we should be just as aware of that as the issues)
(Also FWIW, I appreciate your entirely reasonable comment. There's far too many extreme opinions on this topic from all sides.)
Some not-problems, presented as though they are:
"How can we prevent the untimely eradication of Polio?"
"How can we prevent bot network operators from being unfairly excluded from online political discussions?"
"How can we enable context-and-content-unaware text generation mechanisms to propagate throughout society?"
For example, MKUltra tried to solve a problem: "How can I manipulate my fellow man?" That problem still exists today, and you bet AI is being employed to try to solve it.
History is littered with problems such as these.
Yes, we are clearly talking about things to mostly still come here. But if you assign a 0 until its a 1 you are just signing out of advancing anything that's remotely interesting.
If you are able to see a path to 1 on AI, at this point, then I don't know how you would justify not giving it our all. If you see a path and in the end using all of human knowledge up to this point was needed to make AI work for us, we must do that. What could possibly be more beneficial to us?
This is regardless of all issues the will have to be solved and the enormous amount of societal responsibility this puts on AI makers — which I, as a voter, will absolutely hold them accountable for (even though I am actually fairly optimistic they all feel the responsibility and are somewhat spooked by it too).
But that does not mean I think it's responsible to try and stop them at this point — which the copyright debate absolutely does. It would simply shut down 95% of AI, tomorrow, without any other viable alternative around. I don't understand how that is a serious option for anyone who roots for us.
Oh, the humanity! Who will write our third-rate erotica and Russian misinformation in a post-AI world?
I don’t think that the consumer LLMs that openai is pioneering is what need optimism.
AlphaFold and other uses of the fundamental technology behind LLMs need hype.
Not OpenAI
AlphaFold is a game changer for medical R&D. Everyone should be hyped for that.
They also are leveraging these same ML techniques for detecting kelp forest off the coast of Australia for preservation.
Alphabet isn’t a great company, but that does not mean the good they do should be ignored.
Much more deserving than chatgpt. Productifyed LLMs are just an attempt to make a new consumer product category.
I think you raise some interesting concerns in your last paragraph.
> enormous amount of societal responsibility this puts on AI makers — which I, as a voter, will absolutely hold them accountable for
I'm unsure of what mechanism voters have to hold private companies accountable. Fir example, whenever YouTube uses my location without me ever consenting to it - where is the vote to hold them accountable? Or when Facebook facilitates micro targeting of disinformation - where is the vote? Same for anything AI. I believe any legislative proposals (with input from large companies) is very likely more to create a walled garden than to actually reduce harm.
I suppose no need to respond, my main point is I don't think there is any accountability thru the ballot when it comes to AI and most things high-tech.
Firstly, *skeptics.
Secondly, being skeptical doesn't mean you have no optimism whatsoever, it's about hedging your optimism (or pessimism for that matter) based on what is understood, even about a not-fully-understood thing at the time you're being skeptical. You can be as optimistic as you want about getting data off of a hard drive that was melted in a fire, that doesn't mean you're going to do it. And a skeptic might rightfully point out that with the drive platters melted together, data recovery is pretty unlikely. Not impossible, but really unlikely.
Thirdly, OpenAI's efforts thus far are highly optimistic to call a path to true AI. What are you basing that on? Because I have not a deep but a passing understanding of the underlying technology of LLMs, and as such, I can assure you that I do not see any path from ChatGPT to Skynet. None whatsoever. Does that mean LLMs are useless or bad? Of course not, and I sleep better too knowing that LLM is not AI and is therefore not an existential threat to humanity, no matter what Sam Altman wants to blither on about.
And fourthly, "wanting" to stop them isn't the issue. If they broke the law, they should be stopped, simple as. If you can't innovate without trampling the rights of others then your innovation has to take a back seat to the functioning of our society, tough shit.
> The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me
I don't see s lot of anti AI but instead I see a concern for how it's just being managed and controlled by the larger companies with resources that no start up could dream. Open AI was to release it's models and be well.. Open but fine they're not. But their behaviour of how things are proceeding are questionable and unnecessarily aggravating.
I don't think this is the "ends justify the means" argument you think it is.
Automobiles allow people to travel great distances over short periods of time, increase physical work capacity, allow for building massive structures, and allow for farming insane amounts of food.
Both the internet and automobiles have positively affected my life, and I assume the lives of many others. How are any of these aimless questions?
And who is the one calling for action?
Sorry for being dense, but I'm trying to understand if I'm the "strong" or the "weak" in your analogy.
The work of artists, authors, etc.
I know currently the legal situation is messy, but that's exactly the point, anyone who can't engage in lengthy legal battle and defend their position in court are being sacrificed. The companies behind LLMs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying and exploiting loopholes.
Let's be real without the data there wouldn't be LLMs, so it crazy that some people are downplaying its significance or value, while on the other hand they're losing sleep over finding fresh sources to scrape.
The big publishers seem to have given up and decided it's best to reach agreement with their counterparts, while independent authors are given the finger.
> The work of artists, authors, etc.
Define "a lot"? Most people barely know how to use their email. Even among the minority who do actively use "AI" and excited about it, outside of ML engineers they aren't well-informed or aware what data is used for training, or even what training means and how these models work to begin with.
> People are excited and enthusiastic about AI and are actively reaping the benefits of progress.
Except the terms were already violated in the initial training phase before the services were even public and saw adoption. That's like pointing at a rape victim who got some form of compensation later, saying:
So let's not play the people wanted it card.By the time some people started raising concerns, OpenAI claimed the cat was already out of the bag and "if we didn't do it, someone else will, so deal with it."
Similar to privacy, just because some people don't care, lack awareness, or don't want the hassle of fighting for it, doesn't justify taking it away from others.
This is repackaging content, laundering it, and reselling it.
As others have noted, IP law has lots of problems; Sam Altman et al are exploiting the gap left between the speed of technology and law and using their own version of social good without waiting for the consent of those they're exploiting.
And isn’t this what basically every single scholar in the field says they want, anyway - safe, intentional, controlled deployment?
As you can tell from the above, I’m as far from being “anti-AI” or technically pessimistic as one can be — I plan to dedicate my life to its safe development. So there’s at least one counterexample for you to consider :)
OpenAI's case is especially egregious, with the entire starting as 'open' and reaping the benefits, then doing its best in every way to shut the door after itself by scaring people over AI apocalypses. If your argument is seriously that it is necessary to shamelessly steal and lie to do new things, I question your ethical standards, especially in the face of all the openly developed models out there.
I do not have confidence in the Supreme Court in general, and I think there's a real risk that in deciding on AI training they upend copyright of digital materials in a way that makes it worse for everyone.
It's completely unprecedented.
We allowed scraping images and text en masse when search engines used the data to let us find stuff.
We allow copying of style, and don't allow writing styles and aesthetics to be copyrighted or trademarked.
Then AI shows up, and people change lanes because they don't like the results.
One of the things that made me tilt towards the side of fair use was a breakdown of the Stable Diffusion model. The SD2.1 base model was trained on 5.85 billion images, all normalized to 512x512 BMP. That's 1MB per images, for a total of 5.85PB of BMP files. The resulting model is only 5.2GB. That's more than 99.999999% data loss from the source data to the trained set.
For every 1MB BMP file in the training dataset, less than 1byte makes it into the model.
I find it extremely difficult to call this redistribution of copyrighted data. It falls cleanly into fair use.
Their arguments against this amounts to "we're not using it like they intend it to be used, so it's fine if we obtain it illegally", and that's a bs standard, totally divorced from any legal reality.
Fair Use covers certain transformative uses, certainly, but it doesn't cover illegal obtaining of the content.
You can't pirate a book just because you want to use it transformatively (which is exactly what they've done), and that argument would never hold up for us as individuals, so we sure as hell shouldn't let tech companies get a special carve-out for it.
I'm surprised people are surprised.
>> That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use.
a lot of people and entities do this though... openAI is in the spotlight, but scraping everything and selling it is the business model for a lot of companies...
In my eyes, all genAI companies/tools are the same. I dislike all equally, and I use none of them.
That's the business model of lots of companies. Take, collect and collate data, put it in a new format more useful for your field/customers, resell.
w.r.t. Branding.
AI has been happening "forever". While "machine learning" or "genetic algorithms" were more of the rage pre-LLMs that doesn't mean people weren't using them. It's just Google Search didn't brand their search engine as "powered by ML". AI is everywhere now because everything already used AI and now the products as "Spellcheck With AI" instead of just "Spellcheck".
w.r.t. Willingness
Chatbots aren't new. You might remember Tay (2016) [1], Microsoft's twitter chat bot. It should seem really strange as well that right after OpenAI releases ChatGPT, Google releases Gemini. The transformers architecture for LLMs is from 2014, nobody was willing to be the first chatbot again until OpenAI did it but they all internally were working on them. ChatGPT is Nov 2022 [2], Blake Lemoine's firing was June 2022 [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT
[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient
Thanks for the links too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet_(Terminator)
1986: Geoffrey Hinton publishes the backpropagation algorithm as applied to neural networks, allowing more efficient training.
2011: Jeff Dean starts Google Brain.
2012: Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton publish AlexNet, which demonstrates that using GPUs yields quicker training on deep networks, surpassing non-neural-network participants by a wide margin on an image categorization competition.
2013: Geoffrey Hinton sells his team to the highest bidder. Google Brain wins the bid.
2015: Ilya Sutskever founds OpenAI.
2017: Google Brain publishes the first Transformer, showing impressive performance on language translation.
2018: OpenAI publishes GPT, showing that next-token prediction can solve many language benchmarks at once using Transformers, hinting at foundation models. They later scale it and show increasing performance.
The reality is that the ideas for this could have been combined earlier than they did (and plausibly future ideas could have been found today), but research takes time, and researchers tend to focus on one approach and assume that another has already been explored and doesn’t scale to SOTA (as many did for neural networks). First mover advantage, when finding a workable solution, is strong, and benefited OpenAI.
Honestly, those are not the missing parts that most matter IMO. The evolution of the concept of attention across many academic papers which fed to the Transformer is the big missing element in this timeline.
Not really:
History: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11279 (75 pp.)
Survey: https://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7828 (88 pp.)
Conveniently skim-read over the course of the four weekends on one month.
But out of the co-founders, especially if we believe Elon's and Hinton's description of him, he may have been the one that mattered most for their scientific achievements.
We've had upgrades to hardware, mostly led by NVidia, that made it possible.
New LLMs don't even rely that much on that aforementioned older architecture, right now it's mostly about compute and the quality of data.
I remember seeing some graphs that shows that the whole "learning" phenomena that we see with neural nets is mostly about compute and quality of data, the model and optimizations just being the cherry on the cake.
Don’t they all indicate being based on the transformer architecture?
> not entirely because of transformers but because of the hardware
Kaplan et al. 2020[0] (figure 7, §3.2.1) shows that LSTMs, the leading language architecture prior to transformers, scaled worse because they plateau’ed quickly with larger context.
[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361
As a moral fig leaf. They can always point to it when the press calls -- "see it is a non-profit".
Low level employees are there for the money, not for the drama.
the well known scammer successfully scammed everyone twice. obviously he's keeping it around for the third (and forth...) time
A tale as old as time. Some of us could see it, from afar <says while scratching gray, dusty beard>. Lack of upvotes and excitement does not mean support, but how to account for that in these times? <goes away>
Consider adding some EEE
It's hard to say if there is much brand value left with "OpenAI" - lots of history, but lots of toxicity too.
At the end of the day they'll do as well as they are able to differentiate and sell their increasingly commoditized products, in a competitive landscape where they've got Meta able to give it away for free.
That seems like fraud to me.
And, most importantly: non-profit charities (not the only kind of nonprofit, but presumably what OpenAI was) are legally obligated to operate “for the public good”. That’s why they’re tax exempt: the government is basically donating to them, with the understanding that they’re benefiting the public indirectly by doing so, not just making a few people rich.
In my understanding, this is just blatant outright fraud that any sane society would forbid. If you want to start a for-profit that’s fine, but you’d have to give away the nonprofit and its assets, not just roll it over to your own pocketbook.
God I hope Merrick Garland isn’t asleep at the wheel. They’ve been trust busting like mad during this administration, so hopefully they’re taking aim at this windmill, too.
Little chance of that as Sama is a big time Democrat fundraiser and donor.
Can’t find a good source for both rn but this one has alphabet in the top 50 nationwide for this election: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizat...
edit: and Sam Altman isn’t exactly donating game changing amounts — around $300K in 2020, and seemingly effectively nothing for this election. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at as an individual politician, but that’s about 0.01% of his net worth (going off Wikipedia’s estimate of $2.8B, not counting the ~$7B of OpenAI stock coming his way).
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/openai-sam-altman-political-d...
When you see any numbers for corporations contributing to political campaigns, that's actually just measuring the contributions from the employees of those corporations. That's why most corporations "donate to both parties"--because they employ both Republicans and Democrats.
Name names. We can look it up.
Again, I am not a lawyer but that makes no sense. Otherwise, anyone can claim the non-profit? So clearly there are some beneficial owners out there somehow.
1: In principle; in practice, well, we'll see with this one!
In practice it’s doable though. You can just create a new legal entity and move stuff and/or do future value creating activity in the new co. IF everyone is on board with the plan on both sides of the move then that’s totally doable with enough lawyers and accountants
I'm wondering if OpenAI's charter might provide a useful legal angle. The charter states:
>OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that [AGI ...] benefits all of humanity.
>...
>We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
>Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
>...
>We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community.
>We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. [...]
>...
https://openai.com/charter/
I'm no expert here, but to me, this charter doesn't appear to characterize OpenAI's behavior as of the year 2024. Safety people have left, Sam has inexplicably stopped discussing risks, and OpenAI seems to be focused on racing with competitors. My question: Is the charter legally enforceable? And if so, could it make sense for someone to file an additional lawsuit? Or shall we just wait and see how the Musk lawsuit plays out, for now?
I'm curious about the "fiduciary duty" part. As a member of humanity, it would appear that OpenAI has a fiduciary duty to me. Does that give me standing? Suppose I say that OpenAI compromises my safety (and thus finances) by failing to discuss risks, having a poor safety culture (as illustrated by employee exits), and racing. Would that fly?
Even if you donated to them, all states I know of assign sole oversight for proper management of those funds to the state AG. If you donate to a food bank and they use the money to buy personal Ferraris instead of helping the hungry, that's clearly illegal, but you'd be out the money either way, so you wouldn't have standing to sue. The attorney general has to sue for mismanagement of funds. If you feel OpenAI is violating their charter, I would definitely encourage writing to Mrs. Jennings to voice that opinion.
I don't know the laws of Delaware well, but I would be surprised if he has standing even as a donor.
The IRS isn’t stupid. The rules on what counts as taxable income and what the nonprofit can take tax-free have been around for decades.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-irs-was-gutted (2018)
> An eight-year campaign to slash the agency’s budget has left it understaffed, hamstrung and operating with archaic equipment. The result: billions less to fund the government. That’s good news for corporations and the wealthy.
You sign an exclusive, non-revocable licensing agreement. Ownership of the original IP remains 100% with the original startup.
Now, this only works if the non-profit's board is on-board.
I think the real issue Musk was complaining about is that sama is quickly becoming very wealthy and powerful and Musk doesn't want any competition in this space.
Hopefully some people watching all this realize that the people running many of these big AI related projects don't care about AI. Sam Altman is selling a dream about AGI to help make himself both wealthier and more powerful, Elon Musk is doing the same with electric cars or better AI.
People on HN are sincerely invested in the ideas behind these things, but it's important to recognize that the people pulling the strings largely don't care outside how it benefits them. Just one of the many reasons, at least in AI, truly open source efforts are essential for any real progress in the long run.
There's a lot of jurisdiction around preventing this sort of abuse of the non-profit concept.
The reason why the people involved are not on trial right now is a bit of a mystery to me, but could be a combination of:
* Still too soon, all of this really took shape in the past year or two.
* Only Musk has sued them, so far, and that happened last month.
* There's some favoritism from the government to the leading AI company in the world.
* There's some favoritism from the government to a big company from YC and Sam Altman.
I do believe Musk's lawsuit will go through. The last two points are worth less and less with time as AI is being commoditized. Dismantling OpenAI is actually a business strategy for many other players now. This is not good for OpenAI.
Which ones exactly?
NVIDIA is drinking sweet money from OpenAI.
Microsoft & Apple are in cahoots with it.
Meta/Facebook seems happy to compete with OpenAI on a fair playing field.
Anthropic lacks the resources.
Amazon doesn't seem to care.
Google is asleep.
NVIDIA makes money from any company doing AI. I would be surprised if OpenAI was a whole digit percentage of their revenue.
>Microsoft & Apple are in cahoots with it.
Nope. Apple is using OpenAI to fill holes their current model is not good at. This doesn't sound like a long-term partnership.
>Meta/Facebook seems happy to compete with OpenAI on a fair playing field.
They want open source models to rule, obliterating proprietary models out of existence, while at it.
>Anthropic lacks the resources.
Hence why it would be better for them if OpenAI would not exist. It's the same with all other AI companies out there.
>Amazon doesn't seem to care.
Citation needed, AWS keeps putting out products which are their market leaders, they just don't make a big fuzz about it.
>Google is asleep.
I'll give you this one. I have no idea why they keep Pichai around.
As opposed to? The euphemism "I wouldn't be surprised" usually means you think what you're saying. If you negate that you're saying what you _don't_ think is the case? I may be reading too much into whats probably a typo.
It is not publicly known how much revenue Nvidia gets from OpenAI, but it is likely more than 1%, and they may be one of the top 4 unnamed customers in their 10Q filing, which would mean at least 10% and $3 billion [0].
That's not nothing.
[0] https://www.yahoo.com/tech/nvidia-gets-almost-half-revenue-0...
OpenAI is miles ahead in terms of ecosystem and platform integration. Google can come up with long context windows and cool demos all they want, OpenAI built a lot of moat while they were busy culling products :)
I didn't realise it was that bad.
Amazon gets paid either way, because even if open ai doesn’t use them, where are you going to cloud your api that’s talking with open ai?
If open ai looks weakened I think we’ll see everyone else has a service they want you to try. But there’s no use in making much noise about that, especially during an election year. No matter who wins, all the rejected everywhere will blame AI, and who knows what that will look like. So, sit back and wait for the leader of the pack to absorb all the damage.
I feel like this is quite a slippery slope, though. Should we also give small companies a right to violate trademarks? Copyright? Kill people? These could also give them a chance to compete against big players.
As OpenAI found its product-market fit, the early visionaries are not needed anymore (although I'm sure the people working there are still amazing)
most would happily sell their soul and deal with any mess to reach $150B valuation
Obviously we all think of the NFL as a big money organisation, but it basically just organises the fixtures and the referees. The teams make all the money.
They pay dividends to the teams, however, yes. But all that revenue (which is distinct from team revenue) is actually legally earned by the NFL itself.
I wonder though whether Microsoft is still interested. The free Bing Copilot barely gets any resources and gives very bad answers now.
If the above theory is correct (big if!), perhaps Microsoft wants to pivot to the military space. That would be in line with idealist employees leaving or being fired.
Yes, I too can see how sama could end up as Microsoft’s CEO as a result of this
For corporate use cost/benefit is a big factor, not necessarily what narrow benchmarks your expensive top model can eke out a win on.
Now I don't think that it's because OpenAI has some kind of secret sauce. It rather seems that it's mostly due to their first mover advantage and access to immense hardware resources thanks to their Microsoft partnership. Nevertheless, whatever the reason their models are superior, that superiority is quantifiable in money.
I can see large copyright holders lining up with takedowns demanding they revise their originating datasets since there will now be a clear-cut commercial use without license.
Hopefully at least in the EU someone will wake up and make better laws or even start applying them to the current situation.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/...
I thought so for a moment but then again Meta, Anthropic (I just checked and they have a "for profit and public benefit" status whatever that means), Google or that Musk's thing aren't non-profits, are they ? There are lawsuits in motion for sure but with how it stands today I think ai gets off the hook.
I'm not surprised in the least.
Who is going to give billions to a non-profit with a bizarre structure where you don't actually own a part of it but have some "claim" with a capped profit? Can you imagine bringing that to Delaware courts if there was disagreement over the terms? Investors can risk it if it's a few million, but good luck convincing institutional investors to commit billions with that structure.
At that point you might as well just go with a standard for-profit model where ownership is clear, terms are standard and enforceable in court and people don't have to keep saying "explain how it works again?".
They have that Michael Scott & Ryan energy.
And what comes first, the mission, or being able to tell people you did your best but failed to build the thing you set out to build?
Perhaps most of us are more interested in fairness than progress, and that's fine.
I'm sorry, have we gotten so far up our own asses as a profession that we no longer just excuse unethical behavior, we actually encourage it?
I feel this only scratches the surface of what to chase in life. And in respect to a potentially singular, all-knowing piece of technology, not necessarily a goal people want to embue.
If you don't mind me asking, what generation are you from? Perchance you're newer than me to Earth, among those who find it hard that others have different opinions?
Well, yeah, they're positioning themselves as some of the most powerful and influential individuals on earth. I'd say any personality flaws are pretty important.
There will always be people who disagree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to downplay their success for selfish reasons.
And conversely, there will always be people who agree with the politics/opinions/alleigances of a successful person and who wish to overstate the reasons behind their success for selfish reasons.
If you want to understand why, read the Walter Isaacson biography of Musk (which is based on accounts by his friends, enemies and employees). He's a hard-arsed manager, he is technically involved at all levels of the company, he is relentless, and he takes risks and iterates like no other CEO.
Walter Isaacson doesn't have the best reputation for covering his subjects objectively to be fair. If your source for what Elon has or hasn't done is Isaacson, you aren't standing on very solid ground.
The bigger picture point though is that you can easily argue that the employees at those companies, and not a single man, are responsible for the success of those companies. We give far too much credit to CEOs.
Tesla began as a very early-stage startup in mid-2003 but produced nothing prior to Musk.
It was Musk that made the investment (in 2004) that Tesla needed to begin work on their first car (the Roadster). Elon Musk was co-founder, product architect and chairman of Tesla at the time of the Roadster's development. To be clear - he was the product architect of Tesla's first product, from the beginning.
Musk received the Global Green 2006 product design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster, presented by Mikhail Gorbachev, and he received the 2007 Index Design award for the design of the Tesla Roadster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generati...
What's being discussed in this thread is not the personal failings of silicon valley darlings, but whether one of them just defrauded a few thousand people and embezzled a significant amount of capital. Citing his character flaws goes along with it though.
Are you seriously arguing that people should be exempt from law for "advancing humanity"? Because I don't see any advancements whatsoever from all of the people mentioned. Altman and Musk would get a hardon for sure though, from being mentioned together with Jobs.
Oppenheimer "advanced humanity" by giving us nuclear power. Cool. I love cheap energy. Unfortunately, there were some uh... "unfortunate side-effects" which continue to plague us.
Yishan Wong describes a series of actions by Yishan and Sam Altman as a "con", and Sam jumps in to brag that it was "child's play for me" with a smiley face. :)
I never read that as a brag, but as a sarcastic dismissal. That’s why it started with “cool story bro” and “except I could never have predicted”. I see the tone as “this story is convoluted” not as “I’ll admit to my plan now that you can’t do anything about it”.
That’s not to say Sam isn’t a scammer. He is. It just doesn’t seem like that particular post is proof of it. But Worldcoin is.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/richardnieva/worldcoin-...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...
Here is Yishan's comment with his name spelled out for clarity instead of just saying "CEO":
-- yishanwongMy understanding of what Sam meant by "I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot" was that he was conveying respect for Yishan essentially out-playing Sam at the end (the two of them are friends) by distancing himself (Yishan) from the situation and any potential liability in order to leave Sam "holding the bag" of possible liability.
Reputationally... the net winner is Zuck. Way to go Meta (never thought I'd think this).
List of crawlers for those who now want to block: https://platform.openai.com/docs/bots
https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/blob/main/rob...
cloudflare have a button for this:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo...
"If I read your book and I have a photographic memory and can recall any paragraph do I need to pay you a licensing fee?"
"If I go through your library and count all the times that 'the' is adjacent to 'end' do I need to get your permission to then tell that number to other people?"