OpenAI Moves to Complete Potentially the Largest Theft in Human History (thezvi.substack.com)

It seems weird to say speculative gains were lost

They should at least have to pay the max marginal tax rate on all the donations they got that could have been tax deductible. And any other tax benefit they received.

This is the "everybody has a price" principle applied to organizations. One way to compare corruption across countries is by looking at the price you need to pay to override or bypass oversight, and how widely the resulting gains are distributed through the network.

When the whole ai thing exploded Sam Altman was peddling this hopeful narrative that Openai is a non profit is concerned about safety and improving humanity, and they were working with regulators to ensure the safety of the industry. The cynics have been vindicated.

> or when Altman said that if OpenAI succeeded at building AGI, it might “capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” That, he said, “is for sure not okay for one group of investors to have.”

He really is the king of exaggeration.

If i understood correctly the author does admit that continuing openai as a nonprofit is unrealistic, and the current balance of power could be much worse, but what disgusts me is the dishonest messaging they started off with.

Anyone else read Empire of AI? It left me pretty disgusted with openAI and Altman in particular. Curious if anyone has a rec for a book that is more positive in AIs benefits / the behavior of Sam / OAI?

Edit: downvoting why? Sama fanboys? Tell me your book rec then.

a Lehman Brothers moment

I'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical?

What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.

Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?

> It’s as if a mugger demanded all your money, you talked them down to giving up half your money, and you called that exchange a ‘change that recapitalized you.’

[flagged]

"Theft" means taking something from someone without consent. Who lost what ? There is no law suite, so maybe it's a donation ??

And here I thought the article would be about the blatant copyright infringement of every author, artist, and creative to train their models.

Take image diffusion models. They’re trained on the creative works of thousands and completely eliminates the economic niche for them.

I want to understand this more, so can someone please ELI5 what the theft in the article actually is? Theft implies someone lost something. I think it's theft from the non-profit? But what does that mean? Is it theft of taxes because of the wealth accumulated in the non-profit was not taxed according to how it would have been for a for-profit entity?

EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I read the article and it's not clear to me. The entire article is written with the assumption that the reader knows what the author is thinking.

Breaking news: For profit company chases profit, briefly pretends it's not while it is

I think OpenAI is screwed long-term, and their leadership knows it. Their most significant advantage was their employees, most of whom have now left for other companies. They're getting boxed in across every segment where they were previously the leader:

- Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube).

- Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too).

- Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding.

- Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?).

OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon?

It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year.

If they want to cash out, now is the time.

Theft of what, and from whom? The author breathlessly jumps around without ever establishing the most basic premise. Seems like clickbait doom-mongering more than anything substantial.

The IP concern is real, but it isn’t binary: we can move from monolithic pretraining on scraped corpora to multi-agent, agentic LLM workflows that retrieve licensed content at inference with provenance, metering, and revocation. Distributed agentic AI lets rights holders expose APIs or sandboxes so models reason in parallel over data without copying it, yielding auditable logs and pay-per-use economics. Parallel agentic AI pipelines can also enforce policy (e.g., no-train/no-store) as first-class constraints, which is much harder to do with a single opaque model.