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> Additionally, a structure with the ownership of OpenAI would be put in place. Microsoft would entail a 49 percent stake while other investors would take over
by World177 4y ago
> Additionally, a structure with the ownership of OpenAI would be put in place. Microsoft would entail a 49 percent stake while other investors would take over the other 49 percent. The remaining 2 percent will reportedly go to OpenAI’s non-profit parent firm.
When OpenAI was funded as a non-profit in 2015, it raised $1 billion from investors that included YC Research. [1] Sam Altman was also the former president of Y Combinator. [2] How did OpenAI move from being funded entirely as a non profit to a for-profit company with less than 2% being owned by the non-profit?
[1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/sam-altman-for-president
- swagmoney1606 4y agoOne thing that really bothers me is how much of a contradiction "OpenAI" is. There's virtually nothing open about it.
- Aissen 4y agoDisagreed. I'd say there's almost nothing open about it. GPT-1, GPT-2, Whisper, Point e, various papers etc. were all "open" contributions.
- esperent 4y agoIt's a good reminder that names don't mean anything. Words don't mean anything ("don't be evil" comes to mind). Only actions matter.
- nimbius 4y agowell clearly it was open for business.
- matchagaucho 4y agoIIRC Musk wanted the auto industry to standardize on an "Open AI" for autopilot, to waive liability and build consensus around ethical decisions.
- asdff 4y agoMaybe he should start with standardizing his charger
- brightball 4y agoIndustry is too early IMO. There’s a huge need to innovate on rapid recharge. I’d worry standardizing would negatively impact this.
- selectodude 4y agoSeeing as right now there are two connectors, Tesla's and literally everybody else, I'm not sure where innovation is necessary.
- brightball 4y agoThat we still don’t have rapid recharge close to gas?
- engineer_22 4y agoI dont know... high voltage and gas fumes dont sound like they mix.
- brightball 4y agoWell done sir.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- endymi0n 4y ago* literally everybody else _per continent_ please, also CCS is an abomination of a charging port. If you would let the CCS consortium design a megawatt charger like Tesla‘s V4, mere mortals would probably not even able to lift it.
- mshake2 4y agoYou can ask ChatGPT if you can run it locally, and it will happily say it is open source, then give 2 github.com links that 404 and then say it doesn't know where the code is if you press it for answers.
- MichaelBurge 4y agoChatGPT wasn't trained on text that talks about its own build process, source code, Github repos, etc. so it doesn't know any more than you and any such answers would be hallucinations.
- mshake2 4y agoI can't wait for the inevitable lawsuits that will result when this technology is white-labeled and misrepresents the business to customers or investors.
- loa_in_ 4y ago> I can't wait for the inevitable lawsuits But there's no ill intent. As long as it's not labeled as human. I guess it applies to everything, even sentient AIs, that it's fair as long as they don't promise services of a human.
- jjeaff 4y agoIt doesn't seem like that would magically protect a business. Otherwise, you could just have an AI write all your terms of service and marketing copy. That way, if you get sued, you can just say "oh, an AI wrote that marketing copy. We never claimed that a human made those promises."
- idontpost 4y ago[dead]
- pera 4y agoI remember the first time I read "OpenAI" I thought it was a new project of the Khronos Group consortium
- gonehome 4y agoIt's "open" relative to all of the research being IP of Google and FB. They pulled researchers into their own org and out of FAANG which I think was part of the motivation. They pitched it as open to the public, but I'm not sure that's what it was. I think opinions also changed because of goal alignment and AGI safety ideas becoming better understood.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoFAANG engineers usually publish their research in top NLP conferences ran by the ACL, which forces all published papers to have a permissive license and highly incentives people to contribute code along with the paper for reproducibility reasons. You don't know what you're talking about. OpenAI has done a lot of self publishing/arxiv to avoid getting slammed in peer review by the fact that none of what they have is open source.
- jefftk 4y ago> what they have is open source How is https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper not open source?
- Der_Einzige 4y agoThat's the only thing they open sourced. Also not NLP. That's speech to text.
- jefftk 4y agoHow is speech to text (speech recognition) not NLP? I used to work in NLP and the team next to me worked in speech to text. Though this was a decade ago and maybe terms have drifted? But it's listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing#Common_NLP_tasks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing#Co...
- varelse 4y ago[dead]
- synu 4y agoAI grant is another one. It's not actually a grant at all, they take ownership of your company. There's something about AI tech where it seems important to the owners that it comes across as open and philanthropic, even when it isn't.
- ethbr0 4y agoBecause nobody adopts your product if you advertise yourself as "the Oracle of {new thing}".
- adventured 4y agoThe industry has a potent weaponization aspect/risk to it, that the tech overlords recognized a very long time ago. They also know how parts of the tech landscape (eg SV workers) responds to such things as AI being used for military purposes (or similar). So naturally the people in charge of big tech (including the financiers) have to try to lure that labor in to creating what they want, via misleading fakery. Thus it is you get the non-open OpenAI.
- auggierose 4y agoThat sounds paranoid, but from what I see it is true.
- TheRealNGenius 4y ago[dead]
- neximo64 4y agoIn what way? The code is public
- SergeAx 4y agoAlso nothing intelligent.
- adrr 4y agoWas the $1b donated to the non-profit? That’s what I would want to know. Every time I hear non profit, I just assume it’s for tax avoidance.
- count 4y agoNon-profit does not necessarily mean 'charity' (which gets you the tax avoidance). There are a bunch of other categories that are non-charitable non-profits. Home owners associations, for example.
- lacker 4y agoI don't know anything about specifically how OpenAI made this transition. But in general this nonprofit to for-profit transition happens a lot. In general, when you run a for-profit company, the board has a responsibility to the shareholders to not hurt them financially. A nonprofit doesn't have these constraints - who would they be hurting? So if a nonprofit wants to do some weird financial transaction, and the board all agrees, they can usually just do it. For example, a nonprofit can agree to sell its assets in a complicated deal, and there is no real "external review" of this. So, you could create a for-profit subsidiary that is wholly owned, and then sell off some or all of its stock to a new group of investors. Or create different types of stock, capped or noncapped or preferred or unpreferred or whatever, and allocate different amounts of that to different groups. In particular, as long as both OpenAI leadership and the leadership of OpenAI's nonprofit parent firm (which are the same people, maybe?) agrees to this round of Microsoft investment, they can probably rewrite the terms in any way they want. Including in such a way that leaves the ownership being 49% Microsoft, 49% other investors, 2% nonprofit parent.
- slim 4y agoOpenAI leadership and the leadership of OpenAI's nonprofit parent firm (which are the same people, maybe?) exposing the burried lede :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beisner 4y agoIt's probably reasonably straightforward for well-connected VC people to raise $1bn from philanthropic rich people, which might have seemed like enough money at the time to make progress on the problem of AGI. But I suspect they've realized that the actual amount of capital required to cover headcount (some of the most expensive employees in the world) and compute (some of the largest specific+expensive compute requirements out there) that would be necessary to advance the state of the art far enough to create a real product that might be cash-flow-neutral is probably on the order of $10-30bn. And that's a tremendous amount of money for a philanthropist or set of philanthropists to sink into, far more than even the most well-connected people can marshal in donations from American billionaires. And the government likely wouldn't funnel that kind of money into an organization that has only a few hundred people. So the only remaining route (or at least the easiest for a bunch of established capitalists) is to raise money as a for-profit venture.
- kmeisthax 4y agoOpenAI has a very, very complicated ownership structure. They explicitly call this a "capped profit corporation". What this means in practice is that they have a non-profit arm that owns a for-profit arm, and the for-profit arm has some vague and laughably high "profit cap" to meet. Personally, it sounds like a really sketchy way to work around privacy and copyright concerns. I.e. "we're just doing non-profit research", while smuggling the fruits of that research into the for-profit arm.
- zdragnar 4y agoThat sounds a lot like the structure of the Mozilla Foundation (the non profit part) and the Mozilla Corporation (the for profit part that runs firefox, iirc).
- SkyMarshal 4y ago> and the for-profit arm has some vague and laughably high "profit cap" to meet. What's a profit cap? I've never even heard of that.
- kmeisthax 4y agoSee https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
- choppaface 4y agoReminder that Deepmind went for a mere $500m https://www.computerworld.com/article/2699555/google-acquires-artificial-intelligence-company-deepmind.amp.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2699555/google-acquire... A big up round like this during a recession provides a very useful lens to see how OpenAI is bargaining here.
- darkerside 4y agoSeems trivial for MS to buy another 2% from another investor
- gptgpp 4y agoSure, it's a little bit on the nose that a company titled "OpenAI" became, rapidly became absorbed by large private interests and, for the most part, open only in name (to be fair they do publish quite a few papers). But also, in Microsoft's defense, AI is potentially dangerous! We NEED large corporations to control it behind closed doors. Think of the terrible things the unwashed masses would do with such a disruptive technology! I, for one, would like to see legislation similar to that on cryptography, that bans exports and places heavy restrictions on who can access and develop such technologies. I'm thinking maybe we could call it the "Save the Children from AI Super-Predators" act? Or maybe the "American AI Freedom" bill, since a similar naming scheme is working great for OpenAI? I'm totally open to input for names. Call your senator, today!