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It's pretty ridiculous to call this criminal or morally disgusting. If you look at what is happening at Twitter and Musk's claims to want to build an alt-right

It's pretty ridiculous to call this criminal or morally disgusting. If you look at what is happening at Twitter and Musk's claims to want to build an alt-right OpenAI you can see the potential for ideological disagreements. Musk brought money to the table but Altman et al brought experience and reputation. And they have just as much right as Musk to determine the direction of the company.

pffft8888 4y ago
It is morally disgusting and if Delaware General Business Law allows it that does not make it lawful in other jurisdictions.
- tuukkah 4y ago
  What's the moral principle here: if you have taken any money from person X, then if person X feels like it, you must sell out to them?
  - pffft8888 4y ago
    No, you must not take money for a non-profit to support Open & Transparent AI research and then turn it into a for-profit (he could have just refused to sell, end of story) and make it about Closed Non-Transparent AI and start calling for regulations every other tweet, to build a moat that you know you can't otherwise have... because you're not that innovative, just lucky. That's sums it up pretty nicely, I would think.
    - SideQuark 4y ago
      It's perfectly legal to do what they did. If you and Musk don't understand the law it's not OpenAIs fault. Musk has shown quite clearly he's a business idiot with his signing to buy Twitter foregoing due diligence, trying to walk, and a court about to hand him his butt making him jump in. Both of you can now ask ChatGPT to explain the law to you and it will.
      - pffft8888 4y ago
        Legal and Ethical are completely different things in the modern Western mindset, so enjoy your legal existence ...
        SideQuark 4y ago
        The issue with ethics is people make up plenty of conflicting and unsupportable ethics all the time. The law has evolved to handle more balance and stability to help people with competing ideas of ethics live together. They're also clearly not "completely different things." That would imply no overlap, yet I find laws embody plenty of things I find ethical. If you find nothing in the law ethical then I certainly do not want your ethics. So I'll gladly take law on the whole over a person on the internet's as hoc flavor of ethics.
        AlchemistCamp 4y ago
        A hundred and fifty years ago, not only was it legal to kill American-Indians, but the US and various state governments were paying people to. This ranged from sponsoring militias in California slaughtering entire settlements to paying individuals in Minnesota a $75 bounty per Dakota scalp. Even in that time, there were many who could see that regardless of laws, the slaughter was not ethical. Others, committed atrocities for profit and consoled themselves that they were following the law. It’s generally a bad sign when someone answers questions of ethics with law. People constrained only by the law with no further ethical concerns do terrible things, right up to the limit of what the legal system they live under allows. To be clear, I am not claiming sama is unconcerned with ethics. I’m pushing back against conflating ethics with legality.
        SideQuark 4y ago
        When people pull one post selected, cherry picked example to argue for a general trend, it baffles me. The proper way to do evidence on the pros/cons of a system is to take all evidence. Yes there's outliers. But that's all they are. As ethics change, laws change, and vice versa. Neither exists or even is workable without the other. What is ethical in one time or place or situation changes, just like laws, and for the same reason- they're cultural constructs that evolve. As to claiming ethics is superior to law, history is also filled with people having different ethics going outside the law and causing great harm, genocides, and wars. Ethics is not defined in any universal sense. One could argue every lawbreaker has different ethics than those not breaking laws. Again, I prefer a society where people follow societally agreed upon laws over ones where everyone choose their own ethics and acts accordingly.
    - atonse 4y ago
      Ok I hate to be that guy. I always advocate that people should be good, blah blah. However… non-profit is largely a tax designation. In exchange for tax exemptions, non-profits can’t basically give their profits to shareholders. While the IRS does outline general examples of what we think of as charitable organizations, and the thing you claimed probably isn’t terribly clean (they do specify that nobody should profit from it, and one could claim that the for profit OpenAI is profiting from the non-profit, so is Microsoft), being a non-profit generally says next to nothing about morals. It’s probably closer to an academic institution spinning off a company from the product of its research, which happens quite often.
      - pffft8888 4y ago
        People are nuts to be focusing on the mundane and not on the fact that he went from $100M to promote Open Transparent AI Research to taking that $100M building expertise and tech and running off with a private for-profit dedicated to CLOSED AND OPAQUE AI Research. Something very wrong with that. Why are people here trying so hard to make it about technicalities?
        ithkuil 4y ago
        (being a bit of a devil's advocate because I honestly haven't formed an opinion yet since I don't know much; these are genuine questions) If it weren't for the spinning up the private company, perhaps they wouldn't have the money to get where they are now and they would be yet another snow flake in the AI Winter? How much of that was achieved while the company was a non-profit and how much was the value added once they spun off the for profit company? Did OpenAI the non-profit give any secret sauce to the for-profit arm? How does this relate to the many spinoffs from educational institutions that also receive donations and/or taxpayer money?
- tehwebguy 4y ago
  There is no jurisdiction in America that will let you retroactively decide the strings you want your past donations to come attached with. What are you talking about?
- PKop 4y ago
  There isn't a universal morality so just say you find it disgusting.
marcusverus 4y ago
> Musk's claims to want to build an alt-right OpenAI. I saw Elon push back on GPT's "wokeness"[0], but when did he say he was building an "alt-right" OpenAI? [0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/09/woke-chatgpt-conservatives-bias/11215353002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/09/woke-chatgpt-...
- lardo 4y ago
  Replace "alt-(left|right)" with "thing author doesn't like"
- SideQuark 4y ago
  Alt-right don't call themselves that. They simply parrot the same beliefs and principles until those beliefs and principles are applied to themselves.
  - marcusverus 4y ago
    Why do progressives always resort to oblique arguments like this? Are you capable of engaging without resorting to innuendo or broad accusations of bad faith?
    - SideQuark 4y ago
      I'm not a progressive. Why do people immediately label others to fit strawmen arguments? Let's break down the statements: Is there a movement or group often labeled alt-right? If so, do they use that phrase to label themselves? Do they tend to have similar beliefs (say for example support police, nearly unlimited free speech rights, smaller govt, lower spending...)? When these beliefs are not convenient, do they ignore them? (Ignore police and law for Jan 6, use govt to ban speech and books they dislike, increase govt intrusion for things they like, and ignore their own party running up national debt beyond anyone before Trump),? I'm pretty sure the above facts are not political at all. They are facts. The hypocrisy has pushed a significant number of lifelong conservatives out of the party. It would be a magical progressive that could simply argue so many conservatives to bail out.
pyuser583 4y ago
Musk didn’t bring experience to the table?!?
- ben_w 4y ago
  None of Musk's experience was brought to the table. He left the board, and even if he hadn't he's spread a bit thin by the rockets, the cars, the brain surgery, the civil-engineering-slash-personal-flamethrower, and the social media companies.

pffft8888 4y ago

It is morally disgusting and if Delaware General Business Law allows it that does not make it lawful in other jurisdictions.

tuukkah 4y ago
What's the moral principle here: if you have taken any money from person X, then if person X feels like it, you must sell out to them?
- pffft8888 4y ago
  No, you must not take money for a non-profit to support Open & Transparent AI research and then turn it into a for-profit (he could have just refused to sell, end of story) and make it about Closed Non-Transparent AI and start calling for regulations every other tweet, to build a moat that you know you can't otherwise have... because you're not that innovative, just lucky. That's sums it up pretty nicely, I would think.
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    It's perfectly legal to do what they did. If you and Musk don't understand the law it's not OpenAIs fault. Musk has shown quite clearly he's a business idiot with his signing to buy Twitter foregoing due diligence, trying to walk, and a court about to hand him his butt making him jump in. Both of you can now ask ChatGPT to explain the law to you and it will.
    - pffft8888 4y ago
      Legal and Ethical are completely different things in the modern Western mindset, so enjoy your legal existence ...
      - SideQuark 4y ago
        The issue with ethics is people make up plenty of conflicting and unsupportable ethics all the time. The law has evolved to handle more balance and stability to help people with competing ideas of ethics live together. They're also clearly not "completely different things." That would imply no overlap, yet I find laws embody plenty of things I find ethical. If you find nothing in the law ethical then I certainly do not want your ethics. So I'll gladly take law on the whole over a person on the internet's as hoc flavor of ethics.
        AlchemistCamp 4y ago
        A hundred and fifty years ago, not only was it legal to kill American-Indians, but the US and various state governments were paying people to. This ranged from sponsoring militias in California slaughtering entire settlements to paying individuals in Minnesota a $75 bounty per Dakota scalp. Even in that time, there were many who could see that regardless of laws, the slaughter was not ethical. Others, committed atrocities for profit and consoled themselves that they were following the law. It’s generally a bad sign when someone answers questions of ethics with law. People constrained only by the law with no further ethical concerns do terrible things, right up to the limit of what the legal system they live under allows. To be clear, I am not claiming sama is unconcerned with ethics. I’m pushing back against conflating ethics with legality.
        SideQuark 4y ago
        When people pull one post selected, cherry picked example to argue for a general trend, it baffles me. The proper way to do evidence on the pros/cons of a system is to take all evidence. Yes there's outliers. But that's all they are. As ethics change, laws change, and vice versa. Neither exists or even is workable without the other. What is ethical in one time or place or situation changes, just like laws, and for the same reason- they're cultural constructs that evolve. As to claiming ethics is superior to law, history is also filled with people having different ethics going outside the law and causing great harm, genocides, and wars. Ethics is not defined in any universal sense. One could argue every lawbreaker has different ethics than those not breaking laws. Again, I prefer a society where people follow societally agreed upon laws over ones where everyone choose their own ethics and acts accordingly.
  - atonse 4y ago
    Ok I hate to be that guy. I always advocate that people should be good, blah blah. However… non-profit is largely a tax designation. In exchange for tax exemptions, non-profits can’t basically give their profits to shareholders. While the IRS does outline general examples of what we think of as charitable organizations, and the thing you claimed probably isn’t terribly clean (they do specify that nobody should profit from it, and one could claim that the for profit OpenAI is profiting from the non-profit, so is Microsoft), being a non-profit generally says next to nothing about morals. It’s probably closer to an academic institution spinning off a company from the product of its research, which happens quite often.
    - pffft8888 4y ago
      People are nuts to be focusing on the mundane and not on the fact that he went from $100M to promote Open Transparent AI Research to taking that $100M building expertise and tech and running off with a private for-profit dedicated to CLOSED AND OPAQUE AI Research. Something very wrong with that. Why are people here trying so hard to make it about technicalities?
      - ithkuil 4y ago
        (being a bit of a devil's advocate because I honestly haven't formed an opinion yet since I don't know much; these are genuine questions) If it weren't for the spinning up the private company, perhaps they wouldn't have the money to get where they are now and they would be yet another snow flake in the AI Winter? How much of that was achieved while the company was a non-profit and how much was the value added once they spun off the for profit company? Did OpenAI the non-profit give any secret sauce to the for-profit arm? How does this relate to the many spinoffs from educational institutions that also receive donations and/or taxpayer money?
tehwebguy 4y ago
There is no jurisdiction in America that will let you retroactively decide the strings you want your past donations to come attached with. What are you talking about?
PKop 4y ago
There isn't a universal morality so just say you find it disgusting.

marcusverus 4y ago

> Musk's claims to want to build an alt-right OpenAI. I saw Elon push back on GPT's "wokeness"[0], but when did he say he was building an "alt-right" OpenAI? [0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/09/woke-chatgpt-conservatives-bias/11215353002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/09/woke-chatgpt-...

lardo 4y ago
Replace "alt-(left|right)" with "thing author doesn't like"
SideQuark 4y ago
Alt-right don't call themselves that. They simply parrot the same beliefs and principles until those beliefs and principles are applied to themselves.
- marcusverus 4y ago
  Why do progressives always resort to oblique arguments like this? Are you capable of engaging without resorting to innuendo or broad accusations of bad faith?
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    I'm not a progressive. Why do people immediately label others to fit strawmen arguments? Let's break down the statements: Is there a movement or group often labeled alt-right? If so, do they use that phrase to label themselves? Do they tend to have similar beliefs (say for example support police, nearly unlimited free speech rights, smaller govt, lower spending...)? When these beliefs are not convenient, do they ignore them? (Ignore police and law for Jan 6, use govt to ban speech and books they dislike, increase govt intrusion for things they like, and ignore their own party running up national debt beyond anyone before Trump),? I'm pretty sure the above facts are not political at all. They are facts. The hypocrisy has pushed a significant number of lifelong conservatives out of the party. It would be a magical progressive that could simply argue so many conservatives to bail out.

pyuser583 4y ago

Musk didn’t bring experience to the table?!?

ben_w 4y ago
None of Musk's experience was brought to the table. He left the board, and even if he hadn't he's spread a bit thin by the rockets, the cars, the brain surgery, the civil-engineering-slash-personal-flamethrower, and the social media companies.