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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 exempt
by 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 agoPeople 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?