3 ms·

If one wanted to invest in OpenAI or companies leveraging their technologies, what would HN recommend?

binarymax 3y ago
Buy MSFT? They have a good investment in OpenAI and their involvement may bring growth in their stock.
kornhole 3y ago
Because MS owns half the company, you could invest there but would also be investing in the rest of their product lines. If you are an accredited investor, Microventures and perhaps some others allow investment in pre-IPO shares.
joedevon 3y ago
You can't invest in a non-profit. j/k
MangoCoffee 3y ago
same as invest in SpaceX. you invest in a company that have investment in SpaceX for example buy Google stock.
hollerith 3y ago
OpenAI is less good as an investment than their revenue curve would suggest because the US government is likely to cap the size of future training runs (to reduce AI extinction risk) and there are plenty of open-source offerings suitable for the work of fine tuning and otherwise exploiting the economic potential of models of the size of GPT-4, so it is hard to see how OpenAI would be able to construct much of a moat by which to protect their prospective future profit margins. The idea that AI research must be regulated to prevent harms, including human extinction, is ridiculed on this site and in Silicon Valley, but policy is decided by representatives for the entire US voting population, not just the technologists of Silicon Valley, and polls show widespread skepticism in the broader population about the wisdom of continuing to create ever more capable AIs. Also, the people lobbying for a cap are disciplined, smart and well-funded. Companies that focus on applying the models we have now will probably do OK (e.g., Google's using something analogous to GPT-4 to improve their Search service except that unlike GPT-4, Google's model can cite its sources) but OpenAI is not doing that: their focus is to increase capabilities trusting that it will become clear in the future how to use those increased capabilities to produce economic value, but that plan doesn't work very well if the government imposes a limit on the increase of capabilities. Don't say I didn't try to warn you. ADDED. The leader of OpenAI says that it cost OpenAI roughly 100 million dollars to provide the computing resources necessary to create GPT-4. Once that "foundational model" model was created, it could be run (deployed) on much humbler hardware; some open-source competitors to GPT-4 for example can run on a beefy Macbook. Naturally there is no practical way to stop people from running a model once it has been released to the public, so regulation will target the "training runs" such as the aforementioned training run that produced GPT-4. The point is that there are many ways to "fine tune" a basic model to increase its economic value. GPT-4 by itself for example is useless as a search engine, but Microsoft fine-tuned it to produce something (Bing Chat, a.k.a., Sydney) that has some hope of becoming a popular search engine. You probably want to restrict your AI investments to companies good at this fine-tuning process.
- istjohn 3y ago
  We've been waiting over a decade for regulation to come to the social media space. Why do you think the government will be any different with AI?
  - hollerith 3y ago
    The embrace of social media by the mainstream population was probably a mistake, but it is a mistake that our society can recover from whereas if humanity makes a mistake with an AI that is more capable than the most capable human institutions, there's no recovery because there is a good chance there is no longer anybody left alive. More to the point, decision makers, e.g., in the US Congress, who were contemplating regulation of social media 10 years or 5 years ago knew that any harms caused by social media could be recovered from and can be probably persuaded that a mistake during "frontier" AI research probably cannot be recovered from. The people pushing for regulation of AI research do not need to convince the decision makers to the point of certainty. If the average decision maker for example comes to believe that there is a 10% change that AI research will kill everyone (if left unregulated too long) they will shut down "frontier" AI research even it means lots of Silicon-Valley types and AI-sector investors get very sore at them because most decision makers (at least in the US) have grandchildren or the hopes of having grandchildren one day. This is in contrast to the situation with social media 5 or 10 years ago, in which if a decision maker is only 10% certain that social media is harming the population, he's not likely to see that as a sufficient reason for making enemies in Silicon Valley and in those invested in Silicon Valley and as sufficient reason for doing the work of getting a law passed.
swader999 3y ago
Nvidia.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
You're too late, the gains are already priced into nvidia Maybe choose an industry you think will become automated the quickest: whatever business can lay off all its labor first can distribute the newfound profit to investors instead

Buy MSFT? They have a good investment in OpenAI and their involvement may bring growth in their stock.

Because MS owns half the company, you could invest there but would also be investing in the rest of their product lines. If you are an accredited investor, Microventures and perhaps some others allow investment in pre-IPO shares.

joedevon 3y ago

You can't invest in a non-profit. j/k

MangoCoffee 3y ago

same as invest in SpaceX. you invest in a company that have investment in SpaceX for example buy Google stock.

hollerith 3y ago

OpenAI is less good as an investment than their revenue curve would suggest because the US government is likely to cap the size of future training runs (to reduce AI extinction risk) and there are plenty of open-source offerings suitable for the work of fine tuning and otherwise exploiting the economic potential of models of the size of GPT-4, so it is hard to see how OpenAI would be able to construct much of a moat by which to protect their prospective future profit margins. The idea that AI research must be regulated to prevent harms, including human extinction, is ridiculed on this site and in Silicon Valley, but policy is decided by representatives for the entire US voting population, not just the technologists of Silicon Valley, and polls show widespread skepticism in the broader population about the wisdom of continuing to create ever more capable AIs. Also, the people lobbying for a cap are disciplined, smart and well-funded. Companies that focus on applying the models we have now will probably do OK (e.g., Google's using something analogous to GPT-4 to improve their Search service except that unlike GPT-4, Google's model can cite its sources) but OpenAI is not doing that: their focus is to increase capabilities trusting that it will become clear in the future how to use those increased capabilities to produce economic value, but that plan doesn't work very well if the government imposes a limit on the increase of capabilities. Don't say I didn't try to warn you. ADDED. The leader of OpenAI says that it cost OpenAI roughly 100 million dollars to provide the computing resources necessary to create GPT-4. Once that "foundational model" model was created, it could be run (deployed) on much humbler hardware; some open-source competitors to GPT-4 for example can run on a beefy Macbook. Naturally there is no practical way to stop people from running a model once it has been released to the public, so regulation will target the "training runs" such as the aforementioned training run that produced GPT-4. The point is that there are many ways to "fine tune" a basic model to increase its economic value. GPT-4 by itself for example is useless as a search engine, but Microsoft fine-tuned it to produce something (Bing Chat, a.k.a., Sydney) that has some hope of becoming a popular search engine. You probably want to restrict your AI investments to companies good at this fine-tuning process.

istjohn 3y ago
We've been waiting over a decade for regulation to come to the social media space. Why do you think the government will be any different with AI?
- hollerith 3y ago
  The embrace of social media by the mainstream population was probably a mistake, but it is a mistake that our society can recover from whereas if humanity makes a mistake with an AI that is more capable than the most capable human institutions, there's no recovery because there is a good chance there is no longer anybody left alive. More to the point, decision makers, e.g., in the US Congress, who were contemplating regulation of social media 10 years or 5 years ago knew that any harms caused by social media could be recovered from and can be probably persuaded that a mistake during "frontier" AI research probably cannot be recovered from. The people pushing for regulation of AI research do not need to convince the decision makers to the point of certainty. If the average decision maker for example comes to believe that there is a 10% change that AI research will kill everyone (if left unregulated too long) they will shut down "frontier" AI research even it means lots of Silicon-Valley types and AI-sector investors get very sore at them because most decision makers (at least in the US) have grandchildren or the hopes of having grandchildren one day. This is in contrast to the situation with social media 5 or 10 years ago, in which if a decision maker is only 10% certain that social media is harming the population, he's not likely to see that as a sufficient reason for making enemies in Silicon Valley and in those invested in Silicon Valley and as sufficient reason for doing the work of getting a law passed.

swader999 3y ago

Nvidia.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

You're too late, the gains are already priced into nvidia Maybe choose an industry you think will become automated the quickest: whatever business can lay off all its labor first can distribute the newfound profit to investors instead