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What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unb
by lexandstuff 3y ago
What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.
- __loam 3y agoWe don't really know anything about the internal finances at this point. The product is solid but who knows how fucked up things are. Maybe they were on track to run out of money. GPU compute ain't cheap.
- crop_rotation 3y agoNone of that can be a reason for a step like this. OpenAI can easily charge much more for their products, and there is a market for even extremely high prices (even if not as big) and given this is a non profit, it doesn't even need to make billions of dollars in money.
- CrazyStat 3y agoOpenAI exists both as a nonprofit and, for several years now, as a for-profit company [1] that has taken billions of dollars in investment. It needs to make billions of dollars to return to investors just as much as any other for-profit company does. [1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
- crop_rotation 3y agoThe non profit is the majority owner of the for profit, and there is no investor pressure here to make billions.
- j45 3y agoCould that not change as the board changes?
- jprete 3y agoI think the board is required to be a majority non-equity-holders precisely because an equity-holding board will not keep to their non-profit mission.
- j45 3y agoSince it's a private non-profit corp it might be whatever they want the rules to be. Arms-length neutrality on a board in silicon valley might still work like the rest as other comments have stated. Maybe someone can shed some light on it
- jprete 3y agoI’m presuming it was put into place as part of creating the capped-for-profit entity, to make sure the for-profit couldn’t itself permanently misalign the non-profit’s board.
- tempsy 3y agoEhh the whole “I don’t have equity” thing was a bit strange to me.
- mcenedella 3y agoSo weird.
- s1artibartfast 3y agowhat was strange about it? seemed pretty straight forward to me
- moralestapia 3y ago>what was strange about it? There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI think the ratio is basically the opposite, but thanks for explaining.
- moralestapia 3y agoOk, now I'm curious, do you live in a monastery or a very small community?
- s1artibartfast 3y agono, I live in a US urban environment and my experience is that most people enjoy doing good and helping others, especially when it is simple and low effort.
- manquer 3y ago> simple and low effort You would agree the OpenAI is neither ? the comparison doesn't do well then?
- soderfoo 3y agoAnd Sam was the face of AI to the general public, which makes these moves all the more perplexing.
- strikelaserclaw 3y agohe wasn't a very good face, most of my friends don't recognize who sam is, they know what chatgpt is though.
- cthalupa 3y agoI think you're likely vastly overestimating the amount of people in the general public who have any idea who Sam is at all.
- LoganDark 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/2501 https://xkcd.com/2501
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoJust look at how this news is doing on reddit (a service i conflate a little more with the general public than hacker news which learns towards silicon valley technology) and you can easily see the truth of your statement.
- rchaud 3y agoInterestingly parts of this comment section are behaving in Reddit-y ways, posting board members' Linkedins and questioning their credentials, as if their jobs are to just rubber stamp the CEO's calls.
- blackoil 3y agothat's not un-HN. Noone has any clue, and all are speculating, so it is one theory after another. We have dozen posts on capitalization.
- cedws 3y agoOpenAI is still riding on a fast wave of success from ChatGPT. Let's see how they're doing in a year.
- mvkel 3y agoDefinitely lots of tape and bubblegum holding things together. Like any fast growing company! And this one is breaking speed records.