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OpenAI Discusses Giving Altman 7% Stake in For-Profit Shift
- mise_en_place 2y agoTo me, it seems like they're choreographing an exit/acquisition or going public.
- Arubis 2y agoOpenAI valuations this year have ranged $80-150bn. Since it’s funny money anyway, let’s call it $100bn for easier math. That’s a $7bn stake.
- dosinga 2y agoI mean Musk wouldn't do it for that, why would Altman?
- 383toast 2y agoMicrosoft owns 50%, other investors own 20-30% presumably(?), 10% employee pool, that means all the other OpenAI founders/etc basically get nothing compared to Altman...
- bbor 2y agoWell, tbf, he’s one of the only ones left. There’s so much ethical/political/cultural attrition at these companies that even the company founded by attrition (Anthropic) looks like Theseus’ ghost ship these days. And Altman is, somehow, seen as an indispensable mascot for the general public and/or politicians worldwide. After all, what are the engineers gonna do? Quit? They’d be replaced in a month, I’m sure every open position OAI posts gets thousands of qualified applicants from people dreaming of FIRE and/or terrified of automation. And obviously they’re way too proud to consider unionization.
- ethbr1 2y ago> And Altman is, somehow, seen as an indispensable mascot for the general public and/or politicians worldwide. It's not rocket science. He figures out what people want to hear, tells them that, then does whatever he thinks is best regardless of what he said. When put that way, it does sound a bit sociopathic though...
- whyenot 2y agoHis sincerity and seriousness are so over the top, it comes off looking like an act, even if it is not.
- mnk47 2y agoSincerity? I don't know. He seems to really believe in AGI and the singularity and all that, but everything else seems to be lie after lie. This article [0] on the New York Magazine paints him as an incredibly insencere manipulator, which lines up with accusations made by Helen Toner and others. Things he repeatedly says (not caring about money, caring a lot about safety) are often at odds with his actions. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-openai-profile.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificia...
- deepfriedchokes 2y ago“He’s smart, like for a flyover-state community college,” said a Bay Area VC. “Do you watch Succession? You could make a Tom analogy.” Wow.
- ein0p 2y agoI guess we’ll see soon enough who gets the most credit for OpenAIs success and who’s disposable/replaceable. Sutskever in particular has quite a bit of mythology about him. Let’s see if he can fulfill all that.
- 7e 2y agoYeah, that's what you get when you pack the board with your sycophants.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoI'd like to see him go back to congress and explain his previous angelic story of not profiting by one penny from OpenAI. Current OpenAI raise is rumored to be at $150B, so 7% is over $10B.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago> I'd like to see him go back to congress and explain his previous angelic story of not profiting by one penny from OpenAI. A businessman lied? Pikachu's everywhere were shocked.
- __loam 2y agoIt's incredible that a company that has been bleeding senior staff like a stuck pig is capable of getting these kinds of valuations.
- bananapub 2y agoit's not incredible at all - the "valuations" are just numbers that associates of OpenAI put in to the media, which then get republished. it truly is the ultimate triumph of the VC class.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoThere is some reality to them - they are extrapolations of latest investment round. Say OpenAI had been valued at $100B, but some investors can be convinced to buy a 10% stake for $15B, then the company is now "valued" at $150B (10% = $15B => 100% = $150B).
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y agoIt's a bit like the tail wagging the pig though, since reality is probably more like a 1% (tail) share being bought for $1.5B, and that determining the "value" of the remaining 99% (the whole pig).
- TheTxT 2y ago
- 7e 2y agoThere is no moat in LLMs, I don't see this ending well. NVIDIA might buy them, but not for the price they want.
- dartos 2y agoThe moat is in the sheer cost of training models. At most you’ll have like 5 major players.
- turnsout 2y agoIsn’t their training subsidized by Microsoft? Sounds like Microsoft has the moat.
- dartos 2y agoSure, whatever. The moat is still the cost.
- turnsout 2y agoI hear ya. But with great open source models like Llama 3.2 dropping near-daily, I wonder if/when we’ll reach a point where free models are good enough for 99% of tasks.
- dartos 2y agoLlama is NOT open source. It’s freeware. We can’t reproduce it and its license has commercial restrictions. That being said, most models are based on llama, so it may seem like a lot of movement is happening, but it’s not, really. RWKV and deepseek are the only LLMs that’re fully open that I’m aware of. If meta decided to stop releasing llama, that’s that.
- n_ary 2y agoIf llama achieves valuable strides, it will definitely be put behind paywall. The play has always been the same, release something semi-polished until you gain mass adaptation, then build a paywall infront when people are reliant on it and attrition is expensive. Look at the twitter API for example, or reddit or what not.
- totetsu 2y agohttps://archive.is/McpGn https://archive.is/McpGn
- d--b 2y ago> The company is considering becoming a public benefit corporation, tasked with turning a profit and also helping society. What a joke.
- alsfasjh 2y agoMake everyone unemployed. Offer the unemployed a pittance for having their retinas scanned with "the orb". Claim that you are helping society.
- bbor 2y agoWe’re so interested in the public good that we can’t be hampered by the restrictive chains of legal obligations to the public! Don’t worry, we’ll just make rhetorical promises instead, it’s much more freeing. After all, who cares about nonprofit law in a new era with super high stakes? It’s all about agility now that we’re irreversibly in the Intelligence Age, and if you don’t let us abandon our obligations, we won’t be able to successfully bring about the Intelligence Age!
- 93po 2y agoNon-profits can make as much profit as they want, in fact they're encouraged to. The part they left out was "tasked with turning a profit (for already extremely wealthy individuals)"
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] more discussion: Altman equity https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548 Mira https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651038
- lxgr 2y agoI still have no idea what the "open" in OpenAI stands for, but at least we now know that it rhymes with the "non" in "nonprofit".
- 4b11b4 2y agoI lol
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- wg0 2y agoWhere are those Jobs that AI was supposed to take over? Especially programming?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- n_ary 2y agoAt IBM[1] and eventually to all the businesses that buy from IBM [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41646967
- 93po 2y agoHave you seen the software development job market? It's absolutely awful, the worst it's been since the internet became mainstream.
- khazhoux 2y agoI'm confused why people are so outraged on here. Usually everyone cheers on the CEO who becomes a billionaire by leading a successful startup. If the complaints here are because you invested in OpenAI and feel deceived and betrayed, that's one thing. But for everyone here who is just an observer, and didn't contribute to or trade with them, what are your grounds for being upset?
- Jordan-117 2y agoBecause if OpenAI's technology is as powerful and world-shaking as Altman says, it would be nice for it to be under the control of a nominally pro-social and humanist non-profit organization with safety and equity as paramount goals rather than just another cutthroat for-profit Silicon Valley corporate juggernaut.
- mitthrowaway2 2y agoSpeaking for myself, I'm worried that this adventure might lead to human extinction (among other possible negative outcomes), and one of the points of making it a non-profit was to help remove some of the incentives to charge recklessly forward. To that extent, this seems like a step in the wrong direction.
- khazhoux 2y agoTotally fair POV. I get sense, every time this topic comes up, that people feel that OpenAI somehow owes them to remain non-profit.
- n_ary 2y agoI agree to most of your opinion but > I'm worried that this adventure might lead to human extinction Is buying into Sam’s marketing and selling dreams to MBAs. Recall that, crypto in last decade promised to make global current financial system and banks go extinct… Corona lockdowns were expected to be the new norm… IBM watson was going to solve cancer… we were supposed to go Nuclear+renewable… Internet was going to make everyone own their own little business… Uber was going to make gig economy lucrative… Facebook was going to cure the global loneliness… Theranos was… whelp. Marketers will beat up their drums, money will be made, innovations will go one. At this moment, at the risk of getting political, OpenAI is at much less potential to extinct human species compared to looming war in EU and ME.
- AdieuToLogic 2y agoThis analysis from over a week ago may provide context as to why the shift is happening: https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
- purplezooey 2y agoThis is ridiculous. It's hard to see the source of the leverage.