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OpenAI Moves to Complete Potentially the Largest Theft in Human History
- seydor 1y agoa Lehman Brothers moment
- labrador 1y agoIt seems weird to say speculative gains were lost
- FeepingCreature 1y agoSure, but in this case the speculative scenario is the entire premise behind the existence of the charity in the first place.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- labrador 1y agoThe charity was premised on either: - AGI being cheap to develop, or - finding funders willing to risk billions for capped returns. Neither happened. And I'm not sure the public would invest 100's of billions on the promise of AGI. I'm glad there are investors willing to take that chance. We all benefit either way if it is achieved.
- frotaur 1y ago'We all benefit either way'? I am not sure that making labour obsolete, and putting the replacement in the hands of a handful of investor will result in everybody benefiting.
- labrador 1y agoThat's a different conversation. I believe AGI will be a net benefit.
- Zardoz84 1y agoThere isn't AGI
- labrador 1y agoExactly. That's why I called them speculative.
- grayhatter 1y agoI feel as though you're ignoring the most important part of that sentence. I assume you meant to write; I believe that AGI will be a net benefit to whomever controls it. I would argue that if a profit driven company rents something valuable out to others, you should expect it would benefit them just as much if not more, than those paying for that privilege. Rented things may be useful, but they certainly are not a net benefit to the system as a whole.
- labrador 1y agoNo, I believe AGI will have a net benefit for all of humanity. The telephone system was a net benefit for all Americans even though for a time AT& T (Ma Bell) controlled it.
- grayhatter 1y agoYour pattern matching skills leave a lot of room for improvement. Information interconnection is meaningfully different from AGI, and the environment ATT and Bell existed within no longer exist.
- labrador 1y agoAGI is fantasy at this point and your assumption that AGI would give OpenAI unprecented powers is the Musk/Yudkowsky/Hinton argument that AI will dominate and enslave us. Drop those assumptions and my point stands that throughout history, monopolistically-controlled transformative technologies (telephones, electricity, vaccines, railroads) have still delivered net benefits to society, even if imperfectly distributed. This is just historical fact.
- FeepingCreature 1y ago"Neither happened"? I wasn't aware the OpenAI capped-profit corp had a funding problem?
- JohnnyMarcone 1y agoA lot of funding was predicated on them making the transition. Also they would not have been able to IPO without the transition, so there was a funding problem when you look at it that way.
- zozbot234 1y agoEspecially when those same speculative gains were predicated on the "theft" happening in the first place. The non-profit got at least a full order of magnitude more value out of the current deal than they could have gotten had OpenAI left their corporate structure unchanged. And they still get to control more of OpenAI if its valuation explodes, so the "upside" profile that they used to get by capping profits is broadly unchanged. Want even more upside? Then the non-profit can just plow some of their current stake into buying cheap options at their fair market price.
- lokar 1y agoThey should at least have to pay the max marginal tax rate on all the donations they got that could have been tax deductible. And any other tax benefit they received.
- bix6 1y agoAnyone else read Empire of AI? It left me pretty disgusted with openAI and Altman in particular. Curious if anyone has a rec for a book that is more positive in AIs benefits / the behavior of Sam / OAI? Edit: downvoting why? Sama fanboys? Tell me your book rec then.
- AJ007 1y agoDid not read the book, but have been following OpenAI since the beginning. The whole thing comes across as a bait and switch with parallels to Google's "Don't be evil." At minimum he isn't a person whom comes across as trustworthy - but very few tech leaders (or politicians, etc.) do. This situation is arguably better than an alternative where Google or another big tech monopoly had also monopolized LLMs (which seems like the most likely winner otherwise, however they may have also never voluntarily ventured in to publicly releasing LLM tools because of the copyright issues and risk of cannibalizing their existing ad business.) Feels like this story isn't finished and writing a book is premature.
- wslh 1y agoThis is the "everybody has a price" principle applied to organizations. One way to compare corruption across countries is by looking at the price you need to pay to override or bypass oversight, and how widely the resulting gains are distributed through the network.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoWhen the whole ai thing exploded Sam Altman was peddling this hopeful narrative that Openai is a non profit is concerned about safety and improving humanity, and they were working with regulators to ensure the safety of the industry. The cynics have been vindicated. > or when Altman said that if OpenAI succeeded at building AGI, it might “capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” That, he said, “is for sure not okay for one group of investors to have.” He really is the king of exaggeration. If i understood correctly the author does admit that continuing openai as a nonprofit is unrealistic, and the current balance of power could be much worse, but what disgusts me is the dishonest messaging they started off with.
- denverllc 1y agoAccording to empire of ai, they started OpenAI as a nonprofit so they could get people devoted to the mission and wouldn’t have to pay the high SV wages
- r_lee 1y agoAnd (im pretty sure) to get funding from prominent figures who were afraid of AI being monopolized privately and being used for evil...
- lawn 1y agoJust looking at Altman's history none of this is even remotely surprising. Lookup Worldcoin for instance.
- overvale 1y agoI'm so genuinely confused by all this. It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why (my fault for not keeping up I guess). But a company that wants to spend trillions of dollars on AGI infrastructure and hopes to re-shape the entire global economy surely needs to plow a staggering amount of money into its operations and not into a non-profit. I get that there is controversy over redirecting profits of a very successful business from a non-profit entity (which would be great) to private parties, but... that was always going to happen right? Am I just too cynical? What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious. Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
- skinnymuch 1y agoYes. Colonialism is certainly going to be worse. One AI company going from non profit to whatever it is now is not close.
- pfortuny 1y ago[deleted]: I need to be calm before posting.
- dang 1y agoIf only we all would!
- kamikazeturtles 1y ago> Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right? I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest. Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?
- zozbot234 1y ago
- mentalgear 1y ago> It’s as if a mugger demanded all your money, you talked them down to giving up half your money, and you called that exchange a ‘change that recapitalized you.’
- halJordan 1y agoStrictly speaking, in this scenario the mugger was recapitalized
- uvaursi 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nroets 1y ago"Theft" means taking something from someone without consent. Who lost what ? There is no law suite, so maybe it's a donation ??
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- verdverm 1y agoThe taxpayers / government. If they have been abusing their NP status to avoid taxes, they should have to back pay those.
- next_xibalba 1y agoSurely they have never turned a profit and are a long way from being profitable. If so, what taxes, current or back, would they owe?
- selectodude 1y agoThe money they received was tax deductible for the people who “donated it”. They money should have been taxed as income for either the earner or OpenAI.
- verdverm 1y agoI'd be curious if people were actually writing off their OpenAI bills as donations. That would be a big number for the enterprise deals, if they qualify as a donation
- the_duke 1y agoSurely the money coming in would otherwise have been investments exchanged for stock, which are not taxed until gains are realized.
- verdverm 1y agoIncome taxes are not the only tax non-profits are exempted from. Sales and property taxes are others, depending on jurisdiction, California being one such state. I am not familiar if OpenAI-NP has been exempted from these https://www.fplglaw.com/insights/california-nonprofit-law-essentials-part-4-state-tax-exemption/ https://www.fplglaw.com/insights/california-nonprofit-law-es...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- drivebyhooting 1y agoAnd here I thought the article would be about the blatant copyright infringement of every author, artist, and creative to train their models. Take image diffusion models. They’re trained on the creative works of thousands and completely eliminates the economic niche for them.
- binarymax 1y agoI want to understand this more, so can someone please ELI5 what the theft in the article actually is? Theft implies someone lost something. I think it's theft from the non-profit? But what does that mean? Is it theft of taxes because of the wealth accumulated in the non-profit was not taxed according to how it would have been for a for-profit entity? EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I read the article and it's not clear to me. The entire article is written with the assumption that the reader knows what the author is thinking.
- joe_the_user 1y agoIt seems like you're mixing "I don't understand X" with what's effectively an argument that X is false. Perhaps people feel that there's some bad faith in that approach. Also, the article is very clear - the wealth transfer is moving the money/capital controlled by a non-profit to stockholders of a for-profit company. The non-profit lost that property, the share holders gained that property. It seems like taking an implicit assumption something like "the same people are running the for-profit on the same basis they ran the non-profit so where's the theft" - feel free to make that argument but mix the claim with "I don't understand" doesn't seem like a fair approach.
- binarymax 1y agoI'm absolutely not arguing that X is false, because I don't know what X is, and I am arguing in good faith. I will follow up with the question: if the non-profit and the for-profit are owned by the same shareholders, what is the theft? Is this not a legal transfer between business entities? I am also a somewhat harsh critic of Sam Altman (mostly around theft of IP used to train models, and around his odd obsession with gathering biometrics of people). So I'm honestly looking for answers here to understand, again, what wrongdoing is being done?
- overvale 1y agoI'm not 100% clear myself but I think that the criticism is that what was supposed to be a non-profit delivering world-changing technology for the public good was bullied/manipulated into a for-profit entity that would enrich investors and consolidate power among the wealthy. So the "theft" is the wealthy stealing the benefits of AGI from the people. I think.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- deepdarkforest 1y agoBreaking news: For profit company chases profit, briefly pretends it's not while it is
- khazhoux 1y agoThis is it exactly. Plus, why do people think OAI is still special? Facebook, Google, and many smaller companies are doing the exact same work developing models.
- 47282847 1y agoIt is special because of what is being discussed here: it attempted (pretended?) to do so as a non-profit, which arguably gave it early support by people who otherwise may not have provided it. None of the other players you mention did so, which to me makes it an unfair advantage. Or not, given that it seems that anything is fair that you can get away with these days.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jampa 1y agoI think OpenAI is screwed long-term, and their leadership knows it. Their most significant advantage was their employees, most of whom have now left for other companies. They're getting boxed in across every segment where they were previously the leader: - Multimodality (browser use, video): To compete here, they need to take on Google, which owns the two biggest platforms and can easily integrate AI into them (Chrome and YouTube). - Pricing: Chinese companies are catching up fast. It feels like a new Chinese AI company appears every day, slowly creeping up the SOTA benchmarks (and now they have multimodality, too). - Coding and productivity tools: Anthropic is now king, with both the most popular coding tool and model for coding. - Social: Meta is a behemoth here, but it's surprising how far they've fallen (where is Llama at?). This is OpenAI's most likely path to success with Sora, but history tells us AI content trends tend to fade quickly (remember the "AI Presidents" wave?). OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon? It makes sense to cash out while we're still in "the bubble." Big Tech profits are at an all-time high, and there's speculation about a crash late next year. If they want to cash out, now is the time.
- throwaway314155 1y ago> most of whom have now left for other companies Is there like a public list of all employees who have transitioned or something? As far as I know there have been some high profile departures.
- nofriend 1y ago> OpenAI knows that if AGI arrives, it won't be through them. Otherwise, why would they be pushing for an IPO so soon? an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.
- jgalt212 1y ago> an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment. private deals are becoming bigger than public deals recently. so perhaps the IPO market is not a larger source of capital. different untapped capital, maybe, but probably not larger.
- periodjet 1y agoTheft of what, and from whom? The author breathlessly jumps around without ever establishing the most basic premise. Seems like clickbait doom-mongering more than anything substantial.
- CPLX 1y agoHere’s an analogy that might help: Imagine if an executive was running the world’s largest charity for cancer research, which was chartered to make sure a cure remained in the public trust and raised millions with that promise. But then once they discovered a cure for cancer the executive instead decided to transfer that cure to a ruthlessly competitive company they personally owned a large percentage of and then become a billionaire many times over.
- JohnnyMarcone 1y agoI thought Altman didn't own hardly any equity.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- senordevnyc 1y agoHe doesn't, which the Sam haters consistently just ignore or gloss over. Or my favorite, they pivot to complaining about how OpenAI is investing in companies he has a stake in, so that's how he's grifting everyone! Which makes no sense, because he could have pretty easily openly negotiated tens of billions in equity in OpenAI if he was after that, rather than try and do some kind of sleight of hand behind the scenes to maybe make 1% of that. Maybe.
- whatpeoplewant 1y agoThe IP concern is real, but it isn’t binary: we can move from monolithic pretraining on scraped corpora to multi-agent, agentic LLM workflows that retrieve licensed content at inference with provenance, metering, and revocation. Distributed agentic AI lets rights holders expose APIs or sandboxes so models reason in parallel over data without copying it, yielding auditable logs and pay-per-use economics. Parallel agentic AI pipelines can also enforce policy (e.g., no-train/no-store) as first-class constraints, which is much harder to do with a single opaque model.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]