OpenAI is still a nonprofit. Their Financials are public. A lot of folks use "profit" in a hand-wavey sense to describe something they don't like, like an organization sitting on cash or paying key employees more than they expect. The organization may not be doing what donors thought it would with their money, but that doesn't necessarily mean cash retained is profit.
Recent filings show the organization has substantially cut its compensation for key employees year after year. It's sitting on quite a bit of cash, but I think that is expected given the scope of their work.
That said, their Financials from 2019 look a little weird. They reported considerable negative expenses, including negative salaries (what did they do, a bunch of clawbacks?), and had no fundraising expenses.
> Going forward (in this post and elsewhere), “OpenAI” refers to OpenAI LP (which now employs most of our staff), and the original entity is referred to as “OpenAI Nonprofit.”
Doesn't OpenAI Nonprofit own (maybe only 51% now that Microsoft owns the other 49%) OpenAI? I don't know how these things work, but it's kinda like how there's the Mozilla Foundation (non-profit) and the Mozilla Corporation. As described on Wikipedia, "the Mozilla Corporation is a tax-paying entity, which gives it much greater freedom in the revenue and business activities it can pursue".
I think it's all quite shady, but it seems like the parent company, which in theory holds 51% of the "profit-capped" company, is still a non-profit.
I wish someone, ideally from OpenAI, would clarify the situation.
Anything is possible if you are powerful enough and have the world's biggest companies competing for your product.
My worry is that even a half baked AI can produce useful wonders in many fields like healthcare, however useful amounts of data will now only be accessible and available to powerful players. Probably OpenAI did the bait and switch to get many competing sides on the same page.
Yuuup. And just like with Facebook, real power ( information ) in the form of ingested data and prompts will be available to people like Altman, Thiel and Musk, while everyone is gushing over being able to build a simple website automatically ( which is arguably cool ).
I wish I could trust FB to deliver on their promises, but this community's only hope is to ensure an open source version of gpt exists.
edit: To the best of my knowledge, banks seem to shy away from those tools so far, but I am sure there are analysts out there just waiting for an ok.
>I wish I could trust FB to deliver on their promises, but this community's only hope is to ensure an open source version of gpt exists.
This is the worrisome part of it all. It's no longer programmer sweat and toil that creates the value, but raw compute, which has a fixed capital cost that cannot be surmounted by skill or dedication. I don't see how, short of massive crowdfunding, open source can possibly release a state of the art LLM.
Hmm. Crowdfunding avenues exist. What is missing is trust ( also undermined by OpenAI ). I am trying to think who I would believe to have the knowledge, skill, PR skills ( or at least name recognition ) and ethics necessary to pull it off and I am drawing a blank. I am admittedly merely an interested party, but it does not bode well since the rest of the public knows or cares even less.
This is the loophole. It's what Mozilla did (Foundation created Corporation, and moved employees there), and even IKEA is technically owned by a nonprofit (Stichting INGKA Foundation).
It’s not difficult. I suspect it’s not as much as turning a non-profit into a for-profit, as it is about starting a new company and somehow transferring/licensing the IP from the old into the new.
I'm sure they did work hard and the product is innovative from my understanding of the definition of the word but oh boy does the whole "ethics" theater manage to infuriate me...
The worst part is that Altman had nothing to do with the success of Open AI. He simply failed upwards into this job, thanks to his Paul Graham friendship and YC connection.
We will see Altman all over the place while all the hardwork was done by actual scientists at Open AI who have barely spoken.
Yes. YC was very well established when he took over after failing with Loopt. YC is paulg and Morris brainchild. You might want to check on the 100X number again. And that's not how success is measured anyway.
Did worldcoin fail or shut down? Is there an article about that? It seems they stopped operating in a few countries in March 2022, anything beyond that?
It never succeeded to able to fail :) . Last I remember was an artice a few years ago describing how this scheme worked - basically it was a pyramid (incoming dictionary warriors in 3...2...1...), when earlier believers were inviting new people in the sect, to operate these orbs for pittance, and a fraction of funds from newcomers was given to early members. Where the money came in the first place I don't remember, but I won't be surprised if it was from a VC injections.
Does he refuse to reap the rewards, does he disavow the actions in a meaningful way? If not, then he's just as guilty whether he "did it" himself or not.
He probably would have done the same with his crypto scam startup worldcoin if it would not have failed in every way before he could scam.