Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and the mission went out the window.
A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly giving them a say in the organization, and things can change very quickly.
* This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.
How do we know the mission got thrown out a window? The board still, after days of intense controversy, have yet to clearly explain how Altman was betraying the mission.
Did he ignore safety? Did he defund important research? Did he push forward on projects against direct objections from the board?
If there’s a good reason, then let everybody know what that is. If there isn’t, then what was the point of all this?
He went full-bore on commercialization, scale, and growth. He started to ignore the 'non-profit mission'. He forced out shoddy, underprovisioned product to be first to market. While talking about safety out one side of his mouth, he was pushing "move fast and break things", "build a moat and become a monopoly asap" typical profit-driven hypergrowth mindset on the other.
Not to mention that he was aggressively fundraising for two companies that would be either be OpenAI's customer or sell products to OpenAI.
If OpenAI wants commercial hypergrowth pushing out untested stuff as quickly as possible in typical SV style they should get Altman back. But that does seem to contradict their mission. Why are they even a nonprofit? They should just restructure into a full for-profit juggernaut and stop living in contradiction.
chatgpt was under provisioned relative to demand, but demand was unprecedented, so it's not really fair to criticize much on that.
(It would have been a much bigger blunder to, say, build out 10x the capacity before launch, without knowing there was a level of demand is known to support it.)
Also, chatgpt's capabilities are what drove the huge demand, so I'm not sure how you can argue it is "shoddy".
Shipping broken product is a typical strategy to gain first mover advantage and try to build a moat. Even if it's mostly broken, if it's high value, people will do sign up and try to use it.
Alternatively, you can restrict signups and do gradual rollout, smoothing out kinks in the product and increasing provisioning as you go.
In 2016/17 Coinbase was totally broken. Constantly going offline, fucking up orders, taking 10 minutes to load the UI, UI full of bugs, etc. They could have restricted signups but they didn't want to. They wanted as many signups as possible, and decided to live with a busted product and "fix the airplane while it's taking off".
This is all fine, you just need to know your identity. A company that keeps talking about safety, being careful what they build, being careful what they put out in the wild and its potential externalities, acting recklessly Coinbase-style does not fit the rhetoric. It's the exact opposite of it.
In what way is ChatGPT broken? It goes down from time to time and has minor bugs. But other than that, the main problem is the hallucination problem that is a well-known limitation with all LLM products currently.
This hardly seems equivalent to what you describe from Coinbase, where no doubt people were losing money due to the bad state of the app.
For most startups, one of the most pressing priorities at any time is trying to not go out of business. There is always going to be a difficult balance between waiting for your product to mature and trying to generate revenue and show progress to investors.
Unless I’m totally mistaken, I don’t think that OpenAI’s funding was unlimited or granted without pressure to deliver tangible progress. Though I’d be interested to hear if you know differently. From my perspective, OpenAI acts like a startup because it is one.
A distasteful take on an industry transforming company. For one, I'm glad OpenAI released models at the pace they did which not only woke up Google and Meta, but also breathe a new life into tech which was subsumed by web3. If products like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT is your definition of "shoddy", then I'd like nothing more for Sam to accelerate!
Because the mission is visibly abandoned. There's nothing "open" about OpenAI. We may not know how the mission was abandoned but we know Sam was CEO, hence responsible.
In terms of the LLM's, it was abandoned after GPT-2 when they realised the dangers of what was coming with GPT 3/3.5. Better to paywall access to and monitor it than open-source it and let it loose on the world.
ie. the original mission was never viable long-term.
GPUs run on cash, not goodwill. AI researchers also run on cash -- they have plenty of options and an organization needs to be able to reward them to keep them motivated and working.
OpenAI is only what it is because of its commercial wing. It's not too different from the Mozilla Foundation, which would be instantly dead without their commercial subsidiary.
I would much rather OpenAI survives this and continues to thrive -- rather than have Microsoft or Google own the AI future.
>GPUs run on cash, not goodwill. AI researchers also run on cash
I've made this exact point like a dozen times on here and on other forums this weekend and I'm kinda surprised at the amount of blowback I've received. It's the same thing every time - "OpenAI has a specific mission/charter", "the for-profit subsidiary is subservient to the non-profit parent", and "the board of the parent answers to no one and must adhere to the mission/charter even if it means blowing up the whole thing". It's such a shockingly naive point of view. Maybe it made sense a few years ago when the for-profit sub was tiny but it's simply not the case any more given the current valuation/revenue/growth/ownership of the sub. Regardless of what a piece of paper says. My bet is the current corporate structure will not survive the week. If the true believers want to continue the mission while completely ignoring the commercial side, they will soon become volunteers and will have to start a GoFundMe for hardware.
>Mozilla Firefox, once a dominant player in the Internet browser market with a 30% market share, has witnessed a significant decline in its market share. According to Statcounter, Firefox's global market share has plummeted from 30% in 2009 to a current standing of 2.8%.
All the board did is replace a CEO, I think there is a whiff of cult of personality in the air. The purpose-driven non-profit corporate structure that they chose was precisely created to prevent such things.
Microsoft is intimately connected to the global surveillance infrastructure currently propping up US imperialism. Parts of the company basically operate as a defense contractor, not much different from Raytheon or Northrup Grumman.
For what it's worth, Google has said it's not letting any military play with any of their AI research. Microsoft apparently has no such qualms. Remember when the NSA offered a bounty for eavesdropping on Skype, then Microsoft bought Skype and removed all the encryption?
that PRISM was originally just a Microsoft thing, very likely built by Microsoft to funnel data to the NSA. Other companies were added later, but we know from the MUSCULAR leak etc, that some companies like Google were added involuntarily, by tapping fiber connections between data centers.
if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters.
what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then?
to a comment like this. why?
because no matter what people think inside, the outside world is full of wolves. the one who is capable of eating everyone is the king. there is an easy way to do that. be nice. even if you are not. act nice. even if you are not. will people notice it? yes. but would they care? for 10 min, 20 min or even 1 day. sooner or later they will forget the facade as long as you deliver things.
i was really naive believing there was any another option. if it is about capital and if it is the game, then i am ready to play now. can't wait to steal so many open source project out there and market it. obviously it will be hard but hey, it is legal and doable. just stating this fact because i never had the confident to pull it off. but after recent events, it started making sense. so whatever people do is now mine. i am gonna live with this motto and forget the goodwill of any person. as long as i can craft a narrative and sell whatever other create, i think that should be okay. what do you think of it? i am talking about the things like MIT license and open-source.
how far will it take me? as long as i have ability to steal the content and develop on top of stolen content, pretty sure i can make living out of it. please note, it doesn't imply openai stole anything. what i am trying to imply is that, i am free to steal and sell stuff others made for free. i never had that realization until today.
going by this definition, value can be leeched off other people who are doing things for free!
This in the theory of the lizard. Bugs do all the hard work of collecting food and water and flying around and lizards just sit and eat the ones that fly by.
Well except tragedy of the commons right? If it’s all lizards and no flies everyone dies. This is why the human versions project to the workers that they are all in it together and blah blah blah.
Non-profits are often misrepresented as being somehow morally superior. But as San Francisco will teach you, status as non-profit has little or nothing to do with being a mission driven organization.
Non-profits here are often just another type of company, but one where the revenue goes entirely to "salaries". Often their incentives are to perpetuate whatever problem there are there to supposedly solve. And since they have this branding of non-profit, they get little market pressure to actually solve problems.
For all the talk of alignment, we already have non-human agents that we constantly wrestle to align with our general welfare: institutions. The market, when properly regulated, does a very good job of aligning companies. Democracy is our flawed but acceptable way of dealing with monopolies, the biggest example being the Government. Institutions that escape the market and don't have democratic controls often end up misaligned, my favorite example being US universities.
Haven't 700 or so of the employees signed onto the letter? Hard to argue it's just a few important people who've been compromised when it's almost the entire company.
You compromise a few influential people in the organization to get a foot in the door and ultimately your money - which you control. Your money will do the rest.
The 700 other employees who've signed on have agency. They can refuse to go to Microsoft, and Microsoft wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Microsoft's money isn't some magical compelling force that makes everyone do what they want, otherwise they could have used it on the board in the first place.
Money changes people. Especially when it’s a lot of money. They got used to the money and they want it to keep flowing - the charter be damned. Everyone has a price.
Everyone has a price, yet Microsoft can't buy the three board members on OpenAI board. Curious.
Your initial statement was flatly wrong, and you're grasping at straws to make it still true. Microsoft wouldn't be able to get anywhere if the people who work for OpenAI chose to stay. The choice they're making to leave is still their choice, made of their own volition.
There's a whole range of opinions about AI as it is now or will be in the near future: for capabilities, I've seen people here stating with certainty everything from GPT being no better than 90s Markov chains to being genius level IQ; for impact, it (and diffusion models) are described even here as everywhere on the spectrum from pointless toys to existential threats to human creativity.
It's entirely possible that this is a case where everyone is smart and has sincerely held yet mutually incompatible opinions about what they have made and are making.
Right, what if what he wasn't being candid about was "we could be rich!" or "we're going to be rich!" messaging to the employees? Or some other messaging that he did not share with the board? Etc.. etc..
> * This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.
To me, RIM circa 2008 would have been a far better acquisition for Microsoft. Blackberry was embedded in corporate world, the media loved it (Obama had one), the iphone and android were really new.
I don't think this is a fair conclusion. Close to 90% of the employees have signed a letter asking for the board to resign. Seems like that puts the burden of proof on the board.
A board that basically accused Altman, publicly, of wrongdoing of some kind which appears to be false. To bring Altman back, or issue an explanation, would require retracting that; which brings in serious questions about legal liability for the directors.
Think about it. If you are the director of the company, fire the CEO, admit you were wrong even though nothing materially changed 3 days later, and severely damaged the company and your investors - are you getting away without a lawsuit? Whether it be from investors, or from Altman seeking to formally clear his name, or both? That's a level of incompetence that potentially runs the risk of piercing into personal liability (aka "you're losing your house").
So, you can't admit that you were wrong (at least, that's getting risky). You also can't elaborate on what he did wrong, because then you're in deep trouble if he actually didn't do anything wrong [1]. Your hands are tied for saying anything regarding what just happened, and it's your own fault. All you can do is let the company implode.
[1] A board that was smarter would've just said that "Altman was a fantastic CEO, but we believe the company needs to go a different direction." The vague accusations of wrongdoing were/are a catastrophic move; both from a legal perspective in tightening what they can say, and also for uniting the company around Altman.
There's no "open version" of OpenAI that actually exists. Elon Musk pledged money then tried to blackmail them into becoming the CEO, then bailed, leaving them to burn.
Sam Altman, good or bad, saved the company with his Microsoft partnership.
I honestly wish Windows Phone had stuck around. I didn't particularly like the OS (too much like Win8), but it would at least be a viable alternative to the Apple-Google duopoly.
A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly giving them a say in the organization, and things can change very quickly.
* This was what MS did to Nokia too, if I remember correctly, to get them to adopt the Windows Phone platform.