I think it would be helpful for you to clarify which part of the chain you found objectionable:

- in 2015, OpenAI was founded as a Delaware nonprofit

- in 2017, OpenAI discovered the scaling laws and realized they needed far more compute (and thus money) than they had initially anticipated

- that discovery precipitated a series of negotiations between the founders on how to restructure OpenAI to raise more money for compute, ultimately resulting in Musk’s departure when the other founders would not give him control

- in 2018, OpenAI attempted to dramatically increase its fundraising despite Elon ending his contributions, but raised only $50M of its $100M goal

- in 2019, OpenAI created a capped-profit subsidiary in order to attract funding from commercial entities

- the nonprofit hired an independent assessor to value its IP, and then transferred that IP to the for-profit for fair value (around $60 million in 2019)

- the OpenAI nonprofit received a right to 100x capped return on its IP investment, or $6B, once the for-profit began making a profit. The nonprofit also received the right to the residual profit after all future investors reached their caps

- in 2019, OpenAI’s capped-profit received $1B in investment from Microsoft. OpenAI later received $2B from Microsoft in 2021 and $10B in 2023 as compute scaling continued

- Microsoft received a cap of 20x on its $1B investment, and 6x on its $2B and $10B investments, for a total of $92B target redemption

- in 2025, OpenAI’s for-profit entity recapitalized from a capped-profit entity with residuals flowing to the nonprofit to a traditional public benefit corporation with traditional equity

- in exchange for the residual (and 100x profit cap on the original $60M transfer) the nonprofit received a 26% equity stake in the for-profit. That stake is currently valued at around $200B

All of the above is from the record in Musk v. Altman, thanks to which we now have all the details. The upshot for the nonprofit is that it transferred IP worth around $60M in 2019 for rights to $6B in future profit, and then ended up with $200B in equity after the recapitalization. I see a lot of people in this thread assuming that the nonprofit no longer exists, which is not true.

There's a lot of things these days that you can't do that are being done.

Non profits have always been able to have for profit subsidiaries, owned by the non profit.

Most startups don't actually make profits and nonprofits can't give equity so it's not really a favorable structure.

This case was the first of its kind and it was never tested if OpenAI breached their charitable mission and the case was dismissed due to the statute of limitations.

Other than researchers, nobody from big tech would ever see themselves wanting to work at a charity / non-profit. The moment the VCs came into the picture then all the grifters poured in and AGI meant IPO.

> You can just use a favorable structure until it’s time to enrich yourself.

Maybe that diary was made out of teflon.

Nonprofit doesn't mean anything, since people can just route the profits into salaries. It's just another legacy regulation that may have once once had a societally-constructive purpose that wealthy people just use as one of the array of financial tools to help implement their latest scams. IMO, here are no legitimate nonprofits.

Western countries have been utterly strangled by nonprofits. Governments fund them with tax money in order to lobby themselves for legislation that financially benefits individuals in government and their donors. Obama even expanded the rules in the US to allow the government to unconstitutionally fund religious groups to accomplish functions that belong in government.

They should all be either reformed so that their internal bylaws and compensation are strictly regulated or probably preferably, they should simply be destroyed. If you only pay taxes on your profits (and we get rid of legal vehicles to hide profits) and your employees are obligated to pay taxes on their incomes, there's no need for a nonprofit status. If nonprofits want to engage in business (religions included), let them pay taxes. If they engage in charity, they won't have anything to tax.

It should not surprise you to learn that Greg Brockman is a Trumper and major donor.

It should also not surprise you that the Epstein files have not been released.

Everything is possible and not possible in a corrupted system.

I remember when wired changed editors. After Chris Anderson left it became "gq but we talk about iPhones"

I dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue that the technology enabled.

This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination.

There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things.

I too miss old Byte magazine days.

If his entire personal diary got exposed and that's the worst that's in it, good for him.

Yes, that, please! I also never understood why the board resigned after ousting Sam...

The winners get to write history.

Anthropic is the most hyped AI company now. Their models aren't the best, but their marketing sure is.

People discount Google/Deepmind but a lot of the original research was done there including inventing transformers which form the basis of the other AI companies.

It really does feel like OpenAI has lost their leadership. I haven’t used a model of theirs, let alone an app, in months.

pretraining isn't unsupervised, it is self-supervised - meaning it is moderately more scale limited.

I found it more interesting than I thought because I thought it'd all be stuff I knew but a lot was new to me.

Or when sociopaths are in charge, and the board tries to fix that, but other sociopaths work together to overrule the board. (And wtf is that anyway, overriding the board? Why do we even have boards of directors if rich, powerful assholes can just do whatever they want?)

I think of it more as a parable about how effective 'tying yourself to the mast' actually is

The founders of OpenAI naively^ thought "this will make sure that we don't have too much power if we succeed"

But it didn't work. What lesson should we learn?^^

^ please grant this for the sake of argument

^^ I have other models that I prefer to explain what happened, but I think this one is the most interesting

Nioxin shampoo generally works.

> Whatever AGI is, it "AGI" is not glueing a load of text prediction machines together.

K don't think it would be that simple either, but for now we simply don't know.

I would like to think that what I consider my intelligence will always be distinguishable from a cleverly built harness wrapped around text prediction, but I can't say for sure that's guaranteed.

I'm not sure people are saying AGI is glueing text machines.

How do you know that?

> What was the technical plan

"1. Solve reinforcement learning

2. Solve unsupervised learning

3. Gradually learn more complicated 'things'"

That three point list is verbatim the extent of the technical plan mentioned.

> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

Paraphrasing, "we needed more money for compute and didn't think we could get enough as a non-profit". Brockman's diary might be a stronger indicator of the real real reason, though.

Granola notes are a 1 Minute read: https://notes.granola.ai/d/2c35c84f-6eb4-497a-8419-294d92141...

>> What was the technical plan and what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

Because they were still downloading from Anna's Archive and the lawyers were in panic?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JoUcQ1qmAc

    00:00:00 Introduction
    00:00:49 Meeting Sam Altman and Starting OpenAI
    00:02:40 Building the Founding Team
    00:04:25 DeepMind's Lead Over OpenAI
    00:04:54 The Change from a Pure Non-Profit
    00:06:05 Breakthrough Moments at OpenAI
    00:08:22 What Dota 2 Meant for OpenAI
    00:10:04 Reasoning Versus Prediction
    00:11:59 Tensions Grow at OpenAI
    00:15:44 Sam Altman's Firing
    00:17:49 Greg Quits OpenAI
    00:19:56 Sam Explores Deal with Microsoft's Satya
    00:20:28 OpenAI Employees Sign Petition for Altman's Return
    00:23:43 Ilya Sutskever Leaves OpenAI
    00:24:59 Lessons Learned in Leadership after Sam Ousting
    00:28:22 The Thing Ilya Said that Greg Can't Forget
    00:32:22 Is AI Going Parabolic?
    00:33:24 How Much of OpenAI's Code is Written by AI?
    00:36:21 Are AI Chatbots Just Telling Us What We Want to Hear?
    00:38:06 The Global AI Race to Reach AGI
    00:38:40 What Happens if US Doesn't Reach AGI First?
    00:39:49 Are Competing Countries Stealing AI Advancements from U.S?
    00:40:38 Why ChatGPT No Longer Shows Reasoning
    00:41:47 The Finite Constraints of Compute
    00:43:38 On Investing Early in Data Centers
    00:46:31 The Future of Data Center Specialization
    00:47:52 How OpenAI Will Decide Whose Queries to Serve
    00:49:08 OpenAI on Consumer vs Enterprise Models
    00:53:05 Data Centers in Space?
    01:00:56 What Should AI Regulation Look Like?
    01:04:33 The Future of AI-Powered Entrepreneurship
    01:04:44 AI and Job Loss
    01:07:15 The Skills Young People Should Invest In
    01:11:30 What Does Success Look Like For You?

1. Solve reinforcement learning.

2. solve unsupervised learning.

3. gradually tackle more complicated things.

> what was the "real reason" they couldn't achieve their original goals?

I assume this is referring to why they gave up being a non-profit. The answer is that they needed more money.

> Not feeling like 1 hour of my Sunday is worth listening to this, do anyone have the non-clickbait answers to the two "previews" mentioned in the description?

I know HN is built around mostly not reading the articles linked but how about you click on the link and surprise, there is already exactly another link providing what you're asking for.

ChatGPT or CoPilot were awesome products at the time. I do not use them anymore these days. But to me it felt never like i was abused. And Investment into companies is what it is, a risk. But the results remain forever, whoever wins.

Not a fan of Altman but the devil you know is a powerful argument. If you believe a CEO/Founder to be a grifter-position at its core (fake it till you make it etc etc), retaining the best grifter you can find is the optimal play.