It’s a capped-profit structure where excess profit will supposedly go back to the no-profit side. From a recent NYTimes article [1]:
> But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.
> His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.
Returns are capped at 100x their initial investment, which, you know, is not that big of a cap. VCs would go crazy for a 100x return. Most companies, even unicorns, don't get there.
They're justifying it by saying AGI is so stupidly big that OpenAI will see 100000x returns if uncapped. So, you know, standard FOMO tactics.
I'm sure he believes that at such a time when OpenAI creates AGI, all the company's investors' profit caps will have been passed (or will immediately be passed), and thus he will have removed all incentives for anyone at the company - including himself - to keep it from the world.
But there are so, so many incentives other than equity that come into play. Pride, well-meaning fear of proliferation, national security concerns, non-profit-related but still-binding contractual obligations... all can contribute to OpenAI wanting to keep control of their creations even if they have no specific financial incentive to do so.
Whether that level of control is good or bad is a much longer conversation, of course.
Again, this is unbelievably good marketing - and good sales when pitching VCs. Plus it's a nice reworking of the very for profit nonprofit model (see also FTX). But in terms of actual reality openAI is mostly succeeding by being more reckless and more aggressively commercial than the other players in this space, and is in no meaningful way a nonprofit any longer.
This is ducking insane. How are people not up in arms about this? Imagine if the guy who invented recombinant insulin stated publicly that he intended to capture the entire medical sector and then use the money and power to reshape society by distributing wealth as he saw fit. That’s ducking insane and dangerous. This guy has lost his fucking mind and needs to be stopped.
I’m sorry your AI keyboard didn’t like your sentiment. Words have been changed to reduce your vulgarity. Thankyou for your human node input.
On a serious note I think you are right. In private the ideology of him and his mentor Theil is a lot more… elite. Their think tank once said “of all the people in the world there are probably only 10,000 unique and valuable characters. The rest of us are copies.”
I’m not going to criticize that because it might be a valid perspective but filter it through that kind of power. I don’t love that kind of thinking driving such a powerful technology.
I am so sad that Silicon Valley started out as a place to elevate humanity and ended with a bunch of tech elites who see the rest of the world generally as a waste of space. They claim fervently otherwise but at this point it seems to be a very thin veneer.
The obvious example being GPT was not built to credit or give attribution to its contributors. It is a vision of the world where everything is stolen from all of us and put in Sam Altmans hands because he’s… better or
Something.
I find OpenAI a bit sketchy, but this is an overreaction. The only difference between OpenAI and the rest is that OpenAI claims to have good intentions, only time will tell if this is true. But the others don't even claim to have good intentions. It's not like any of OpenAI's actions are unusually bad for a for-profit compnay.
> But these profits are capped, and any additional revenue will be pumped back into the OpenAI nonprofit that was founded back in 2015.
> His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.
How believable that is, who knows.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-ope...