I don't understand why they are spending so much time and effort trying to put a positive spin on this whole for-profit thing. No one is buying it. We all know what's going on. Just say "we want to make lots of money" and move on with your lives.
I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world. Employees on the inside are always going to have a decent percentage of “true believers” who have cognitive dissonance if they don’t believe they’re making the world better. And so companies need to provide a narrative to keep that type of employee happy.
I think this underestimates the degree to which the people on these companies legitimately believe what they’re saying. I’ve worked at one of these companies and absolutely would fall into your category of being a true believer at the time.
People of all stripes are extremely willing to embrace ideas that justify their own personal benefit. A rich person might be more likely to believe in trickle-down economics because ultimately it enriches them — but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a false belief. An American might sincerely believe that gun proliferation is safe, because the information they process is filtered by their biases as it’s important to their cultural identity.
So when your stock options will pay out big from the company’s success, or even just if your paycheque depends on it — you’re more likely to process information and ideas though the lens of your bias. It’s not just being a gullible true believer tricked by the company’s elite — you’re also just willing to interpret it the same way in no small part because it benefits you.
Modern hiring process, esp culture fit, is designed to ensure that fraction of true believers inside the company is meaningfully higher compared to the outside.
I think it is simpler than that: people generally tend to work for companies who's products they think are interesting and useful. It's much easier to go into work each day when you think you're spending your time doing something useful.
It works both ways. Sure, when you're looking for more people to join your cult, it helps to get those who are already drawn to you. But you also need to screen out those who would become disappointed quickly, and brainwash the ones that join to ensure continued devotion.
In a way, liking the job is part of the compensation package. That's why places like game development and SpaceX can pay little for bad working conditions and still have enough applicants.
It's only really an issue if you get tricked by a facade or indoctrinated into a cult. For companies that are honest the dynamic is perfectly fine
There’s also the added layer that if you admit the place you’re working at is doing something wrong/immoral, not only do you suddenly feel a conscience-driven pressure to do something about it (leave even) but also it opens the door that maybe you had been contributing to something “evil” this whole time and either didn’t catch it or ignored it. Nobody wants to believe they were doing something wrong basically every day.
And a non-American may think the right to bear arms is antiquated and that a trained, armed populace isn't instrumental to a functioning democracy. What's your point? How have you established that this is the biased viewpoint and not your own?
> I think often company spin like this is more targeted towards internal employees than the outside world.
Probably is more ti employees than the general public, but it is even more targeted to the growing number of lawsuts against the conversion, since the charity nonprofit’s board is required to act in the interest of its charitable purpose even in a decision like this.
It is directed at defeating the idea, expressed quite effectively in the opening of Musk’s suit, that “Never before has a corporation gone from tax-exempt charity to a $157 billion for-profit, market-paralyzing gorgon—and in just eight years. Never before has it happened, because doing so violates almost every principle of law governing economic activity. It requires lying to donors, lying to members, lying to markets, lying to regulators, and lying to the public.”
There are tons of examples of non profit that are run for profit (mostly profit / career advancement of those in charge and their families and friends).
Firefox spend a ton on pet projects to boost careers. Now the core product lost most matketshare and is not what people want.
Wikipedia collects a ton of money and wastes it on everything bar wikipedia (mostly salaries and pet proje ts).
There are those charities where 95% of collected money is spent on own costs and only 5% reaches those in need / the topics that they should solve.
Control over non profits is a joke. People in charge respond to nobody.
Yes but when that statement doesn't come with "and we're doubling all your salaries" then as an employee it doesn't really matter.
The double edge of most companies insulating employees from the actual business is that beyond the maintenance cost employees don't care that the business is doing well because, well, it doesn't affect them. But what does affect them is abandoning the company's values that made them sign on in the first place.
> Employees on the inside are always going to have a decent percentage of “true believers” who have cognitive dissonance if they don’t believe they’re making the world better.
No, this is an artifact of insisting that people pretend to be true believers during interviews.
After I was fired from a position doing bug bounty triage on HackerOne, I applied to be a bug triager on HackerOne. And they rejected me, stating that my description of why I applied, "this is identical to the job I was already doing", didn't make them feel that I saw their company as a calling rather than a place of employment.
It's quite frankly more than that. They think we are all idiots into believing that so-called "AGI" is going to make the world a better place, whilst investors, employees are laughing all the way to the bank with every new fundraising round.
First being a non-profit, then taking Microsoft's money, then ditching non-profit status to a for-profit organization and now changing definitions of "Open" and "AGI" to raise more money.
It is a massive scam, with a new level of newspeak.
I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).
If your employees actually believe this spin that’s a big stretch especially the behavior of the CEO and the board being dissolved recently … I was a employee at a large company and I could see when the CEO was actually taking a stand that meant something and wasn’t some type of action trying to mislead employees .
I agree. It’s for internal employees who are probably being heavily recruited for real RSU money from Meta and Google.
Having spend the better part of my life in Silicon Valley my view has been gone are the days of mission. Everybody just wants RSU
You could tell employees they will build software to track lock up immigrants, deplete the world of natural resources, cause harm to other countries and if their RSUs go up 99% will be on board, especially if their H1b is renewed :)
This. Stuff like mission statements and that kind of crap is for these type of employees who need to delude themselves that they're not just part of a profit making exercise or manufacturing weapons to suppress minorities / kill brown people. Every company has one.
I feel that Gaza has shown us that there aren’t as many of these types of employees as we think.
Most people don’t care.
OpenAI is doing this show because if they don’t they are more vulnerable to law-suits. They need to manufacture a narrative without this exact structure they cannot fulfill their original mission.
Really? I mean, I don't know a single person in real life who believes all this corporate bs. We know there must be a mission because this is the current business culture taught during MBA courses and everybody accepted it as a matter of course but I'm not even sure the CEOs themselves believe there is even one employee who is fascinated by its mission - say, a FedEx driver who admires the slogan "FedEx Corporation will produce superior financial returns for its shareowners by providing high value-added logistics, transportation and related business services".
"We are turning our non profit into a for profit because we want to make money" isn't legal.
To make this transition in a way that maximizes how much money they can make while minimizing what they lose to lawsuits they need to explain what they're doing in a positive way.
That depends - they probably have to do whatever is in the best interests of the non-profit, so if they explain the motivations behind why they feel they are acting within their responsibility then that could probably help a defence.
IANAL though. I assume you can make a case though that says OpenAI needs to be able to raise sufficient capital to maintain its current market position, and these changes are required for that, and without maintaining market position the non-profit arm will not be able to achieve its aims.
As they have to act in the interests of the non-profit arm, I assume there must be an element of mens rea (state of mind) - the same action could probably be illegal or legal depending on why it was done.
That's not really true and is at the heart of much of the 'confusion' about e.g. tax evasion vs. tax avoidance. You can do illegal things if you don't get prosecuted for them and a lot of this type of legal wrangling is to give your lawyers and political allies enough grey area to grab onto to shout about selective prosecution when you're called out for it.
I don't see how that's relevant. In what case is the difference between tax evasion and avoidance just the motive/explanation? I'm pretty sure the difference is purely technical.
Moreover, I don't think a lack of prosecution/enforcement makes something legal. At least, I don't think that defense would hold up very well in court.
> I'm pretty sure the difference is purely technical.
It's really not - there is a ton of tax law that relies on e.g. the fair market value of hard-to-price assets or if all else fails and a penalty is due, there's an entire section of the CFR on how circumstances surrounding the underpayment can reduce or eliminate the liability.
If you've only ever filed a personal tax return, you're dramatically under-appreciating how complicated business taxes are and how much grey area there really is. Did you know you can pay your 10-year old to work for you as a means to avoid taxes? Try looking up the dollar amount where avoid turns to evade... there isn't one. The amount paid just has to be "reasonable and justifiable" and the work they perform has to be "work necessary to the business".
Waiving penalties depending on the circumstance is interesting but not directly relevant to the question on hand. You would have already been found to have evaded taxes before the penalty could be assessed. So the circumstance/motivation/explanation is still not the differentiator between avoidance and evasion in this case - just the penalty.
If tax law were black and white / “purely technical” they wouldn’t make accommodation to reduce your penalties if you made good faith errors when filing was my only point.
There are solidly legal and solidly illegal ways to do this, and a range of options in between. My reading of what they are doing is that it is pretty far toward the legal end of this spectrum, and the key question will be whether whether the non-profit is appropriately compensated for its stake in the for-profit.
Explaining reduces the chance that they're challenged by the IRS or attorney general, since that is a political process.
The key thing is that assets of a 501c3 are irrevocably dedicated to charitable purposes, which is not the case for a 501c6. If the NFL had somehow started as a 501c3 before realizing that was a bad structure for their work, the standard approach would be for the 501c3 to sell their assets at fair market value to new for-profit. Then either those proceeds could be donated to other 501c3s, or the old NFL could continue as a foundation, applying those assets charitably.
(Not a lawyer, just someone interested in non-profits. I'm on the board of two, but that doesn't make me an expert in regulation!)
Sorry, which conversion? If you mean OpenAI, it's not clear that what they are currently planning is illegal. If they do it correctly, the non-profit is fully compensated for their stake in the for-profit.
OpenAI isn't making money. They are like a giant furnace for investment dollars. Even putting aside that the NFL and OpenAI aren't the same kind of entity, there is also no taxes issue.
They are explaining how they see what they are doing as compliant with the law around 501c3s, which it arguably is. And they are putting a positive spin on it to make it less likely to be challenged, since the main ways this could be challenged involve government agencies and not suits from individuals.
This is pure speculation but being a nonprofit, there's still a risk of getting sued by the public on the grounds of not following the promises of their work being a public good.
I couldn't care less about their structure but the level of effort to put a positive spin on it makes the whole thing look more sketchy rather than less.
They are trying to convince themselves that is not the reason, because they'd like to think of themselves as above such trivial concerns as greed, and hunger for power, and fear of somebody else beating them to it and having power over them. So, they want to call their feelings as something else, something noble.
And then, as others point out, they are also interested in other people believing this, whether for employees or lawsuits. But I think that would not justify saying these same things again and again, when by now they have nothing new to say and people have mostly made up their mind.
I am not entirely sure about this. Before 2012, may be. Somewhere along the line 2012 - 2022 it was all about doing something Good for the world. And "we want to make lots of money" isn't part of that equation. Now the pendulum may be swinging back but it only just started.
Nice point of reference may be Sequoia profile of Sam Bankman-Fried.
The OpenAI announcements seems to lay out a much different separation of operations moving forward:
"Under the proposed structure, the public benefit corporation, which is a for-profit corporate entity, will run and control OpenAI’s operations and business, while the non-profit will hire a leadership team and staff for charitable initiatives in sectors such as healthcare, education and science."
The non-profit would be relegated to work off to the side to make it's impact in the world, where the new for-profit corporate entity will just focus on profit.
Because that is not their motivation and no amount of spin casting changes it.
There’s a simple counter-factual for people with this level of ability:
“Making money” can be easily pursued at BlackRock or any number of PE firms.
Creating historic technology, of unknown difficulty and scale of impact, is not something pure capitalism can or is designed to deliver. What would investors or customers buy at the start of OpenAI?
While OpenAI may end up a corporation like any other, it would not have achieved what it had as one.
I've been looking for my broadbrush. I forgot I loaned it out.
It seems we've yet again forgotten that HN is an echo chamber. Just because the audience here "knows" something does not mean the rest of the vastly greater numbers of people do as well. In fact, so many people I've talked with don't have a clue about who makes/owns/controls ChatGPT nor would they recognize Sam's name if even OpenAI.
The PR campaign being waged is not meant for this audience. It is meant for everyone else that can be influenced.
