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Notes -
OpenAI To Become a For-Profit Company
You'll notice that the link is to a hackernews thread. I did that intentionally because I think some of the points raised there get to issues deeper than "hurr durr, Elon got burnt" or whatever.
Some points to consider:
It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public imagine. Sam Altman spent a bunch of time on Capitol Hill last year and seemed to move with greater ease because of the whole "benefit to humanity" angle. Then, once you have acquired a bunch of market share this way, flip the money switch on. Also, there are a bunch of tax incentives for non-profits that make it easier to run in the early startup phase.
I think this can be seen as a milestone for VC hype. The trope for VC investors is that they see every investment as "changing the world," but it's mostly a weird status-signaling mechanism. In reality, they're care about the money, but also care about looking like they're being altruistic or, at least, oriented towards vague concepts of "change for the better." OpenAI was literally pitched as addressing an existential question for humanity. I guess they fixed AI alignment in the past week or something and now it's time, again, to flip the money switch. How much of VC is now totally divorced from real business fundamentals and is only about weird idea trading? Sure, it's always been like that to some extent, but I feel like the whole VC ecosystem is turning into a battle of posts on the LessWrong forums.
How much of this is FTX-style nonsense, but without outright fraud. Altman gives me similar vibes as SBF with a little less bad-hygiene-autism. He probably smells nice, but is still weird as fuck. We know he was fired and rehired at OpenAI. A bunch (all?) of the cofounders have jumped shipped recently. I don't necessarily see Enron/FTX/Theranos levels of plain lying, but how much of this is a venture funding house of cards that ends with a 99% loss and a partial IP sale to Google or something.
Honestly, these histrionics about Altman being some gay supervillain make me like him more, not less. Being crazy and ambitious is a prerequisite to doing great things. And the notion that because he's gay, he doesn't care about anything is ridiculous. If only he could be as pro human as Joseph Stalin (two children), Robert Mugabe (four children) or Genghis Khan (innumerable children)?
And the lack thereof for Peter Thiel should tell you all you need to know, particularly given the fact that he's specifically working on and enabling AI in the contexts of surveillance and defense.
Oh, I like Peter Thiel as well. I don't really know what you mean by "all I need to know".
I mean, look, clearly there are gay men who give themselves over to a life of mindless hedonism. There are straight men who do that too! Most of them do not end up running billion dollar companies at the cutting edge of technology. To an extent, Sam Altman might see AI as his "baby". In that sense he is probably not that different to many other CEOs or founder-owners who see their company as their baby, or artists seeing their art as their baby, or anything. But that's something quite different from being a hedonist or a short termist or a misanthrope. Many parents would set the world on fire to keep their babies warm. That doesn't make them misanthropes or short termists.
Ah, sorry for being unclear. We're on the same page.
I just meant that people here turn a blind eye to Peter Thiel's AI panopticon empire and buggery because he hates on woke people. Zero to One and that op-ed about flying cars and twitter also fit the aesthetic/worldview of the locals.
The Alt Man, on the other hand, has none of those things. Or at least so far as I'm aware.
In neither case is the operative quality being a childless homosexual, just the perceived political valency.
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