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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)?
I’m not saying that no parents are short-termist psychopaths, I’m saying that no childfree people aren’t short-termist psychopaths.
Outsourcing the necessary work of (both literal and figurative) species reproduction to god-knows-who (and in all likelihood it’s to 7-kids-per-woman educationless Third Worlders) is a rather spectacular indicator that you Just Don’t Give A Shit, no matter what prosocial rhetoric might come out of your mouth.
George Washington did not have kids. I kind of agree with you in general, that the recent trend of choosing fur babies instead of human children is alarming. But I think there is a huge difference between people who make a deliberate choice to go without kids and those who are infertile or homosexual.
People who cannot have a biological legacy seek other ways to leave a legacy. Many of the greatest people in history had no children. It's the people who seem to have no desire to leave a legacy of any kind behind that bother me the most.
I was reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which the Earth loses its biosphere, and reflected on the absurdity of a universe without intelligent life. Imagine a universe that existed, with particles bouncing around, planets forming, and no one to witness it the whole time before it crunched down to nothing again. It just strikes me as absurd! Intelligent life is an obvious good, and yet there are people who don't think so. People who think that humans have messed up nature, instead of being the salt that gave it value in the first place. People who want humans gone (even without us creating an intelligence after us.)
(Edit: I don't mean that most fur-baby people think this way explicitly. Most don't ever reflect on it. And that kind of makes it worse in my view. It's in the air they breathe.)
Sam Altman at least isn't like that. He does want to leave behind an intelligent legacy, just not a human legacy. And that is disturbing, but I don't think it's the same kind of disturbing that is afflicting the middle class.
George married Martha after she had been widowed with kids. They absolutely tried to conceive more but could not. Meanwhile, George raised Martha's kids as if they were his own. Between his stepchildren, his plantation, and his slaves, Washington had a very busy homelife, and probably would not have imagined himself as having to compensate with his legacy.
Like I said, there is a huge difference between people who choose to be childless and those who are infertile.
I am making a distinction between biological legacy, which George Washington doesn't have, with his "effort" legacy which includes the country and his step children.
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