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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.
It's a constant issue with any kind of contractually based restriction on future behavior. I'm constantly dealing with people trying to put "irrevocable" clauses into their contracts, and it's really hard to pre-commit in such a way that consenting parties can't avoid the penalties.
Is that a bad thing? Past me was a different person. Why should I be beholden to him? I appreciate continuity of obligations to others, but why should I feel obligated to honor past commitments (e.g. not to make a profit) that I made to myself?
Because you didn't make that promise to yourself. If it was like a private oath to quit drinking then sure, it's between past you and future you. But more often it's a restriction that you publicized and used to build goodwill and generally improve your position. OpenAI got where it is partly because people were permissive of a "non-profit" doing shady stuff "for the greater good".
Revoking a commitment like that is a really obvious act of duplicity and the correct move is for the broad public to punish them harshly for it. Keeping one's word is basically the highest virtue in my eyes and I hate that we've reached this point where duplicity is normalized.
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