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someone in the HN thread reminded me of this again, and I remembered I didn't remember the entire story here. part of the thing with reddit was not only did Sam Altman engineer Conde Nast into being a minority stakeholder and by helping to manufacture a bunch of leadership crisises at reddit. if you're not familiar with this, here's Yishan, a former CEO of reddit, saying exactly this in a manner that is second only in wink wink nudge nudge to If I Did It.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/comment/cszjqg2/
this seems similar to what ended up essentially happening at OpenAI, although it's over board seats rather than stake in the company.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38386365
I imagine this HN commenter is right and at the end of the day this comes down to capitalism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38376123
this is probably not news to themotte, but it also seems pretty evident to me that the nonprofit's goals were wholly unimportant to those working there. whether you like openai or not1, the name was and is a punching bag essentially because it's neither open nor ai. the weird structure seemed to those working there probably just was seen as tax evasion (sorry, avoidance) and that aforementioned rubber stamp.
but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Larry Summers of all people2 being added to the board is darkly hilarious though. it's basically taking off the mask.
1. I don't particularly care one way or another about them as I don't use their stuff nor plan to.
2. this part is more unrelated snark so i'm leaving it to a footnote, but he's a great measure for economists. he managed to predict that 3 contradictory things were going to happen with regards to inflation and none of those 3 things happened.
I think Matt Levine had the correct take in his latest Money Stuff. The basic idea is there's some natural tension between the board of OpenAI and its employees/investors. The board is committed to the non-profit mission of building safe AI while the employees and investors want to build a commercially viable product that turns their equity into big piles of money. There can naturally be some tension between these things!
While the board has a certain formal legal power over the employees and investors it cannot actually accomplish much without them. So the employees and investors have a great deal of informal power. Currently it seems like the balance of power is on the "make big piles of money" side and this will probably be more true after the restructuring.
I think one outcome here is the IRS should probably revoke OpenAI's charitable status. It is hard for me to take the idea they are a charitable organization seriously when the CEO of the for-profit subsidiary can overrule the board to which he ostensibly reports in order to make more money.
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