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I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market:

> Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler.

The value investor Mohnish Pabrai once talked about his observation that most companies with a moat pretend they don’t have one and companies without pretend they do.

That is a very obvious thing for them to say though regardless of what they truly believe, because (a) it legitimizes removing the cap , making fundraising easier and (b) averts antitrust suspicions.

> "Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission."

One remarkable advantage of being a "Public Benefit Corporation" is this it:

> prevent[s] shareholders from using a drop in stock value as evidence for dismissal or a lawsuit against the corporation[1]

In my view, it is their own shareholders that the directors of OpenAI are insulating themselves against.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

(b) is true but no so much (a). If investors thought it would be winner take all and they thought ClosedAI would win they'd invest in ClosedAI only and starve competitors of funding.

Actually I'm thinking in a winner-takes-all universe, the right strategy would be to spread your bets on as many likely winners as possible.

That's literally the premise of venture capital. This is a scenario where we're assuming ALL our bets will go to zero, except one which will be worth trillions. In that case you should bet on everything.

It's only in the opposite scenario (where every bet pays off with varying ROI) that it makes sense to go all-in on whichever bet seems most promising.

[dead]

I'm not surprised that they found a reason to uncap their profits, but I wouldn't try to infer too much from the justification they cooked up.

As a deeper issue on "justification", here is something I wrote related to this in 2001 on the risks of non-profits engaging in self-dealing when they create artificial scarcity to enrich themselves:

https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html#...

"Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works. If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?"

"Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. The trademark-infringing non-profit-sheltered project I mention above is as I see it in large part just a way to convert some government supported PhD thesis work and ongoing R&D grants into ready cash for the developers. Such "spin-offs" are actually encouraged by most funders. And frankly if that group eventually sells their software to a movie company, say, for a million dollars, who will really bat an eyebrow or complain? (They already probably get most of their revenue from similar sales anyway -- but just one copy at a time.) But how is this really different from the self-dealing of just selling charitably-funded software directly to Microsoft and distributing a lump sum? Just because "art" is somehow involved, does this make everything all right? To be clear, I am not concerned that the developers get paid well for their work and based on technical accomplishments they probably deserve that (even if we do compete for funds in a way). What I am concerned about is the way that the proprietary process happens such that the public (including me) never gets full access to the results of the publicly-funded work (other than a few publications without substantial source)."

That said, charging to provide a service that costs money to supply (e.g. GPU compute) is not necessarily self-dealing. It is restricting the source code or using patents to create artificial scarcity around those services that could be seen that way.

Enlightening read, especially your last paragraph which touches on the nuance of the situation. It’s quite easy to end up on one side or the other when it comes to charity/nonprofits because the mission itself can be very motivating and galvanizing.

There needs to be regulations about deceptive, indirect, purposefully ambiguous or vague public communication by corporations (or any entity). I'm not an expert in corporate law or finance, but the statement should be:

"Open AI for-profit LLC will become a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)"

followed by: "Profit cap is hereby removed" and finally "The Open AI non-profit will continue to control the PBC. We intend it to be a significant shareholder of the PBC."

AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity.

Not only is there infinite incentive to compete, but theres decreasing costs to. The only world in which AGI is winner take all is a world in which it is extremely controlled to the point at which the public cant query it.

> AGI can't really be a winner take all market. The 'reward' for general intelligence is infinite as a monopoly and it accelerates productivity

The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself are theoretically unsurmountable.

But OpenAI doesn't have a path to AGI any more than anyone else. (It's increasingly clear LLMs alone don't make the cut.) And the market for LLMs, non-general AI, is very much not winner takes all. In this announcement, OpenAI is basically acknowledging that it's not getting to self-improving AGI.

> The first-mover advantages of an AGI that can improve itself are theoretically unsurmountable.

This has some baked assumptions about cycle time and improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling.

> this has some baked assumptions about cycle time and improvement per cycle and whether there's a ceiling

To be precise, it assumes a low variability in cycle time and improvement per cycle. If everyone is subjected to the same limits, the first-mover advantage remains insurmountable. I’d also argue that whether there is a ceiling matters less than how high it is. If the first AGI won’t hit a ceiling for decades, it will have decades of fratricidal supremacy.

> I’d also argue that whether there is a ceiling matters less than how high it is.

How steeply the diminishing returns curve off at.

I think the foundation model companies are actually poorly situated to reach the leading edge of AGI first, simply because their efforts are fragmented across multiple companies with different specializations—Claude is best at coding, OpenAI at reasoning, Gemini at large context, and so on.

The most advanced tools are (and will continue to be) at a higher level of the stack, combining the leading models for different purposes to achieve results that no single provider can match using only their own models.

I see no reason to think this won't hold post-AGI (if that happens). AGI doesn't mean capabilities are uniform.

Remember however that their charter specifies: "If a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project"

It does have some weasel words around value-aligned and safety-conscious which they can always argue but this could get interesting because they've basically agreed not to compete. A fairly insane thing to do in retrospect.

Who defines "value-aligned, safety-conscious project"?

"Instead of our current complex non-competing structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal competing structure where ..." is all it takes

Most likely the same people who define "all natural chicken" - the company that creates the term.

I actually lol-ed at that. It's like asking the inventor of a religion who goes to heaven.

They will just define away all of those terms to make that not apply.

Nothing OpenAI is doing, or ever has done, has been close to AGI.

Agreed and, if anything, you are too generous. They aren’t just not “close”, they aren’t even working in the same category as anything that might be construed as independently intelligent.

I agree with you, but that’s kindof beside the point. Open AI’s thesis is that they will work towards AGI, and eventually succeed. In the context of that premise, Open AI still doesn’t believe AGI would be winner-takes-all. I think that’s an interesting discussion whether you believe the premise or not.

I agree with you

I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?

Differentiating between AGI and non-AGI, if we ever get remotely close, would be challenging, but for now it's trivial. The defining feature of AGI is recursive self improvement across any field. Without self improvement, you're just regurgitating. Humanity started with no advanced knowledge or even a language. In what should practically be a heartbeat at the speed of distributed computing with perfect memory and computation power, we were landing a man on the Moon.

So one fundamental difference is that AGI would not need some absurdly massive data dump to become intelligent. In fact you would prefer to feed it as minimal a series of the most primitive first principles as possible because it's certain that much of what we think is true is going to end up being not quite so -- the same as for humanity at any other given moment in time.

We could derive more basic principles, but this one is fundamental and already completely incompatible with our current direction. Right now we're trying to essentially train on the entire corpus of human writing. That is a defacto acknowledgement that the absolute endgame for current tech is simple mimicry, mistakes and all. It'd create a facsimile of impressive intelligence because no human would have a remotely comparable knowledge base, but it'd basically just be a glorified natural language search engine - frozen in time.

When it can start wars over resources.

Seems as good a difference as any

Please, keep telling people that. For my sake. Keep the world asleep as I take advantage of this technology which is literally General Artificial Intelligence that I can apply towards increasing my power.

Every tool is a technology than can increase ones power.

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here. Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

Why does the Author choose to ignore the "General" in AGI?

Can ChatGPT drive a car? No, we have specialized models for driving vs generating text vs image vs video etc etc. Maybe ChatGPT could pass a high school chemistry test but it certainly couldn't complete the lab exercises. What we've built is a really cool "Algorithm for indexing generalized data", so you can train that Driving model very similarly to how you train the Text model without needing to understand the underlying data that well.

The author asserts that because ChatGPT can generate text about so many topics that it's general, but it's really only doing 1 thing and that's not very general.

There are people who can’t drive cars. Are they not general intelligence?

I think we need to separate the thinking part of intelligence from tool usage. Not everyone can use every tool at a high level of expertise.

Generally speaking, anyone can learn to use any tool. This isn't true of generative AI systems which can only learn through specialized training with meticulously curated data sets.

People physically unable to use the tool can't learn to use it. This isn't necessarily my view, but one could make a pretty easy argument that the LLMs we have today can't drive a car only because they aren't physically able to control the car.

> but one could make a pretty easy argument that the LLMs we have today can't drive a car only because they aren't physically able to control the car.

Of course they can. We already have computer controlled car systems, the reason LLMs aren't used to drive them is because AI systems that specialize in text are a poor choice for driving - specialized driving models will always outperform them for a variety of technical reasons.

>can only learn through specialized training with meticulously curated data sets.

but so do I!

This isn't true. A curated data set can greatly increase learning efficiency in some cases, but it's not strictly necessary and represents only a fraction of how people learn. Additionally, all curated data sets were created by humans in the first place, a feat that language models could never achieve if we did not program them to do so.

Generality is a continuous value, not a boolean; turned out that "AGI" was poorly defined, and because of that most people were putting the cut-off threshold in different places.

Likewise for "intelligent", and even "artificial".

So no, ChatGPT can't drive a car*. But it knows more about car repairs, defensive driving, global road features (geoguesser), road signs in every language, and how to design safe roads, than I'm ever likely to.

* It can also run python scripts with machine vision stuff, but sadly that's still not sufficient to drive a car… well, to drive one safety, anyway.

The latest models are natively multimodal. Gemini, GPT-4o, Llama 4.

Same model trained on audio, video, images, text - not separate specialized components stitched together.

Text can be a carrier for any type of signal. The problem gets reduced to that of an interface definition. It’s probably not going to be ideal for driving cars, but if the latency, signal quality, and accuracy is within acceptable constraints, what else is stopping it?

This doesn’t imply that it’s ideal for driving cars, but to say that it’s not capable of driving general intelligence is incorrect in my view.

You can literally today prompt ChatGPT with API instructions to drive a car, then feed it images of a car's window outlooks and have it generate commands for the car (JSON schema restricted structured commands if you like). Text can represent any data thus yes, it is general.

> JSON schema restricted structured commands if you like

How about we have ChatGPT start with a simple task like reliably generating JSON schema when asked to.

Hint: it will fail.

ChatGPT can write a working Python script to generate the Json. It can call a library to do that.

"AGI is already here, just wait 30 more years". Not very convincing.

... that was written in mid-2023. So that opinion piece is trying to redefine 2 year old LLMs like GPT-4 (pre-4o) as AGI. Which can only be described as an absolutely herculean movement of goalposts.

> AGI is already here

Last time I checked, in an Anthropic paper, they asked the model to count something. They examined the logits and a graph showing how it arrived at the answer. Then they asked the model to explain its reasoning, and it gave a completely different explanation, because that was the most statistically probable response to the question. Does that seem like AGI to you?

That's exactly what I would expect from a lot of people. Post factum rationalization is a thing.

Exactly. A lot of these arguments end up dehumanizing people because our own intelligence doesn’t hit the definition

I would argue that this is a fringe opinion that has been adopted by a mainstream scholar, not a mainstream opinion. That or, based on my reading of the article, this person is using a definition of AGI that is very different than the one that most people use when they say AGI.

Their multimodal models are a rudimentary form of AGI.

EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

Ah! Like Full Self Driving!

AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, we don't wait for somebody to give us a task and go do it as if that is our sole existence. We live with our thoughts, blank out, watch TV, read books etc. What we currently have and possibly in the next century as well will be nothing close to an actual AGI.

I don't know if it is optimism or delusions of grandeur that drives people to make claims like AGI will be here in the next decade. No, we are not getting that.

And what do you think would happen to us humans if such AGI is achieved? People's ability to put food on the table is dependent on their labor exchanged for money. I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone? Absolutely not. Even UBI isn't going to cut it because even with UBI people still want to work as experiments have shown. But with that, there won't be a majority of work especially paper pushing mid level bs like managers on top of managers etc.

If we actually get AGI, you know what would be the smartest thing for such an advanced thing to do? It would probably kill itself because it would come to the conclusion that living is a sin and a futile effort. If you are that smart, nothing motivates you anymore. You will be just a depressed mass for all your life.

That's just how I feel.

> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything

There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".

ChatGPT can solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across a vast number of problem domains.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462

The paper is summarized here https://venturebeat.com/ai/here-is-how-far-we-are-to-achievi...

This constant redefinition of what AGI means is really tiring. Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy search engine/auto completer.

I agree. AGI is meaningless as a term if it doesn't mean completely autonomous agentic intelligence capable of operating on long-term planning horizons.

Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what means that and only that!?

> Edit: because if "AGI" doesn't mean that... then what means that and only that!?

"Agentic AI" means that.

Well, to some people, anyway. And even then, people are already arguing about what counts as agency.

That's the trouble with new tech, we have to invent words for new stuff that was previously fiction.

I wonder, did people argue if "horseless carriages" were really carriages? And "aeroplane" how many argued that "plane" didn't suit either the Latin or Greek etymology for various reasons?

We never did rename "atoms" after we split them…

And then there's plain drift: Traditional UK Christmas food is the "mince pie", named for the filling, mincemeat. They're usually vegetarian and sometimes even vegan.

Agents can operate in narrow domains too though, so to fit the G part of AGI the agent needs to be non-domain specific.

It's kind of a simple enough concept... it's really just something that functions on par with how we do. If you've built that, you've built AGI. If you haven't built that, you've built a very capable system, but not AGI.

> Until an AI has agency, it is nothing but a fancy search engine/auto completer.

Stepping back for a moment - do we actually want something that has agency?

Who is "we"?

Vulture Capitalists, obviously

Unless you can define "agency", you're opening yourself to being called nothing more than a fancy chemical reaction.

It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement.

Think about it - the original definition of AGI was basically a machine that can do absolutely anything at a human level of intelligence or better.

That kind of technology wouldn't just appear instantly in a step change. There would be incremental progress. How do you describe the intermediate stages?

What about a machine that can do anything better than the 50th percentile of humans? That would be classified as "Competent AGI", but not "Expert AGI" or ASI.

> fancy search engine/auto completer

That's an extreme oversimplification. By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak. No that's not how deep learning systems work. It's not auto complete.

> It's not a redefinition, it's a refinement

It's really not. The Space Shuttle isn't an emerging interstellar spacecraft, it's just a spacecraft. Throwing emerging in front of a qualifier to dilute it is just bullshit.

> By the same reasoning, so is a person. They are just auto completing words when they speak.

We have no evidence of this. There is a common trope across cultures and history of characterising human intelligence in terms of the era's cutting-edge technology. We did it with steam engines [1]. We did it with computers [2]. We're now doing it with large language models.

[1] http://metaphors.iath.virginia.edu/metaphors/24583

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/a...

Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes levels of performance.

The General Intelligence part of AGI refers to its ability to solve problems that it was not explicitly trained to solve, across many problem domains. We already have examples of the current systems doing exactly that - zero shot and few shot capabilities.

> We have no evidence of this.

That's my point. Humans are not "autocompleting words" when they speak.

> Technically it is a refinement, as it distinguishes levels of performance

No, it's bringing something out of scope into the definition. Gluten-free means free of gluten. Gluten-free bagel verus sliced bread is a refinement--both started out under the definition. Glutinous bread, on the other hand, is not gluten free. As a result, "almost gluten free" is bullshit.

> That's my point. Humans are not "autocompleting words" when they speak

Humans are not. LLMs are. It turns out that's incredibly powerful! But it's also limiting in a way that's fundamentally important to the definition of AGI.

LLMs bring us closer to AGI in the way the inventions of writing, computers and the internet probably have. Calling LLMs "emerging AGI" pretends we are on a path to AGI in a way we have zero evidence for.

> Gluten-free means free of gluten.

Bad analogy. That's a binary classification. AGI systems can have degrees of performance and capability.

> Humans are not. LLMs are.

My point is that if you oversimplify LLMs to "word autocompletion" then you can make the same argument for humans. It's such an oversimplification of the transformer / deep learning architecture that it becomes meaningless.

> That's a binary classification. AGI systems can have degrees of performance and capability

The "g" in AGI requires the AI be able to perform "the full spectrum of cognitively demanding tasks with proficiency comparable to, or surpassing, that of humans" [1]. Full and not full are binary.

> if you oversimplify LLMs to "word autocompletion" then you can make the same argument for humans

No, you can't, unless you're pre-supposing that LLMs work like human minds. Calling LLMs "emerging AGI" pre-supposes that LLMs are the path to AGI. We simply have no evidence for that, no matter how much OpenAI and Google would like to pretend it's true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

Why are you linking a Wikipedia page like it's the ground zero for the term? Especially when neither article the page link to justify that definition see the term as a binary accomplishment.

The g in AGI is General. I don't what world you think Generality isn't a spectrum, but it's sure as hell isn't this one.

That's right, and the Wikipedia page refers to the classification system:

"A framework for classifying AGI by performance and autonomy was proposed in 2023 by Google DeepMind researchers. They define five performance levels of AGI: emerging, competent, expert, virtuoso, and superhuman"

In the second paragraph:

"Some researchers argue that state‑of‑the‑art large language models already exhibit early signs of AGI‑level capability, while others maintain that genuine AGI has not yet been achieved."

The entire article makes it clear that the definitions and classifications are still being debated and refined by researchers.

Then you are simply rejecting any attempts to refine the definition of AGI. I already linked to the Google DeepMind paper. The definition is being debated in the AI research community. I already explained that definition is too limited because it doesn't capture all of the intermediate stages. That definition may be the end goal, but obviously there will be stages in between.

> No, you can't, unless you're pre-supposing that LLMs work like human minds.

You are missing the point. If you reduce LLMs to "word autocompletion" then you completely ignore the the attention mechanism and conceptual internal representations. These systems have deep learning models with hundreds of layers and trillions of weights. If you completely ignore all of that, then by the same reasoning (completely ignoring the complexity of the human brain) we can just say that people are auto-completing words when they speak.

> I already linked to the Google DeepMind paper. The definition is being debated in the AI research community

Sure, Google wants to redefine AGI so it looks like things that aren’t AGI can be branded as such. That definition is, correctly in my opinion, being called out as bullshit.

> obviously there will be stages in between

We don’t know what the stages are. Folks in the 80s were similarly selling their expert systems as a stage to AGI. “Emerging AGI” is a bullshit term.

> If you reduce LLMs to "word autocompletion" then you completely ignore the the attention mechanism and conceptual internal representations. These systems have deep learning models with hundreds of layers and trillions of weights

Fair enough, granted.

> Sure, Google wants to redefine AGI

It is not a redefinition. It's a classification for AGI systems. It's a refinement.

Other researchers are also trying to classify AGI systems. It's not just Google. Also, there is no universally agreed definition of AGI.

> We don’t know what the stages are. Folks in the 80s were similarly selling their expert systems as a stage to AGI. “Emerging AGI” is a bullshit term.

Generalization is a formal concept in machine learning. There can be degrees of generalized learning performance. This is actually measurable. We can compare the performance of different systems.

> I can guarantee for a fact, that work will still be there but will it be equitable? Available to everyone?

I don't think there has ever been a time in history when work has been equitable and available to everyone.

Of course, that isn't to say that AI can't make it worse then it is now.

I think there's a useful distinction that's often missed between AGI and artificial consciousness. We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently with peak human capabilities, given sufficient tools or hardware to complete whatever that task may be, but lacks subjective experience or independent agency; I would call that AGI.

The two concepts have historically been inexorably linked in sci-fi, which will likely make the first AGI harder to recognize as AGI if it lacks consciousness, but I'd argue that simple "unconscious AGI" would be the superior technology for current and foreseeable needs. Unconscious AGI can be employed purely as a tool for massive collective human wealth generation; conscious AGI couldn't be used that way without opening a massive ethical can of worms, and on top of that its existence would represent an inherent existential threat.

Conscious AGI could one day be worthwhile as something we give birth to for its own sake, as a spiritual child of humanity that we send off to colonize distant or environmentally hostile planets in our stead, but isn't something I think we'd be prepared to deal with properly in a pre-post-scarcity society.

It isn't inconceivable that current generative AI capabilities might eventually evolve to such a level that they meet a practical bar to be considered unconscious AGI, even if they aren't there yet. For all the flak this tech catches, it's easy to forget that capabilities which we currently consider mundane were science fiction only 2.5 years ago (as far as most of the population was concerned). Maybe SOTA LLMs fit some reasonable definition of "emerging AGI", or maybe they don't, but we've already shifted the goalposts in one direction given how quickly the Turing test became obsolete.

Personally, I think current genAI is probably a fair distance further from meeting a useful definition of AGI than those with a vested interest in it would admit, but also much closer than those with pessimistic views of the consequences of true AGI tech want to believe.

One sci-fi example could be based on the replicators from Star Trek, who are able to synthesize any meals on demand.

It is not hard to imagine a "cooking robot" as a black box that — given the appropriate ingredients — would cook any dish for you. Press a button, say what you want, and out it comes.

Internally, the machine would need to perform lots of tasks that we usually associate with intelligence, from managing ingredients and planning cooking steps, to fine-grained perception and manipulation of the food as it is cooking. But it would not be conscious in any real way. Order comes in, dish comes out.

Would we use "intelligent" to describe such a machine? Or "magic"?

Regarding "We could conceivably have some version of AI that reliably performs any task you throw at it consistently" - it is very clear to anyone who just looks at the recent work by Anthropic analyzing how their LLM "reasons" that such a thing will never come from LLMs without massive unknown changes - and definitely not from scale - so I guess the grandparent is absolute right that openai is nor really working on this.

It isn't close at all.

That's an important distinction.

A machine could be super intelligent at solving real world practical tasks, better than any human, without being conscious.

We don't have a proper definition of consciousness. Consciousness is infinitely more mysterious than measurable intelligence.

It seems like you believe AGI won't come for a long time, because you don't want that to happen.

The turing test was succesfull. Pre chatGPT, I would not have believed, that will happen so soon.

LLMs ain't AGI, sure. But they might be an essential part and the missing parts maybe already found, just not put together.

And work there will be always plenty. Distributing ressources might require new ways, though.

While I also hold a peer comment's view that the Turing Test is meaningless, I would further add that even that has not been meaningfully beaten.

In particular we redefined the test to make it passable. In Turing's original concept the competent investigator and participants were all actively expected to collude against the machine. The entire point is that even with collusion, the machine would be able to pass. Instead modern takes have paired incompetent investigators alongside participants colluding with the machine, probably in an effort to be part 'of something historic'.

In "both" (probably more, referencing the two most high profile - Eugene and the large LLMs) successes, the interrogators consistently asked pointless questions that had no meaningful chance of providing compelling information - 'How's your day? Do you like psychology? etc' and the participants not only made no effort to make their humanity clear, but often were actively adversarial obviously intentionally answering illogically, inappropriately, or 'computery' to such simple questions. And the tests are typically time constrained by woefully poor typing skills (this the new normal in the smartphone gen?) to the point that you tend to get anywhere from 1-5 interactions of a few words each.

The problem with any metric for something is that it often ends up being gamed to be beaten, and this is a perfect example of that.

> The turing test was succesfull.

The very people whose theories about language are now being experimentally verified by LLMs, like Chomsky, have also been discrediting the Turing test as pseudoscientific nonsense since early 1990s.

It's one of those things like the Kardashev scale, or Level 5 autonomous driving, that's extremely easy to define and sounds very cool and scientific, but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever.

"but actually turns out to have no practical impact on anything whatsoever"

Bots, that are now allmost indistinguishable from humans, won't have a practical impact? I am sceptical. And not just because of scammers.

> AGI would mean something which doesn't need direction or guidance to do anything. Like us humans, ...

Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before

> Name me a human that also doesn't need direction or guidance to do a task, at least one they haven't done before

Literally everything that's been invented.

I feel like, if nothing else, this new wave of AI products is rapidly demonstrating the lack of faith people have in their own intelligence -- or maybe, just the intelligence of other human beings. That's not to say that this latest round of AI isn't impressive, but legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles.

> legions of apologists seem to forget that there is more to human cognition than being able to regurgitate facts, write grammatically-correct sentences, and solve logical puzzles

To be fair, there is a section of the population whose useful intelligence can roughly be summed up as that or worse.

I think this takes an unnecessarily narrow view of what "intelligence" implies. It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability. There are many other intelligent capabilities that most normally-abled human beings possess, such as:

- Processing visual data and classifying objects within their field of vision.

- Processing auditory data, identifying audio sources and filtering out noise.

- Maintaining an on-going and continuous stream of thoughts and emotions.

- Forming and maintaining complex memories on long-term and short-term scales.

- Engaging in self-directed experimentation or play, or forming independent wants/hopes/desires.

I could sit here all day and list the forms of intelligence that humans and other intelligent animals display which have no obvious analogue in an AI product. It's true that individual AI products can do some of these things, sometimes better than humans could ever, but there is no integrated AGI product that has all these capabilities. Let's give ourselves a bit of credit and not ignore or flippantly dismiss our many intelligent capabilities as "useless."

> It conflates "intelligence" with fact-retention and communicative ability

No, I’m using useful problem solving as my benchmark. There are useless forms of intelligence. And that’s fine. But some people have no useful intelligence and show no evidence of the useless kind. They don’t hit any of the bullets you list, there just isn’t that curiosity and drive and—I suspect—capacity to comprehend.

I don’t think it’s intrinsic. I’ve seen pets show more curiosity than some folk. But due to nature and nurture, they just aren’t intelligent to any material stretch.

Goalpost moving.

Nothing to do with moving the goalposts.

This is current research. The classification of AGI systems is currently being debated by AI researchers.

It's a classification system for AGI, not a redefinition. It's a refinement.

Also there is no universally accepted definition of AGI in the first place.

Thank you.

"AGI" was already a goalpost move from "AI" which has been gobbled up by the marketing machine.

AGI could be a winner-take-all market... for the AGI, specifically for the first one that's General and Intelligent enough to ensure its own survival and prevent competing AGI efforts from succeeding...

How would an AGI prevent others from competing? Sincere question. That seems like something that ASI would be capable of. If another company released an AGI, how would the original stifle it? I get that the original can self-improve to try to stay ahead, but that doesn't necessarily mean it self-improves the best or most efficiently, right?

AGI might not be fungible. From the trends today it's more likely there will be multiple AGIs with different relative strengths and weakness, different levels of accessibility and compliance, different development rates, and different abilities to be creative and surprising.

AGI can be winner take all. But winner take all AGI is not aligned with the larger interests of humanity.

Not saying this is OpenAI's case, but every monopolist claims they are not a monopolist...

Or they consider themselves to have low(er) chance of winning. They could think either, but they obviously can't say the latter.

OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones.

OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities.

I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover.

I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."

> I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."

Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.

If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.

For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.

But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.

> ban all non-US LLM providers

What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.

I don't have to imagine. There are various US bills trying to achieve this ban. Here is one of them:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/us_senator_download_c...

One of them will eventually pass given that OpenAI is also pushing for protection:

https://futurism.com/openai-ban-chinese-ai-deepseek

the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like that.

everyone will roll over if all large public companies roll over (and they will)

rather than coming up with a thorough definition, legislation will likely target individual companies (DeepSeek, Alibaba Cloud, etc)

IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).

Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.

MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.

Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”

Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.

Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is expensive and painful.

Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.

Even if they think it will be a winner-take-all market, they won't say it out loud. It would be begging for antitrust lawsuits.

> I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market:

Yeah; and:

  We want to open source very capable models. 

Not to mention, @Gork, aka Grok 3.5...

Lmaoing at their casual use of AGI as if them or any of their competitors are anywhere near it.

If you change the definition of AGI, we're already there!

Damn, didn't know my Casio FX-300 was AGI, good to know!

"It's not you, it's me."

to me it sounds like an admission that AGI is bullshit! AGI would be so disruptive to the current economic regime that "winner takes all" barely covers it, I think. Admitting they will be in normal competition with other AI companies implies specializations and niches to compete, which means Artificial Specialized Intelligence, NOT general intelligence!

and that makes complete sense if you don't have a lay person's understanding of the tech. Language models were never going to bring about "AGI."

This is another nail in the coffin

That, or they don't care if they get to AGI first, and just want their payday now.

Which sounds pretty in-line with the SV culture of putting profit above all else.

If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.

Define "imminent".

If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world.

Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.

Imminent means "in a timeframe meaningful to the individual equity holders this change is about."

The window there would at _least_ include the next 5 years, though obviously not ten.

AGI is matter of when, not if.

It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming.

ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall.

But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common tasks is not that far off.

Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised, then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI went into hibernation for 10+ years.

There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.

AGI is matter of when, not if

probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong

It is already here, kinda. I mean look at how it passes the bar exam, solves math olympiad level questions, generates video, art, music. What else are you looking for? It already has penetrated into job market causing significant disruption in programming. We are not seeing flying cars but we are witnessing things even not talked about around campfire. Seriously even 4 years ago, would you think all these would happen?

AGI is here?????! Damn, me, and every other human, must have missed that news… /s

Progress is not just a function of technical possibility( even if it exists) it is also economics.

It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend.

If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources.

Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on.

From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges.

[1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion.

[2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.

> AGI is matter of when, not if

We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit in the 80s.)

I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective.

Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI.

That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.

There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).

The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.

I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more.

So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.

Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.

I won't go too far out on this limb, because I kind of agree with you... but to be fair -- 1980s-1990s nanotech did not attract this level of investment, nor was it visible to ordinary people, nor was it useful to anyone except researchers and grant writers.

It seems like nanotech is all around us now, but the term "nanotech" has been redefined to mean something different (larger scale, less amazing) from Drexler's molecular assemblers.

Investment was completely different at the time and interest rates played a huge part of that. VC also wasn't that old in 86.

> Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more,

I thought this was a "we know we can't" thing rather than a "not with current technology" thing?

Specific cases are probably impossible, though there's always hope. After all, to ue the example the nanotech people loved: there are literal assemblers all around you. Whether we can have singular device that can build anything (probably not - energy limits and many many other issues) or factories that can work on atomic scale (maybe) is open, I think. The idea of little robots was kind of visibly silly even at the peak.

The idea of scaling up LLMs and hoping is .. pretty silly.

Every consumer has very useful AI at their fingertips right now. It's eating the software engineering world rapidly. This is nothing like nanotech in the 80s.

Sure. But fancy autocomplete for a very limited industry (IT) plus graphics generation and a few more similar items, are indeed useful. Just like "nanotech" coating of say optics or in the precise machinery or all other fancy nano films in many industries. Modern transistors are close to nano scale now, etc.

The problem is that the distance between a nano thin film or an interesting but ultimately rigid nano scale transistor and a programmable nano level sized robot is enormous, despite similar sizes. Same like the distance between an autocomplete heavily relying on the preexisting external validators (compilers, linters, static code analyzers etc.) and a real AI capable of thinking is equally enormous.

> AGI is matter of when, not if.

LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for the population to think pushes this further and further out each day

I agree that LLMs are hurting the general population’s capacity to think (assuming they use it often. I’ve certainly noticed a slight trend among students I’ve taught to use less effort, and myself to some extent).

I don’t agree that this will affect ML progress much, since the general population isn’t contributing to core ML research.

On the other hand, dumbing down the population also lowers the bar for AGI. /s

> AGI is matter of when, not if.

I want to believe, man.

Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can see no clear steps towards AGI.

https://reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/1jyja0s/2_years_di...

"X increased exponentially in the past, therefore it will increase exponentially in the same way in the future" is fallacious. There is nothing guaranteeing indefinite uncapped growth in capabilities of LLMs. An exponential curve and a sigmoidal curve look the same until a certain point.

Yeah, it is a pretty good bet that any real process that produces something that looks like an exponential curve over time is the early phase of a sigmoid curve, because all real processes have constraints.

And if we apply the 80/20 rule, feels like we're at about 50-75% right now. So we're almost getting close to done with the easy parts. Then come the hard parts.

I don’t think that’s a safe foregone conclusion. What we’ve seen so far is very very powerful pattern matchers with emergent properties that frankly we don’t fully understand. It very well may be the road to AGI, or it may stop at the kind of things we can do in our subconscious—but not what it takes to produce truly novel solutions to never before seen problems. I don’t think we know.

It's somewhat odd to me that many companies operating in the public eye are basically stating "We are creating a digital god, an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" and raising billions to do it, and nobody bats an eye...

I'd really love to talk to someone that both really believes this to be true, and has a hands-on experience with building and using generative AI.

The intersection of the two seems to be quite hard to find.

At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.

This isn't a nuclear weapon. We're not going to accidentally create Skynet. The only thing it's going to go nuclear on is the market for jobs that are going to get automated in an economy that may not be ready for it.

If anything, the "danger" here is that AGI is going to be a printing press. A cotton gin. A horseless carriage -- all at the same time and then some, into a world that may not be ready for it economically.

Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.

Which of these statements do you disagree with?

- Superintelligence poses an existential threat to humanity

- Predicting the future is famously difficult

- Given that uncertainty, we can't rule out the chance of our current AI approach leading to superintelligence

- Even a 1-in-1000 existential threat would be extremely serious. If an asteroid had a 1-in-1000 chance of hitting Earth and obliterating humanity we should make serious contingency plans.

Second question: how confident are you that you're correct? Are you 99.9% sure? Confident enough to gamble billions of lives on your beliefs? There are almost no statements about the future which I'd assign this level of confidence to.

You bring up the example of an extinction-level asteroid hurling toward earth. Gee, I wonder if this superintelligence you’re deathly afraid of could help with that?

This extreme risk aversion and focus on negative outcomes is just the result of certain personality types, no amount of rationalizing will change your mind as you fundamentally fear the unknown.

How do you get out of bed everyday knowing there’s a chance you could get hit by a bus?

If your tribe invented fire you’d be the one arguing how we can’t use it for fear it might engulf the world. Yes, humans do risk starting wildfires, but it’s near impossible to argue the discovery of fire wasn’t a net good.

Since the internet inception there were a few wrong turns taken by the wrong people (and lizards, ofc) behind the wheel, leading to the sub-optimal, enshitified tm experience we have today. I think GP just don't want to live through that again.

Isn't the question you're posing basically Pascals wager?

I think the chance they're going to create a "superintelligence" is extremely small. That said I'm sure we're going to have a lot of useful intelligence. But nothing general or self-conscious or powerful enough to be threatening for many decades or even ever.

> Predicting the future is famously difficult

That's very true, but that fact unfortunately can never be used to motivate any particular action, because you can always say "what if the real threat comes from a different direction?"

We can come up with hundreds of doomsday scenarios, most don't involve AI. Acting to minimize the risk of every doomsday scenario (no matter how implausible) is doomsday scenario no. 153.

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> At the state that we're in the AIs we're building are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli (e.g., a "prompt"). No stimuli, no output.

It was true before we allowed them to access external systems, disregarding certain rule which I forgot the origin.

The more general problem is a mix between the tradegy of the common; we have better understanding every passing day yet still don't understand exacly why LLM perform that well emergently instead of engineered that way; and future progress.

Do you think you can find a way around access boundaries to masquerade your Create/Update requests as Read in the log system monitoring it, when you have super intelligence?

> are just really useful input/output devices that respond to a stimuli

LLMs are huge pretrained models. The economic benefit here is that you don't have to train your own text classification model anymore. (The LLM was likely already trained on whatever training set you could think of.)

That's a big time and effort saver, but no different from "AI" that we had decades prior. It's just more accessible to the normal person now.

> Progress of technology should not be artitrarily held back to protect automateable jobs though. We need to adapt.

So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

Dependent on UBI, existing in a basic pod, eating rations of slop.

> So you don't mind if your economic value drops to zero, with all human labour replaced by machines?

This was the fear when the cotton gin was invented. It was the ear when cars were created. The same complaint happened with the introduction of electronic, automated, telephone switchboards.

Jobs change. Societies change. Unemployment worldwide, is near the lowest it has ever been. Work will change. Society will eventually move to a currency based on energy production, or something equally futuristic.

This doesn't mean that getting there will be without pain.

Where did all the work-horses go? Why is there barely a fraction of the population there once was? Why did they not adapt and find niches where they had a competitive advantage over cars and machines?

The goal for AGI/ASI is to create machines that can do any job much faster, better, and cheaper than humans. That's the ultimate end point of this progress.

The economic value of human labour will drop to zero. That would be an existential threat to our civilization.

alignmentforum.com

Lots of people in academia and industry are calling for more oversight. It's the US government that's behind. Europe's AI Act bans applications with unacceptable risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_Act

The US government probably doesn't think it's behind.

Right now it's operated by a bunch of people who think that you can directly relate the amount of money a venture could make in the next 90 days to its net benefit for society. Government telling them how they can and cannot make that money, in their minds, is government telling them that they cannot bring maximum benefit to society.

Now, is this mindset myopic to everything that most people have in their lived experience? Is it ethically bankrupt and held by people who'd sell their own mothers for a penny if they otherwise couldn't get that penny? Would those people be banished to a place beyond human contact for the rest of their existence by functioning organs of an even somewhat-sane society?

I don't know. I'm just asking questions.

I'd go further and say the US government wants "an instrument more powerful than any nuclear weapon" to be built in its territory, by people it has jurisdiction over.

It might not be a direct US-govt project like the Manhattan Project was, but it doesn't have to. The government has the ties it needs with the heads of all these AI companies, and if it comes to it, the US-govt has the muscle and legal authority to reign control over it.

A good deal for everyone involved really. These companies get to make bank and technology that furthers their market dominance, the US-govt gets potentially "Manhattan project"-level pivotal technology— it's elites helping elites.

Unless China handicaps the their progress as well (which they won’t, see made in China 2025), all you’re doing is handing the future to deepseek et al.

What kind of a future is that? If China marches towards a dystopia, why should Europe dutifully follow?

We can selectively ban uses without banning the technology wholesale; e.g., nuclear power generation is permitted, while nuclear weapons are strictly controlled.

> If China marches towards a dystopia, why should Europe dutifully follow?

I think the more relevant question is: Do you want to live in a Chinese dystopia, or a European one?

A European dystopia won't be AI borne, so this is a false dilemma.

What I meant is: Europe can choose to regulate as they do, and end up living in a Chinese dystopia because the Chinese will drastically benefit from non-regulated AI, or they can create their own AI dystopia.

A non-AI dystopia is the least likely scenario.

If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack Europe, they can invest in defense without unleashing AI domestically. And I don't think China will become a utopia with unregulated AI. My impression after having visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have. But if things go sideways they may regret it too.

Not attack, just influence. Destabilize if you want. Advocate regime change, sabotage trust in institution. Being on a defense in a propaganda war doesn't really work.

With US already having lost ideologigal war with russia and China, Europe is very much next

> China may use AI to attack Europe

No, just control. America exerts influence and control over Europe without having had to attack it in generations.

> If you are suggesting that China may use AI to attack Europe

No - I'm suggesting that China will reap the benefits of AI much more than Europe will, and they will eclipse Europe economically. Their dominance will follow, and they'll be able to dictate terms to other countries (just as the US is doing, and has been doing).

> And I don't think China will become a utopia with unregulated AI.

Did you miss all the places I used the word "dystopia"?

> My impression after having visited it was not one of a utopia, and knowing how they use technology, I don't think AI will usher it in, because our visions of utopia are at odds. They may well enjoy what they have.

Comparing China when I was a kid, not that long ago, to what it is now: It is a dystopia, and that dystopia is responsible for much of the improvements they've made. Enjoying what they have doesn't mean it's not a dystopia. Most people don't understand how willing humans are to live in a dystopia if it improves their condition significantly (not worrying too much about food, shelter, etc).

We don't know whether pushing towards AGI is marching towards a dystopia.

If it's winner takes all for the first company/nation to have AGI (presuming we can control it), then slowing down progress of any kind with regulation is a risk.

I don't think there's a good enough analogy to be made, like your nuclear power/weapons example.

The hypothetical benefits of an aligned AGI outweigh those of any other technology by orders of magnitude.

As with nuclear weapons, there is non-negligible probability of wiping out the human race. The companies developing AI have not solved the alignment problem, and OpenAI even dismantled what programs it had on it. They are not going to invest in it unless forced to.

We should not be racing ahead because China is, but investing energy in alignment research and international agreements.

> We don't know whether pushing towards AGI is marching towards a dystopia.

We do know that. By literally looking at China.

> The hypothetical benefits of an aligned AGI outweigh those of any other technology by orders of magnitude.

AGI aligned with whom?

This thought process it not different than it was with nuclear weapons.

The primary difference is the observability - with satellites we had some confidence that other nations respected treaties, or that they had enough reaction time for mutual destruction, but with this AI development we lack all that.

Yes, it was the same with nukes, each side had to build them because the other side was building them.

Only countries with nuclear weapons had an actual seat at the table when the world banned new nuclear weapon programs.

That is why we see the current AI competition and some attempts from companies to regulate it so that "it is safe only in their hands".

https://time.com/6288245/openai-eu-lobbying-ai-act/

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The EU can say all it wants about banning AI applications with unacceptable risk. But ASML is still selling machines to TSMC, which makes the chips which the AI companies are using. The EU is very much profiting off of the AI boom. ASML makes significantly more money than OpenAI, even.

> Lots of people in academia and industry

Mostly OpenAI and DeepMind and it stunk of 'pulling up the drawbridge behind them' and pivoting from actual harm to theoretical harm.

For a crowd supposedly entrenched in startups, it's amazing everyone here is so slow to recognise it's all funding pitches and contract bidding.

US government is behind because Biden admin were pushing strongly for controls and regulations and told Andersen and friends exactly that, who then went and did everything in their power to elect Trump, who then put those same tech bros in charge of making his AI policy.

The EU does and has passed the AI act to reign in the worst consequences of this nuclear weapon. It has not been received well around here.

The "digital god" angle might explain why. For many, this has become a religious movement, a savior for an otherwise doomed economic system.

Absolutely. It's frankly quite shocking to see how otherwise atheist or agnostic people have so quickly begun worshipping at the altar of "inevitable AGI apocalypse", much in the same way as how extremist Christians await the rapture.

To be fair many of us arrived at the idea that AI was humanities inevitable endpoint ahead of and independently of whether we would ever see it in our lifetimes. Its easy enough to see how people could independently converge on such am idea. I dont see that view as related to atheism in any way other than it creating space for the belief, in the same way it creates space for many others.

Id love to believe there is more to life than the AI future, or that we as humans are destined to be perpetually happy and live meaningful. However I currently dont see how our current levels of extreme prosperity are anything more than an evolutionary blip, even if we could make them last several millennia more.

I guess they think that the “digital god” has a chance to become real (and soon, even), unlike the non-digital one?

We'll be debating whether or not "AGI is here" in philosophical terms, in the same way people debate if God is real, for years to come. To say nothing of the untaxed "nonprofit" status these institutions share.

Omnipotent deities can never be held responsible for famine and natural disasters ("God has a plan for us all"). AI currently has the same get-out-of-jail free card where mistakes that no literate human would ever make are handwaved away as "hallucinations" that can be exorcised with a more sophisticated training model ("prayers").

Roko's Basilisk is basically Pascal's wager with GPUs.

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I don't know what sources you're reading. There's so much eye-batting I'm surprised people can see at all.

How is an LLM more powerful than any nuclear weapon? Seriously curious.

Because many people fundamentally don’t believe AGI is possible at a basic level, even AI researchers. Humans tend to only understand what materially affects their existence.

Most of us are batting our eyelashes as rapidly as possible but have no idea how to stop it.

have they started hiring people to make maglev trains and permaculture gardens all around urban areas yet?

It'd be odd if people batted eyes before the 1st nuclear weapon came to be, but not batting now.

Well, because it's obviously bullshit and everyone knows it. Just play the game and get rich like everyone else.

Are you sure about that? AI-powered robotic soldiers are around the corner. What could go wrong...

Robot soldiers != AGI

Ooo I know, Cybermen! Yay.

We're all too busy rolling our eyes.

This is the moment where we fumble the opportunity to avoid a repeat of Web 1.0's ad-driven race to the bottom

Look forward to re-living that shift from life-changing community resource to scammy and user-hostile

I feel this. I had a very productive convo with an LLM today and realized that a huge part of the value of it was that it addressed my questions in a focused way, without trying to sell me anything or generate SEO rankings or register ad impressions. It just helped me. And that was incredibly refreshing in a digital world that generally feels adversarial.

Then the thought came, when will they start showing ads here.

I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly, or the open source models get good enough, we could still enjoy that simplicity and focus for quite a while. Here’s hoping!

> I like to think that if we learn to pay for it directly

The $20 monthly payment is not enough though and companies like Google can keep giving away their AI for free till OpenAI is bankrupt.

The "good" thing is this is all way too expensive to be ad-supported. Maybe there will be some ad-supported products using very small/cheap models, but the leading edge stuff is always going to be at the leading-edge of compute usage too, and someone has to pay the bill. Even with investors subsidizing a lot of the costs, it's still very expensive to use the best models heavily for real work.

Subscription services can sell ads too. See Hulu, or Netflix. Spotify might not play "radio ads" if you pay, but it will still advertise artists on your home screen.

These models being expensive leads me to think they will look at all methods of monetization possible when seeking profitability. Rather than ads being off the table, it could feasibly make ads be on the table sooner.

Maybe it could happen, but the revenue that can be made per user from ads is basically insignificant compared to the compute costs. They’d be pissing off their users for a very marginal benefit.

Ads intermixed into llm responses is so clearly evil that openai will never do it so long as the nonprofit has a controlling stake (which it currently still has), because the nonprofit would never allow it.

The insidious part is it doesn't have to be so blatant as adverts, you can achieve a lot by just slight biases in text output.

Decades ago I worked for a classical music company, fresh out of school. "So.. how do you anticipate where the music trend is going", I once naively asked one of the senior people on the product side. "Oh, we don't. We tell people really quietly, and they listen". They and the marketing team spent a lot of time doing very subtle work, easily as much as anything big like actual advertisements. Things like small little conversations with music journalists, just a dropped sentence or two that might be repeated in an article, or marginally influence an article; that another journalist might see and have an opinion on, or spark some other curiosity. It only takes a small push and it tends to spread across the industry. It's not a fast process, but when the product team is capable of road-mapping for a year or so in advance, a marketing team can do a lot to prepare things so the audience is ready.

LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle.

>LLMs represent a scary capability to influence the entire world, in ways we're not equipped to handle

replace LLMs with TV, or smartphones, or maybe even mcdonald's, and you've got the same idea. through TV, corporations got to control a lot of the social world and people's behavior.

Ads / SEO but with AI responses was so obviously the endgame given how much human attention it controls and the fact that people aren't really willing to pay what it costs (when decent free, open-weights alternatives exist)

AGI was achieved the first time a model replied "it worked when I ran it"

I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian, self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is fully in line with that. They want to be the kings they always thought of themselves as, and now they get to do so without couching it in "doing good".

That world never existed. Yes, pockets did - IT professionals with broadband lines and spare kit hosting IRC servers and phpBB forums from their homes free of charge, a few VC-funded companies offering idealistic visions of the net until funding ran dry (RIP CoHost) - but once the web became privatized, it was all in service of the bottom line by companies. Web 2.0 onwards was all about centralization, surveillance, advertising, and manipulation of the populace at scale - and that intent was never really a secret to those who bothered to pay attention. While the world was reeling from Cambridge Analytica, us pre-1.0 farts who cut our teeth on Telnet and Mosaic were just kind of flabbergasted that ya'll were surprised by overtly obvious intentions.

That doesn't mean it has to always be this way, though. Back when I had more trust in the present government and USPS, I mused on how much of a game changer it might be for the USPS to provide free hosting and e-mail to citizens, repurposing the glut of unused real estate into smaller edge compute providers. Everyone gets a web server and 5GB of storage, with 1A Protections letting them say and host whatever they like from their little Post Office Box. Everyone has an e-mail address tied to their real identity, with encryption and security for digital mail just like the law provides for physical mail. I still think the answer is about enabling more people to engage with the internet on their selective terms (including the option of disengagement), rather than the present psychological manipulation everyone engages in to keep us glued to our screens, tethered to our phones, and constantly uploading new data to advertisers and surveillance firms alike.

But the nostalgic view that the internet used to be different is just that: rose-tinted memories of a past that never really existed. The first step to fixing this mess is acknowledging its harm.

I don’t think the parent was saying that everyone’s intentions were pure until recently, but rather that naked greed wasn’t cool before, but now it is.

The Internet has changed a lot over the decades, and it did used to be different, with the differences depending on how many years you go back.

As recently as the Silicon Valley tv show, the joke was that every startup pitch claimed they were “making the world a better place”.

"I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do." -Gavin Belson

What we are observing is the effects of profit maximization when the core value to the user is already fulfilled. It's a type of pathological optimization that is useful at the beginning but eventually pathologizes.

When we already have efficient food production that drove down costs and increased profits (a good thing), what else is there for companies to optimize for, if not loading it with sugar, putting it in cheap plastic, bamboozling us with ads?

This same dynamic plays out in every industry. Markets are a great thing when the low hanging fruit hasn't been picked, because the low hanging fruit is usually "cut the waste, develop basic tech, be efficient". But eventually the low hanging fruit becomes "game human's primitive reward circuits".

> That world never existed

It absolutely did. Steve Wozniak was real. Silicon Valley wasn't always a hive of liars and sycophants.

I have to agree. That's one of the dangers of today's world; the risk of believing that we never had a better one. Yes, the altruism of yesteryear was partially born of convenience, but it still existed. And I remember people actually believing it was important and acting as such. Today's cynicism and selfishness seem a lot more arbitrary to me. There's absolutely no reason things have to be this way. Collectively, we have access to more wealth and power now than we ever did previously. By all accounts, things ought to be great. It seems we just need the current generation of leaders to re-learn a few lessons from history.

You and I are on the same path, just at different points in the journey. Your response is very similar to my own tone and position a decade ago, trying to celebrate what we had before in an attempt to shepherd others towards a better future together. Time wore down that naivety into the cynicism of today, because I’ve come to realize that those celebrations simply coddle those who do not wish to put in the effort for change and yearn for a return to past glories.

We should acknowledge the past flatly and objectively for what it was and spend more time building that future, than listening to the victors of the past brag and boast, content to wallow in their accomplishments instead of rejoining contributors to tomorrow. The good leaders of yesteryear have stepped aside in lieu of championing newer, younger visionaries; those still demanding respect for what they did fifty years ago in circumstances we can only dream about, are part of the problem.

Sure it has. For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates). For every starry-eyed engineer or developer who just wants to help people, there are business people who will pervert it into an empire and jettison them as soon as practical. For every TED, there’s a Davos; for every DEFCON, there’s a glut of vendor-specific conferences.

We should champion the good people who did the good things and managed to resist the temptations of the poisoned apple, but we shouldn’t hold an entire city on a pedestal because of nostalgia alone. Nobody, and no entity, is that deserving.

> For every Woz, there was a Jobs; for every Linus, a Bill (Gates)

Nobody said there were no bastards. Just that they didn’t have dominion. We let this happen, in part by being lazy and cynical.

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Coincidentally, and as another pre-1.0 fart myself :-) -- one who remembers when Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" was still just a wild hope -- I was thinking of something similar the other day (not USPS-specific for hosting, but I like that).

It was sparked by going to a video conference "Hyperlocal Heroes: Building Community Knowledge in the Digital Age" hosted by New_ Public: https://newpublic.org/ "Reimagine social media: We are researchers, engineers, designers, and community leaders working together to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect."

A not-insignificant amount of time in that one-hour teleconference was spent related to funding models for local social media and local reporting.

Afterwards, I got to thinking. The USA spent literally trillions of dollars on the (so-many-problematical-things-about-it-I-better-stop-now) Iraq war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War "According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion by 2017 including interest."

Or, from a different direction, the USA spends about US$200 billion per year on mostly-billboard-free roads: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... "In 2021, state and local governments provided three-quarters of highway and road funding ($154 billion) and federal transfers accounted for $52 billion (25 percent)."

That's about US$700 per person per year on US roads.

So, clearly huge amounts of money are available in the USA if enough people think something is important. Imagine if a similar amount of money went to funding exactly what you outlined -- a free web presence for distributed social media -- with an infrastructure funded by tax dollars instead of advertisements. Isn't a healthy social media system essential to 21st century online democracy with public town squares?

And frankly such a distributed social media ecosystem in the USA might be possible for at most a tenth of what roads cost, like perhaps US$70 per person per year (or US$20 billion per year)?

Yes, there are all sorts of privacy and free speech issues to work through -- but it is not like we don't have those all now with the advertiser-funded social media systems we have. So, it is not clear to me that such a system would be immensely worse than what we have.

But what do I know? :-) Here was a previous big government suggestion be me from 2010 -- also mostly ignored (until now 15 years later the USA is in political crisis over supply chain dependency and still isn't doing anything very related to it yet): "Build 21000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA" https://web.archive.org/web/20100708160738/http://pcast.idea... "Being able to make things is an important part of prosperity, but that capability (and related confidence) has been slipping away in the USA. The USA needs more large neighborhood shops with a lot of flexible machine tools. The US government should fund the construction of 21,000 flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at a cost of US$50 billion, places where any American can go to learn about and use CNC equipment like mills and lathes and a variety of other advanced tools and processes including biotech ones. That is one for every town and county in the USA. These shops might be seen as public extensions of local schools, essentially turning the shops of public schools into more like a public library of tools. This project is essential to US national security, to provide a technologically literate populace who has learned about post-scarcity technology in a hands-on way. The greatest challenge our society faces right now is post-scarcity technology (like robots, AI, nanotech, biotech, etc.) in the hands of people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity (whether in big organizations or in small groups). This project would help educate our entire society about the potential of these technologies to produce abundance for all."

Hopelessly over-idealistic premise. Sama and pg have never been anything other than opportunistic muck. This will be my last ever comment on HN.

I feel this so hard, I think this may be my last time using the site as well. They don't care about advancement, they only care about money.

Like everything, it's projection. Those who loudly scream against something are almost always the ones engaging in it.

Google screamed against service revenue and advertising while building the world's largest advertising empire. Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming workers and passengers while creating an unregulated monster that harmed workers and passengers.

Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly screaming against AI harming humanity while doing everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.

If people trust the performance instead of the actions and their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.

Oh I'm not saying they every believed more than their self-centered views, but that in a world that leaned more liberal there was value in trying to frame their work in those terms. Now there's no need to pretend.

And to those who "say" at least now they're honest, I say "WHY?!" Unconditionally being "good" would be better than disguising selfishness as good. But that's not really a thing. Having to maintain the presence of doing good puts significant boundaries on what you can get away with, and increases the consequence when people uncover some shit.

Condoning "honest liars" enables a whole other level of open and unrestricted criminality.

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They deeply believe in the Ayn Rand mindset that the system that brings them the most individual wealth is also the best system for humanity as a whole.

When people that wealthy are that delusional... With few checks or balances from politics, media, or even social media... I don't think humanity as a whole is in for a great time.

They are roughly as delusional as everyone else. There is an image human bias to convince yourself that what benefits you is also best for everyone else.

It’s just that their biases have much more capacity to cause damage as their wealth gives them so much power.

Yes, people are generally delusional; importantly though, some people are much less so (and some more so). Being connected to reality, being grounded, are learnable traits (but not very valuable to CEOs and narcissists).

> They are roughly as delusional as everyone else.

I would bet serious money that people who believe in Ayn Rand are generally more delusional than others, and the same goes for the ultra-wealthy living in a bubble of sycophants.

And their wealth gives them much more capacity - and motive - to cause damage.

It got you the 20th century

> They want to be the kings they always thought of themselves as, and now they get to do so without couching it in "doing good".

You mean, AGI will benefit all of humanity like War on Terror spread democracy?

Why are you changing the subject? The “War on Terror” was never intended to spread democracy as far as I know; democracy was a means by which to achieve the objective of safety from terrorism.

> The “War on Terror” was never intended to spread democracy as far as I know;

Regardless of intent, it was most definitely sold to the American public on that premise.

Is it reasonable to assign the descriptor “authoritarian” to anyone who simply does not subscribe to the common orthodoxy of one faction in the american culture war? That is what it seems to me is happening here, though I would love to be wrong.

I have not seen anything from sama or pmarca that I would classify as “authoritarian”.

Donating millions to a fascist president (in Altman’s case) seems pretty authoritarian to me. And he seems happy enough hanging out with Thiel and other Yarvin groupies.

I think this is more a symptom of the level of commonplace corruption in the American regulatory environment than any indication of the political views of the person directing such donations.

Tim Apple did it too, and we don’t assume he’s an authoritarian now too, do we? I imagine they would probably have done similarly regardless of who won the election.

It sure seems like an endorsement, but I think it’s simply modern corporate strategy in the American regulatory environment, same as when foreign dignitaries stay in overpriced suites in the Trump hotel in DC.

Those who don’t kiss the ring are clearly and obviously punished. It’s not in the interest of your shareholders (or your launch partners) to be the tall poppy.

I do feel that way about every CEO in those cheery inauguration day photos (https://apnews.com/article/trump-inauguration-tech-billionai...). Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai, Cook, Altman, Musk, Thiel: enablers of fascism, every one. However, it should be noted that Cook donated from his own name and not Apple. Guess he didn't want his shittiness to rub off on his company.

As for the shareholders, Cook was more than happy to "do the right thing" in the past, even when under pressure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple–FBI_encryption_dispute).

Yup, if Elon hadn't gotten so jealous and spiteful to him I'm sure he'd be one of Elon's leading sycophants.

I’m not sure exactly what they meant by “liberal” in this case, but since they put it in contrast with authoritarianism, I assume they meant it in the conventional definition of the word (where it is the polar opposite of authoritarianism). Instead of the American politics-as-sports definition that makes it a synonym for “team blue.”

correct. "liberal" as in the general ideas that ie expanding the franchise is important, press freedoms are good, that government can do good things for people and for capital etc. Wikipedia's intro paragraph does a good job of describing what I was getting at (below). In prior decades Republicans in the US would have been categorized as "liberal" under this definition; in recent years, not so much.

>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

No, "authoritarian" is a word with a specific meaning. I'm not sure about applying it to Sam Altman, but Marc Andreessen has expressed views that I consider authoritarian in his victory lap tour since last year's presidential election.

No I don't think it is. I DO think those two people want to be in charge (along with other billionaires) and they want the rest of us to follow along, which is in my book an authoritarian POV. pmarca's recent "VC is the only job that can't be done by AI" is a good example of that; the rest of us are to be managed and controlled by VCs and robots.

are you aware of worldcoin?

altman building a centralised authority of who will be classed as "human" is about as authoritarian as you could get

Worldcoin is opt-in, which is the opposite of authoritarian. Nobody who doesn’t like it is required to participate.

it is opt in until they manage to convince some government to allow them to be the contracted provider of "humanness verification" that is then made a prerequisite to access services.

Comcast is also opt-in. Except, in many areas there are no real alternatives.

I doubt Worldcoin will actually manage to corner the market. But the point is, if it did, bad things would happen. Though, that’s probably true of most products.

it's always opt-in until it isn't

hi i thik it's alsowm

Huh, so Elon's lawsuit worked? The nonprofit will retain control? Or is this just spin on a plan that will eventually still sideline the nonprofit?

To be specific: The nonprofit currently retains control. It will stop once more dilution sets in.

The whole article feels like justifying a bunch of legal nonsense to get to the end result of removing the capped structure.

It more sounds like the district attorneys won

Yes and no. It sounds like the capped profit PPU holders will get to have their units convert 1:1 with unlimited profit equity shares, which are obviously way more valuable. So the nonprofit loses insanely in this move and all current investors and employees make a huge amount.

For better or worse, OpenAI removing the capped structure and turning the nonprofit from AGI considerations to just philanthropy feels like the shedding of the last remnants of sanctity.

> transition to a Public Benefit Corporation

Can some business person give us a summary on PBCs vs. alternative registrations?

A PBC is just a for-profit company that has _some_ sort of specific mandate to benefit the "public good" - however it chooses to define that. It's generally meant to provide some balance toward societal good over the more common, strictly shareholder profit-maximizing alternative.

(IANAL but run a PBC that uses this charter[1] and have written about it here[2] as part of our biennial reporting process.)

[1] https://github.com/OpenCoreVentures/ocv-public-benefit-compa...

[2] https://goauthentik.io/blog/2024-09-25-our-biennial-pbc-repo...

The charter of a public-benefit corporation gives the company's board and management a bit of legal cover for making decisions that don't serve to maximize, or may even limit, financial returns to shareholders, when those decisions are made for the benefit of the public.

Reality: It is the same as any other for-profit with a better-sounding name. It confuses a lot of people into thinking it's a non-profit without being one.

Theory: It allows the CEO to make decisions motivated not just by maximizing shareholder value but by some other social good. Of course, very few PBC CEOs choose to do that.

you could've just asked this to chatgpt....

There are a lot of good points here, by multiple vantage points as far as views for the argument of how imminent, if it - metaphysically or logistically - viable at all even, AGI is.

I personally think the conversation, including obviously in the post itself, has swung too far in the direction of how AGI can or will potentially affect the ethical landscape regarding AI, however. I think we really ought to concern ourselves with addressing and mitigating effects that it already HAS brought - both good and bad - rather than engaging in any excessive speculation.

That's just me, though.

That’s an intentional misdirection, and an all too common one :(

So the non-profit retains control but we all know that Altman controls the board of the non-profit and I'd be shocked if he won't have significant stock in the new for-profit (from TFA: "we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock"). Which means that regardless of whether the non-profit has control on paper, OpenAI is now even better structured for Sam Altman's personal enrichment.

No more caps on profit, a simpler structure to sell to investors, and Altman can finally get that 7% equity stake he's been eyeing. Not a bad outcome for him given the constraints apparently imposed on them by "the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California".

We have seen how much power does the board have after the firing of Altman - none.

Let's see how this plays out. PBC effectively means nothing - just take a look at Xai and its purchase of Twitter. I would love to listen reasoning explaining why this ~33 billion USD move is benefiting public.

> We have seen how much power does the board have after the firing of Altman - none.

Right; so, "Worker Unions" work.

The board had plenty of power.

There was never a coherent explanation of its firing the CEO.

But they could have stuck with that decision if they believed in it.

The explanation seemed pretty obvious to me: They set up a nonprofit to deliver an AI that was Open.

Then things went unexpectedly well, people were valuing them at billions of dollars, and they suddenly decided they weren't open any more. Suddenly they were all about Altman's Interests Safety (AI Safety for short).

The board tried to fulfil its obligation to get the nonprofit to do the things in its charter, and they were unsuccessful.

The question is not if they could, it is if they would.

The explanation was pretty clear and coherent: The CEO was no longer adhering to the mission of the non-profit (which the board was upholding).

But they found themselves alone in that it turns out the employees (who were employed by the for-profit company) and investors (MSFT in particular) didn't care about the mission and wanted to follow the money instead.

So the board had no choice but to capitulate and leave.

ChatGPT is free. That's the public benefit.

Google offers a great many things for free. Should they get beneficial tax treatment for it?

PBCs have no beneficial tax treatment and neither does OpenAI.

Huh. Then yah, what the heck? Why not just be a regular corp?

Branding, and perhaps a demand from the judges. In practice it doesn't mean anything if/when they stuff the board with people who want to run it as a normal LLC.

So, what's the point of a PBC?

Not being snarky here, like what is the purported thesis behind them?

marketing to certain types of philanthropic investors? I think

Mostly branding, like Google's "do no evil"

Some founders truly believe in structuring the company for the benefit of the public, but Altman has already shown he's not one of them.

They don't collect data?

If you use it, that means you received more value than you gave up. It's called consumer surplus.

If I pay £200,000 for a car, I received more value than I gave up, otherwise I wouldn't have given the owner £200,000 for her car. No reasonable person would say the car was "free"...

> If you use it, that means you received more value than you gave up. It's called consumer surplus

This is true for literally any transaction. Actually, it's true for any rational action. If you're being tortured, and you decide it's not worth it to keep your secrets hidden any longer, you get more than you give up when you stop being tortured.

It’s only true in theory and over a single transaction, not necessarily over time. The hack that VCs have exploited for decades now is subsidizing products and acquiring competition to eventually enshittify. In this case, when OpenAI dials up the inevitable enshittification, they’ll have gotten a ton of data from their users to use for their proprietary closed AI.

That's effectively every business that isn't a complete rent-seeking monopoly. It's not a very good measure.

edit: to be clear, it's not a bad thing - we should want companies that create consumer surplus. But that's the default state of companies in a healthy market.

“Use of prison facilities is explicit admission of guilt.”

It’s called prisoners dilemma when even the government is propping this up.

Define “free”.

It’s like a free beer, but it’s Bud Light, lukewarm, and your reaction to tasting the beer goes toward researching ways to make you appreciate the lukewarm Bud Light for its marginal value, rather than making that beer taste better or less unhealthy. They’ll try very hard to convince you that they have though. It parallels their approach to AI Alignment.

This description has no business being as spot on as it is.

Makes me glad I haven't tried the Kool-aid. Uh, crap - 'scuse me, craft - IPA. Uh, beer.

I don't pay money for it?

I will give you a free beer if I can listen all your personal conversations.

free as in free beer

That's like saying AWS is free. ChatGPT has a limited use free tier just like most other SaaS products out there.

Or, alternatively, it’s much harder to fight with one hand behind your back. They need to be able to compete for resources and talent given the market structure, or they fail on the mission.

This is already impossibly hard. Approximately zero people commenting would be able to win this battle in Sam’s shoes. What would they need to do to begin to have a chance? Rather than make all the obvious comments “bad evil man wants to get rich”, think what it would take to achieve the mission. What would you need to do in his shoes, aside from just give up and close up shop? Probably this, at the very least.

Edit: I don’t know the guy and many near YC do. So I accept there may be a lens I don’t have. But I’d rather discuss the problem, not the person.

It seems like they lost most of their top talent - probably because of Altman.

Ok cool so what should he do today? Close up shop? Resign? Or try?

Given how they've been losing their lead recently, replacing Sam Altman with someone more innovative might be a good idea.

What would they have to do to have a chance supporting the mission they were incorporated and given preferential tax treatment for a decade to make happen? Certainly not this.

The moment we stop treating "bad evil man wants to ge it rich" as a straw man, we can heal.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! "Bad evil man wants to get rich! We should enrich Google and Microsoft instead!"

Isn’t Sam already very rich? I mean it wouldn’t be the first time a guy wanted to be even richer, but I feel like we need to be more creative when divining his intentions

Why would we need to be more creative? The explanation of him wanting more money is perfectly adequate.

Being rich results in a kind of limitation of scope for ambition. To the sufferer, a person who has everything they could want, there is no other objective worth having. They become eccentric and they pursue more money.

We should have enrichment facilities for these people where they play incremental games and don’t ruin the world like the paperclip maximizers they are.

> Why would we need to be more creative? The explanation of him wanting more money is perfectly adequate. Being rich results in a kind of limitation of scope for ambition.

The dude announces new initiatives from the White House, regularly briefs Senators and senior DoD leaders, and is the top get for interviews around the world for AI topics.

There’s a lot more to be ambitious about than just money.

These are all activities he is engaging in to generate money through the company he has a stake in. None of those activities have a purpose other than selling the work of his company and presenting it as a good investment which is how he gets money.

Maybe he wants to use the money in some nebulous future way, subjugating all people in a way that deals with his childhood trauma or whatever. That’s also something rich people do when they need a hobby aside from gathering more money. It’s not their main goal, except when they run into setbacks.

People are not complicated when they are money hoarders. They might have had hidden depths once, but they are thin furrows in the ground next to the giant piles of money that define them now.

> These are all activities he is engaging in to generate money through the company he has a stake in. None of those activities have a purpose other than selling the work of his company and presenting it as a good investment which is how he gets money.

So he doesn't enjoy the attention? Prestige or power? Respect?

Are you Sam Altman? Because you're making a lot of assumptions on his psyche right now.

Nah, worldcoin is now going to the US. He just wants to get richer. https://archive.is/JTuGE

OpenAI doesn’t have the lead anymore.

Google/Anthropic are catching up, or already surpassed.

how? The internet says 400 m weekly chatgpt users, 19 m weekly Anthropic, 47.3 m Monthly Gemini, Grok 6.7 m daily, 430 m Baidu.

"It's not about the money, it's about winning"

--Gordon Gekko

It seems a defining feature of nearly every single extremely rich person is their belief that they somehow are smarter than filthy peasants, and so he decides to "educate" them of the sacred knowledge. This may take vastly different forms - genocide, war, trying to create via bribes a better government, create a city from scratch, create a new corporate "culture", do public proselytizing of their "do better" faith, write books, classes etc.

St. Altman plans to create a corporate god for us dumb schmucks, and he will be it's prophet.

Never understood his appeal. Lacks charisma. Not technically savvy relative to many engineers at OpenAI(I doubt he would pass their own intern interviews, even less so their FT). Very unlikeable in person (comes off as fake for some reason, like a political plant). Who is vouching for this guy. When I met him, for some reason, he reminded me of Thiel. He is no Jobs

Altman is a clear sociopath. He's a sales guy and good executive. But he's only out for himself.

SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now.

If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy phones will get a Gemini button, Chrome will get it built into the browser. MS can either develop their own thing , use opensource models, or just ask every frontier model provider (and there's already 3-4 as we speak) how cheaply they're willing to deliver. Then chuck it right in the OS and Office first-class. Which half the white collar world spends their entire day staring at. Apple devices too will get an AI button (or gesture, given it's Apple) and just like MS they'll do it inhouse or have the providers bid against each other.

The only way OpenAI David was ever going to beat the Goliaths GMA in the long run was if it were near-impossible to catch up to them, á la TSMC/ASML. But they did catch up.

It's doubtful if there even is a race anymore. The last significant AI advancement in the consumer LLM space was fluent human language synthesis around 2020, with its following assistant/chat interface. Since then, everything has been incremental — larger models, new ways to prompt them, cheaper ways to run them, more human feedback, and gaming evaluations.

The wisest move in the chatbot business might be to wait and see if anyone discovers anything profitable before spending more effort and wasting more money on chat R&D, which includes most agentic stuff. Reliable assistants or something along those lines might be the next big breakthrough (if you ask certain futurologists), but the technology we have seems unsuitable for any provable reliability.

ML can be applied in a thousand ways other than LLMs, and many will positively impact our lives and create their own markets. But OpenAI is not in that business. I think the writing is on the wall, and Sama's vocal fry, "AGI is close," and humanity verification crypto coins are smoke and mirrors.

Saying LLMs have only incrementally improved is like saying my 13 year old has only incrementally approved over the last 5 years. Sure, it's been a set of continuous improvements, but that has taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful.

Personally, deep research and o3 have been transformative, taking LLMs from something I have never used to something that I am using daily.

Even if the progress ends up plateauing (which I do not believe will happen in the near term), behaviors are changing; OpenAI is capturing users, and taking them from companies like Google. Google may be able to fight back and win - Gemini 2.5 Pro is great - but any company sitting this out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at a later date.

> any company sitting this out risks being unable to capture users back from Open AI at a later date.

Why? I paid for Claude for a while, but with Deepseek, Gemini and the free hits on Mistral, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity I'm not sure why I would now. This is anecdotal of course, but I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour. I think the best the subscription companies can hope for is that their subscribers don't realize that Deepseek and Gemini can basically do all you need for free.

>I'm very rarely unique in my behaviour

I cannot stress this enough: if you know what Deepseek, Claude, Mistral, and Perplexity are, you are not a typical consumer.

Arguably, if you have used a single one of those brands you are not a typical consumer.

The vast majority of people have used ChatGPT and nothing else, except maybe clicking on Gemini or Meta AI by accident.

I doubt it. Google is shoving Gemini on everyone’s face through search, and Meta AI is embedded in every Meta product. Heck, instagram created a bot marketplace.

They might not “know” the brand as well as ChatGPT, but the average consumer has definitely been exposed to those at the very least.

DeepSeek also made a lot of noise, to the point that, anecdotally, I’ve seen a lot of people outside of tech using it.

No, it's still just a toy. Until they can make the models actually consistently good at things, they aren't going to be useful. Right now they still BS you far too much to trust them, and because you have to double check their work every time they are worse than no tool at all.

I can't square how OpenAi can capture users and presumably retain them when the incumbents have been capturing users for multiple decades and why can they not retain them?

If every major player had an AI option, i'm just not understanding how because OpenAi moved first or got big first, the hugely massively successful companies that did the same thing for multiple decades don't have the same advantage?

Who knows how this will play out, but user behavior is always somewhat sticky and OpenAI now has 400M+ weekly active users. Currently, I'm not sure there is much of a moat, as many would jump if, say, Google released a model that is 10x better. However, there are myriad ways that OpenAI could slowly try to make their userbase even stickier:

1. OpenAI is apparently in the process of building a social network.

2. OpenAI is apparently working with Jonny Ive on some sort of hardware.

3. OpenAI is increasingly working on "memory" as a LLM feature. Users may be less likely to switch as an LLM increasingly feels like a person that knows you, understands you, has a history with you, etc.

4. Google and MSFT are leveraging their existing strengths. Perhaps you will stick with Gemini given deep integration with Android, Google Drive, Sheets, Docs, etc.

5. LLMs, as depressing as this sounds, will increasingly be used for romantic/friend purposes. These users may not want to switch, as it would be like breaking up and finding a new partner.

6. Your chat history, if it can't be easily exported/imported, may be a sticky feature, especially if it can be improved (e.g. easily search, cross-reference, chats, like a supercharged interconnecting note app with brains).

I could list 100 more of these. Perhaps none of the above will happen, but again, they have 400M weekly users and they will find ways to keep them. It's a lot easier to keep users that have a habit of showing up, then getting them in the first place. There's a reason that Google is treating this like an emergency; they are at serious risk of having their search cash cow permanently disrupted if they don't act fast to win.

6 (can’t export/import chat history) is already a wrap since every user is prohibited from using ChatGPT chat logs to “develop models that compete with OpenAI,” if you export your chats and give it to Gemini or Claude or post it on X and Grok reads it, then you just violated the OpenAI terms, that’s grounds for a permaban or lawsuit for breach of contract (lol) … maybe your companies accept this risk but I’m in malicious compliance mode

Google is alright, but they have similar stupid noncompete vendor lock in rule, and no way to opt out of training, so there’s no real reason to trust Google. Yeah they could ship tool use in reasoning to catch up to o3, but it’ll just be catching up and not passing unless they fix the stupid legal terms.

Claude IDK how to trust, they train on feedback and everything is feedback, and they have the noncompete rule written even more broadly, dumb to use that.

Grok has a noncompete rule but also has a way to opt out of training, so it’s on the same tier of ClosedAI. I use it sometimes for jokey toy image generation crap but there’s no way to use it for anything serious since it has a copypasted closed ai prohibition

Mistral needs better models and simpler legalese, it’s so complicated and impossible to know which of the million legal contracts applies

IMHO meta is the only player, but they shot themselves in the foot by making Llama 4 too big for the local llama community to even use, super dumb, killed their most valuable thing which was the community.

That means the best models we can use for work without needing to worry about a lawsuit, are Qwen, and DeepSeek distills, no American AI is even in the same ballpark, Gemma 3 is refusal king if you even hint at something controversial. basically, America is getting actively stomped by China in AI right now, because their stuff is open and interoperable, and ours is closed and has legal noncompete bullshit, what can we actually build that doesn’t compete with these companies? Nothing

Very thought provoking reply. #3 sounds the most sticky to me, in the product sense that you'd build "your own LLM/agent" and plug it other services. I heard this on a product podcast [1], think of it like Okta SSO integration: access controls for your personal/sensitive LLM stuff vs all other services trying to get you to use their LLM.

#5 stands out as well as a substantial barrier.

The rest to me our sticky, but no more uniquely sticky than any other service that retains data. Like the switching cost of email or a browser. It does stick but not insurmountable and once the switch is made, it's like why did I wait so long? (I'm a Safari user!)

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful reply.

[1] https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback/the-gre...

To extend your illustration, 5 years ago no one could train an LLM with the capabilities of a 13 year old human; now many companies can both train LLMs and integrate them into products.

> taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful.

Really?

It's been five years. There is no AI killer app. Agentic coding is still hot garbage. Normal people don't want to use AI tools despite them being shoved into every SaaS under the sun. LLMs are most famous among non-tech users for telling you to put glue into pizza. No one has been able to scale their chatbots into something profitable, and no one can put a date on when they'll be profitable.

Why are you still pretending anything is going to come out of this?

Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, ....

Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI. And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ...

So I think your timeline and views are slightly off.

> Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, ....

GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is significant because that's when people seriously considered the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date years back we choose. There's been enough time since then to see the plateau.

> Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI.

I'd double-check that assumption. Many people I've spoken to take a moment to remember that "AI" stands for artificial intelligence. Outside of tongue-in-cheek jokes, OpenAI has about 50% market share in LLMs, but you can't forget that Samsung makes AI washing machines, let alone all the purely fraudulent uses of the "AI" label.

> And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ...

These are entirely different architectures from LLM/chat though. But you're right that OpenAI does that, too. When I said that they don't stray much from chat, I was thinking more about AlexNet and the broad applications of ML in general. But you're right, OpenAI also did/does diffusion, GANs, transformer vision.

This doesn't change my views much on chat being "not seeing the forest for the trees" though. In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.

>In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.

We do appear to be hitting a cap on the current generation of auto-regressive LLMs, but this isn't a surprise to anyone on the frontier. The leaked conversations between Ilya, Sam and Elon from the early OpenAI days acknowledge they didn't have a clue as to architecture, only that scale was the key to making experiments even possible. No one expected this generation of LLMs to make it nearly this far. There's a general feeling of "quiet before the storm" in the industry, in anticipation of an architecture/training breakthrough, with a focus on more agentic, RL-centric training methods. But it's going to take a while for anyone to prove out an architecture sufficiently, train it at scale to be competitive with SOTA LLMs and perform enough post training, validation and red-teamint to be comfortable releasing to the public.

Current LLMs are years and hundreds of millions of dollars of training in. That's a very high bar for a new architecture, even if it significantly improves on LLMs.

ChatGPT was not released to the general public until November 2022, and the mobile apps were not released until May 2023. For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.

LLM AI hype started well before ChatGPT.

This site and many others were littered with OpenAI stories calling it the next Bell Labs or Xerox PARC and other such nonsense going back to 2016.

And GPT stories kicked into high gear all over the web and TV in 2019 in the lead-up to GPT-2 when OpenAI was telling the world it was too dangerous to release.

Certainly by 2021 and early 2022, LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.

>For most of the world LLM's did not exist before those dates.

Just because people don't use something doesn't mean they don't know about it. Plenty of people were hearing about the existential threat of (LLM) AI long before ChatGPT. Fox News and CNN had stories on GPT-2 years before ChatGPT was even a thing. Exposure doesn't get much more mainstream than that.

> LLM AI was being reported on all over the place.

No, it wasn't.

As a proxy, here's HN results prior to November, 2022 - 13 results.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1667260800&dateRange=custom&...

Here's Google Trends, showing a clear uptick May 2023, and basically no search volume before (the small increase Feb. 2023 probably Meta's Llama).

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

As another proxy, compare Nvidia revenues - $26.91bln in 2022, $26.97bln in 2023, $60bln 2024, $130bln 2025. I think it's clear the hype didn't start until 2023.

You're welcome to point out articles and stores before this time period "hyping" LLM's, but what I remember is that before ChatGPT there was very little conversation around LLM's.

Seems like an arbitrary distinction.

I'd say Chain-of-Thought has massively improved LLM output. Is that "incremental"? Why is that more incremental than the move from GPT-2 to GPT-3? Sure you can say that this is when LLMs first passed some sort of Turing test, but fundamentally there was no technological difference from GPT-3 to GPT-4. In fact I would say the quality of GPT-4 unlocked thousands (millions?) more use-cases that were not very viable with the quality delivered by GPT-3. I don't see any reason for more use-cases to keep being unlocked by LLM improvements.

You saying —- with a straight face —- that post 2020 LLM AIs have made only incremental progress?

Yep, compared to beating the Turing test, the progress has been linear with exponentially growing investment. That's diminishing marginal returns.

Yes. But they have also improved a lot. Incremental just means that the function is going up without breaking points. We haven't seen anything revolutionary, just evolutionary in the last 3 years. But the models do provide 2 or 3 times more value. So their pace of advancement is not slow.

Well I think you’re correct that they know the jig is up, but I would say they know the AI bubble is about to burst so they want to cash out before that happens.

There is little to no money to be made in GAI, it will never turn into AGI, and people like Altman know this, so now they’re looking for a greater fool before it is too late.

AI companies are already automating huge swaths of document analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients. I know it’s fun to imagine AI is some big scam like crypto, but you’d have to be ignoring a lot of genuine non hype economic movement at this point to assume GAI isn’t making any money.

Why does the forum of an incubator that now has a portfolio that is like 80% AI so routinely bearish on AI? Is it a fear of irrelevance?

> AI companies are already automating huge swaths of document analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients

I don't think there is serious argument that LLMs won't generate tremendous value. The question is who will capture it. PCs generated massive value. But other than a handful of manufacturers and designers (namely, Apple, HP, Lenovo, Dell and ASUS), most PC builders went bankrupt. And out of the value generated by PCs in the world, the vast majority was captured by other businesses and consumers.

Doctors were using Google to diagnose patients before. The thing is, it's still the doctor delivering the diagnosis, the doctor writing the prescription, and the doctor billing insurance. Unless and until patients or hospitals are willing and legally able to use ChatGPT as a replacement for a doctor (unwise), ChatGPT is not about to eat any doctor's lunch.

Not OP, but I think this makes the point, not argues against it. Something has come along that can supplant Google for a wide range of things. And it comes without ads (for now). It’s an opportunity to try a different business model, and if they succeed at that then it’s off to the races indeed.

It makes one point: that LLMs are useful.

The other point is still suspect: that LLMs will ever scale to AGI.

Which specifically means reliability and explainability for higher-order thinking.

The writing is on the wall that LLMs are going to automate failure-tolerant work.

But the rub there is that failure-tolerant work is also tolerant of less than state of the art, cost-optimized LLMs.

Which leaves OpenAI where? AGI or bust.

And I wouldn't take that bet, when MS, Google, and Apple are alternative options.

Doctors weren't paying for Google either. If ChatGPT or other LLM AIs play that same role, the OP remains correct.

When the wright brothers made their plane they didn't expect today that there are thousands of planes flying at a time.

When the Internet was developed they didn't imagine the world wide Web.

When cars started to get popular people still thought there would be those who are going to stick with horses.

I think you're right on the AI we're just on the cusp of it and it'll be a hundred times bigger than we can imagine.

Back when oil was discovered and started to be used it was about equal to 500 laborers now automated. One AI computer with some video cards are now worth x number of knowledge workers. That never stop working as long as the electricity keeps flowing.

They did actually imagine the World Wide Web at the time of developing the first computer networks. This is one of the most obvious outcomes of a system of networked devices.

Even five years into this "AI revolution," the boosters haven't been able to paint a coherent picture of what AI could reasonably deliver – and they've delivered even less.

Lol they are not using ChatGPT for the full diagnosis. They're used in steps of double checking knowledge like drug interactions and such. If you're gonna speak on something like this in a vague manner I'd suggest you google this stuff first. I can tell you for certain that that part in particular is a highly inaccurate statement.

> Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients

This makes me want to invest in malpractice lawyers, not OpenAI

The lawyers will be obsolete far faster than the doctors

People aren't saying that AI as a tool is going to go bust. Instead, people are saying that this practice of spending 100s of millions, or even billions of dollars on training massive models is going bust.

AI isn't going to be the world changing, AGI, that was sold to the public. Instead, it will simply be another B2B SaaS product. Useful, for sure. Even profitable for startups.

But "take over the world" good? Unlikely.

> Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients.

Oh we know: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11006786/

The article you posted describes a patient using ChatGPT to get a second opinion from what their doctor told them, not the doctor themself using ChatGPT.

The article could just as easily be about “Delayed diagnosis of a transient ischemic attack caused by talking to some rando on Reddit” and it would be just as (non) newsworthy.

Yes. The answer is yes.

The world is changing and that is scary.

They made $4 billion last year, not really "little to no money". I agree it's not clear they can justify their valuation but it's certainly not a bubble.

But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.

Most of that 9 billion was spent on training new models and on staff. If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

> if they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable

OpenAI has claimed this. But Altman is a pathological liar. There are lots of ways of disguising operating costs as capital costs or R&D.

In a space that moves this fast and is defined by research breakthroughs, they’d be profitable for about 5 minutes.

Says literally every startup ever i.r.t. R&D/marketing/ad spend yet that's rarely reality.

But only if everyone else stopped improving models as well.

In this niche you can be irrellevant in months when your models drop behind.

> If they stopped spending money on R&D, they would already be profitable.

The news that they did that would make them lose most of their revenue pretty fast.

I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4.

OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.

There is a pretty significant different between “buy $9 for $4” and selling a service that costs $9 to build and run per year for $4 per year. Especially when some people think that service could be an absolute game changer for the species.

It’s ok to not buy into the vision or think it’s impossible. But it’s a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced comparison, especially when we’re talking about a brand new technology - who knows what the cost optimization levers are. Who knows what the market will bear after a few more revs.

When the iPhone first came out, it was too expensive, didn’t do enough, and many people thought it was a waste of apples time when they should be making music players.

> When the iPhone first came out, it was too expensive, didn’t do enough, and many people thought it was a waste of apples time when they should be making music players.

This comparison is always used when people are trying to hype something. For every "iPhone" there are thousands of failures

It's a commodity technology and VCs are investing as if this were still a winner-takes-all play. It's obviously not, if there were any doubt about that, Deepseek's R1 release should have made it obvious.

> But it’s a shallow dismissal to make the unnuanced comparison, especially when we’re talking about a brand new technology - who knows what the cost optimization levers are. Who knows what the market will bear after a few more revs.

You're acting as-if OpenAI is still the only player in this space. OpenAI has plenty of competitors who can deliver similar models for cheaper. Gemini 2.5 is an excellent and affordable model and Google has a substantially better capacity to scale because of a multi-year investment in its TPUs.

Whatever first mover advantage OpenAI had has been quickly eliminated, they've lost a lot of their talent, and the chief hypothesis they used to attract the capital they've raised so far is utterly wrong. VCs would be mad to be continuing to pump money into OpenAI just to extend their runway -- at 5 Bln losses per year they need to actually consider cost, especially when their frontier releases are only marginal improvements over competitors.

... this is a bubble despite the promise of the technology and anyone paying attention can see it. For all of the dumb money employed in this space to make it out alive, we'll have to at least see a fairly strong form of AGI developed, and by that point the tech will be threatening the general economic stability of the US consumer.

> I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4

I feel like people overuse this criticism. That's not the only way that companies with a lot of revenue lose money. And this isn't at all what OpenAI is doing, at least from their customers' perspective. It's not like customers are subscribing to ChatGPT simply because it gives them something they were going to buy anyway for cheaper.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

But he said he was doing it just for love!! [1]

1: https://www.techpolicy.press/transcript-senate-judiciary-sub...

Sounds a lot like "Google+ will catch Facebook in no time".

OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the default chatbot for most of the planet.

Everybody else like you describe is trying to add some AI crap behind a button on a congested UI.

B2B market will stay open but OpenAI has certainly not peaked yet.

Facebook had immense network effects working for it back then.

What network effect does OpenAI have? Far as I can tell, moving from OpenAI to Gemini or something else is easy. It’s not sticky at all. There’s no “my friends are primarily using OpenAI so I am too” or anything like that.

So again, I ask, what makes it sticky?

OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook.

They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.

I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to be the king of chatbots forever. Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.

Apple had the opportunity to do something really great here. With Siri's deep device integration on one hand and Apple's willingness to force 3rd-party devs to do the right thing for users on the other, they could have had a compelling product that nobody else could copy, but it seems like they're not willing to go that route, mostly for privacy, antitrust and internal competency reasons, in that order. Google is on the right track and might get something similar (although not as polished as typical Apple) done, but Android's mindshare among tech-savvy consumers isn't great enough for it to get traction.

> Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.

This will happen, and it won't be another model which Open AI can't copy, it'll be products.

I don't doubt OpenA I can create the better models but they're no moat if they're not in better products. Right now the main product is chat, which is easy enough to build, but as integrations get deeper how can OpenAI actually ensure it keeps traffic?

Case in point, Siri. Apple allows you to use ChatGPT with Siri right now. If Apple chooses so, they could easily remove that setting. On most devices ChatGPT lives within the confines of an app or the browser. A phone with deep AI integration is arguably a fantastic product— much better than having to open an app and chat with a model. How quickly could Open AI build a phone that's as good as those of the big phone companies today?

To draw a parallel— Google Assistant has long been better than Siri, but to use Siri you don't have to install an app. I've used both Android and iOS, and every time I'm on iPhone I switch back to Siri because in spite of being a worse assistant, it's overall a better product. It integrates well with the rest of the phone, because Apple has chosen to not allow any other voice assistant integrate deeply with the rest of the phone.

Coca Cola does insane amounts of advertising to maintain their position in the mind of the consumer. I don't think it is as sticky as you say it is for OpenAi

Does Google not have brand recognition and Consumer good will? We might read all sorts of deep opinions of Google on HN, but I think Search and Chrome market share speak themselves. For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.

> For the average consumer, I'm skeptical that OpenAI carries much weight.

My friend teaches at a Catholic girls’ high school and based on what he tells me, everyone knows about ChatGPT, both staff and students. He just had to fail an entire class on an assignment because they all used it to write a book summary (which many of them royally screwed up because there’s another book with a nearly identical title).

It’s all anecdotal and whatnot but I don’t think many of them even know about Claude or Gemini, while ChatGPT has broad adoption within education. (I’m far less clear on how much mindshare it has within the general population though)

> who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.

...Until their employer forces them to use Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or whatever, because that's what they pay for and what integrates into their enterprise stack. And the new employee shrugs and accepts it.

Just like people are forced to use web Office and Microsoft Teams, and start prefering them over Google Docs and Slack? I don't think so.

> Just like people are forced to use web Office and Microsoft Teams, and start prefering them over Google Docs and Slack? I don't think so

...yes. Office is the market leader. Slack has between a fifth and a fourth of the market. Coca-Cola's products have like 70% market share in the American carbonated soft-drink market [1].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/060415/how-much-glo...

Yep, I mostly interact with these AIs through Cursor. When I want to ask it a question, there's a little dropdown box and I can select openai/anthropic/deepseek whatever model. It's as easy as that to switch.

Most of my exposure to LLMs has been through GitHub's Copilot, which has that same interface.

Yeah but I remember when search first started getting integrated with the browser and the "switch search engine" thing was significantly more prominent. Then Google became the default and nobody ever switched it and the rest is history.

So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?

I have my own answers for these, and I'm sure all the smart people figuring out strategy at Open AI have thought about similar things.

It's not clear if Open AI will be able to overcome this commodification issue (personally, I think they won't), but I don't think it's impossible, and there is prior art for at least some of the pages in this playbook.

Yes, I think people severely underrate the data flywheel effects that distribution gives an ML-based product, which is what Google was and ChatGPT is. It is also an extremely capital-intensive industry to be in, so even if LLMs are commoditized, it will be to the benefit of a few players, and barring a sustained lead by any one company over the others, I suspect the first mover will be very difficult to unseat.

Google is doing well for the moment, but OpenAI just closed a $40 billion round. Neither will be able to rest for a while.

Yeah, a very interesting metric to know would be how many tokens of prompt data (that is allowed to be used for training) the different products are seeing per day.

> So the interesting question is: How did that happen? Why wasn't Google search an easily swapped commodity? Or if it was, how did they win and defend their default status? Why didn't the existing juggernauts at the time (Microsoft) beat them at this game?

Maybe the big amount of money they've given to Apple which is their direct competitor in the mobile space. Also good amount of money given to Firefox, which is their direct competitor in the browser space, alongside side Safari from Apple.

Most people don't care about the search engine. The default is what they will used unless said default is bad.

I don't think my comment implied that the answers to these questions aren't knowable! And indeed, I agree that the deals to pay for default status in different channels is a big part of that answer.

So then apply that to Open AI. What are the distribution channels? Should they be paying Cursor to make them the default model? Or who else? Would that work? If not, why not? What's different?

My intuition is that this wouldn't work for them. I think if this "pay to be default" strategy works for someone, it will be one of their deeper pocketed rivals.

But I also don't think this was the only reason Google won search. In my memory, those deals to pay to be the default came fairly long after they had successfully built the brand image as the best search engine. That's how they had the cash to afford to pay for this.

A couple years ago, I thought it seemed likely that Open AI would win the market in that way, by being known as the clear best model. But that seems pretty unclear now! There are a few different models that are pretty similarly capable at this point.

Essentially, I think the reason Google was able to win search whereas the prospects look less obvious for Open AI is that they just have stronger competition!

To me, it just highlights the extent to which the big players at the time of Google's rise - Microsoft, Yahoo, ... Oracle maybe? - really dropped the ball on putting up strong competition. (Or conversely, Google was just further ahead of its time.)

From talking to people, the average user relies on memories and chat history, which is not easy to migrate. I imagine that's the part of the strategy to keep people from hopping model providers.

Google, MS, Apple and Meta are all quite capable of generating such a history for new users, if they'd like to.

That sounds eminently solvable.

Brand counts for a lot

Google is one of the most valuable brands ever. Everyone knows it. It is even used for "searching the web" openai is not that strong of a brand

I think for the general public ChatGPT is a much stronger brand than OpenAI itself.

Google is a far bigger brand than ChatGPT and OpenAI combined.

No one has a deep emotional connection with OpenAI that would impede switching.

At best they have a bit of cheap tribalism that might prevent some incurious people who don't care much about using the best tools noticing that they aren't.

Defacto victory.

Facebook wasn't some startup when Google+ entered the scene; they were already cash flow positive, and had roughly 30% ads market share.

OpenAI is still operating at a loss despite having 50+% of the chatbot "market". There is no easy path to victory for them here.

Facebook couldnt be overtaken because of network effects. What network effects are there to a chatbot.

If you look at Gemini, I know people using it daily.

IMHO "ChatGPT the default chatbot" is a meaningful but unstable first-mover advantage. The way things are apparently headed, it seems less like Google+ chasing FB, more like Chrome eating IE + NN's lunch.

OpenAI is a relatively unknown company outside of the tech bubble. I told my own mom to install Gemini on her phone because she's heard of Google and is more likely going to trust Google with whatever info she dumps into a chat. I can’t think of a reason she would be compelled to use ChatGPT instead.

Consumer brand companies such as Coca Cola and Pepsi spend millions on brand awareness advertising just to be the “default” in everyone’s heads. When there’s not much consequence choosing one option over another, the one you’ve heard of is all that matters

I know a single person who uses ChatGPT daily, and only because their company has an enterprise subscription.

My impression is that Claude is a lot more popular – and it’s the one I use myself, though as someone else said the vast majority of people, even in software engineering, don’t use AI often at all.

> OpenAI has been on a winning streak that makes ChatGPT the default chatbot for most of the planet

OpenAI has like 10 to 20% market share [1][2]. They're also an American company whose CEO got on stage with an increasingly-hated world leader. There is no universe in which they keep equal access to the world's largest economies.

[1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/

[2] https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-statistics....

Social media has the benefit of network effects which is a pretty formidable moat.

This moat is non-existent when it comes to Open AI.

That reminds me of the Dictator movie.

All dissidents went into Little Wadyia.

When the Dictator himself visited it, he started to fake his name by copying the signs and names he saw on the walls. Everyone knew what he was.

Internet social networks are like that.

Now, this moat thing. That's hilarious.

The comparison of Chrome and IE is much more apt, IMO, because the deciding factor as other mentioned for social media is network effects, or next-gen dopamine algorithms (TikTok). And that's unique to them.

For example, I'd never suggest that e.g. MS could take on TikTok, despite all the levers they can pull, and being worth magnitudes more. No chance.

Most of the planet doesn’t use chat bots at all.

Facebook fundamentally had network effects.

That's not at all the same thing: social media has network effects that keep people locked in because their friends are there. Meanwhile, most of the people I know using LLMs cancel and resubscribe to Chat-GPT, Claude and Gemini constantly based on whatever has the most buzz that month. There's no lock-in whatsoever in this market, which means they compete on quality, and the general consensus is that Gemini 2.5 is currently winning that war. Of course that won't be true forever, but the point is that OpenAI isn't running away with it anymore.

And nobody's saying OpenAI will go bankrupt, they'll certainly continue to be a huge player in this space. But their astronomical valuation was based on the initial impression that they were the only game in town, and it will come down now that that's no longer true. Hence why Altman wants to cash out ASAP.

Google+ absolutely would have won, and it was clear to me that somebody at Google decided they didn't want to be in the business of social networking. It was killed deliberately, it didn't just peter out.

Even Alibaba is releasing some amazing models these days. Qwen 3 is pretty remarkable, especially considering the variety of hardware the variants of it can run on.

ask 10 people on the street about chatgpt or gemini and see which one they know

Now switch chatgpt and gemini on them and see if they notice.

Ask 10 people on the street in 2009 about IE and Chrome and ask which one they knew.

The names don't even matter when everything is baked in.

On the other hand...If you asked, 5-6-7 years ago, 100 people which of the following they used:

Slack? Zoom? Teams?

I'm sure you'd get a somewhat uniform distribution.

Ask the same today, and I'd bet most will say Teams. Why Teams? Because it comes with office / windows, so that's what most people will use.

Same logic goes for the AI / language models...which one are people going to use? The ones that are provided as "batteries included" in whatever software or platform they use the most. And for the vast majority of regular people / workers, it is going to be something by microsoft / google / whatever.

That's the wrong question. See how many people know Google vs. ChatGPT. As popular as ChatGPT is, Google's the stronger brand.

thats just brand recognition.

The fact that people know Coca Cola doesnt mean they drink it.

It doesn’t?

That name recognition made Coca Cola into a very successful global corporation.

About 95% of people know the Coca Cola brand, about 70% of soda drinkers in the US drink one of its sodas, and about 40% of all people in the US drink it.

Knowing and using are not the same thing.

Your numbers indicate to me their name recognition drives a big part of their value.

40% of the US is a huge customer base.

But whether the competition will emerge as Pepsi or as RC-Cola is still tbd.

or that they would drink it if a well designed, delicious, but no HFCS nor sugar alternative were marketed with funding

The real money is for enterprise use (via APIs), so public perception is not as crucial as for a consumer product.

Ask them about Google or OpenAI and...

Agreed on Google dominance. Gemini models from this year are significantly more helpful than anything from OAI.. and they're being handed out for free to anyone with a Google account.

Makes for a good underdog story! But OpenAI is dominating and will continue to do so. They have the je ne sais quoi. It’s therefore laborious to speak to it, but it manifests in self-reinforcing flywheels of talent, capital, aesthetic, popular consciousness, and so forth. But hey, Bing still makes Microsoft billions a year, so there will be other winners. Underestimating focused breakout leaders in new rapidly growing markets is as cliche as those breakouts ultimately succeeding, so even if we go into an AI winter it’s clear who comes out on top the other side. A product has never been adopted this quickly, ever. AGI or not, skepticism that merely points to conventional resource imbalances misses the big picture and such opinions age poorly. Doesn’t have to be obvious only in hindsight if you actually examine the current record of disruptive innovation.

at least 6-9 months too late

> SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race.

OpenAI trained GPT-4.1 and 4.5—both originally intended to be GPT-5 but they were considered disappointments, which is why they were named differently. Did they really believe that scaling the number of parameters would continue indefinitely without diminishing returns? Not only is there no moat, but there's also no reasonable path forward with this architecture for an actual breakthrough.

Sorry but perhaps you haven't looked at the actual numbers.

Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+.

> Market share of OpenAI is like 90%+

Source? I've seen 10 to 20% [1][2].

[1] https://iot-analytics.com/leading-generative-ai-companies/

[2] https://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/stats/openai-statistics....

Hmm ...

I probably need to clarify what I'm talking about, so that peeps like @JumpCrisscross can get a better grasp of it.

I do not mean the total market share of the category of businesses that could be labeled as "AI companies", like Microsoft or NVIDIA, on your first link.

I will not talk about your second link because it does not seem to make sense within the context of this conversation (zero mentions or references to market share).

What I mean is:

* The main product that OpenAI sells is AI models (GPT-4o, etc...)

* OpenAI does not make hardware. OpenAI is not in the business of cloud infrastructure. OpenAI is not in the business of selling smartphones. A comparison between OpenAI and any of those companies would only make sense for someone with a very casual understanding of this topic. I can think of someone, perhaps, who only used ChatGPT a couple times and inferred it was made by Apple because it was there on its phone. This discussion calls for a deeper understanding of what OpenAI is.

* Other examples of companies that sell their own AI models, and thus compete directly with OpenAI in the same market that OpenAI operates by taking a look at their products and services, are Anthropic (w/ Claude), Google (w/ Gemini) and some others ones like Meta and Mistral with open models.

* All those companies/models, together, make up some market that you can put any name you want to it (The AI Model Market TM)

That is the market I'm talking about, and that is the one that I estimated to be 90%+ which was pretty much on point, as usual :).

1: https://gs.statcounter.com/ai-chatbot-market-share

2: https://www.ctol.digital/news/latest-llm-market-share-mar-20...

> that is the market that I'm talking about, and that is the one that I (correctly, as usual) estimated to be around 90% [1][2]

Your second source doesn’t say what it’s measuring and disclaims itself as from its “‘experimental era’ — a beautiful mess of enthusiasm, caffeine, and user-submitted chaos.” Your first link only measures chatbots.

ChatGPT is a chatbot. OpenAI sells AI models, including via ChatGPT. Among chatbots, sure, 84% per your source. (Not “90%+,” as you stated.) But OpenAI makes more than chatbots, and in the broader AI model market, its lead is far from 80+ percent.

TL; DR It is entirely wrong to say the “market share of OpenAI is like 90%+.”

[1] https://firstpagesage.com/reports/top-generative-ai-chatbots...

Sorry, I was off by 6% and you're right, I'm usually way more precise in my estimates.

>10%-20%

Lmao, not even in Puchal wildest dreams.

> I'm usually way more precise in my estimates

One, you suggested OP had not “looked at the actual numbers.” That implies you have. If you were just guessing, that’s misleading.

Two, you misquoted (and perhaps misunderstand) a statistic that doesn’t match your claim. Even in your last comment, you defined the market as “companies that sell their own AI models” before doubling down on the chatbot-only figure.

> not even in Puchal wildest dreams

Okay, so what’s your source? Because so far you’ve put forward two sources, a retracted one and one that measures a single product that you went ahead and misquoted.

In 2006 IE's market share was higher than current OpenAI's market share.

[flagged]

I have no problem with 'OpenAI', so much as the individual running it and, more generally, rich financiers making the world worse in every capitalizable way and even some they can't capitalize on.

Come on, at least provide your argument, we're curious! I've brought the bear case, so what's your bull case? :)

And yet the analysis is spot on. Gemini and Claude are both clearly better, today.

there are plenty of things that I simply cannot use Gemini for

I asked Gemini today to replace the background of a very simple logo and it refused. ChatGPT did it no problem (though it did take a long time because apparently lots of people were doing image generation).

I guess Gemini just refused because of a poor filter for sensitive content. But still, it was annoying.

Very curious - what is it besides image generation?

Literally the founder of Y Combinator all but outright called Sam Altman a conniving dickbag. That’s the consensus view advanced by the very man who made him.

This seems like misinformation, are you talking about how Sam left YC after OpenAI took off? What PG said was "we didn't want him to leave, just to choose one or the other"[1].

[1]: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

"You could parachute [Sam] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."

http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

That says PG thinks Sam is clever. I don't think there's any moral judgement there. The statement I posted suggests PG likes Sam and would love to keep working with him.

Google is pretty far behind. They have random one off demos and they beat benchmarks yes, but try to use Google’s AI stuff for real work and it falls apart really fast.

People are using Gemini for real work. I prefer Claude myself, but Gemini is as good (or alternatively: as bad) as OpenAI’s models.

The only thing OpenAI has right now is the ChatGPT name, which has become THE word for modern LLMs among lay people.

That's not what early adopter numbers are showing. Even the poll from r/openai a few days ago show Gemini 2.5 with nearly 3x more votes than o3 (and far beyond Claude): https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1k67bya/what_is_cur...

Anecdotally, I've switched to Gemini as my daily driver for complex coding tasks. I prefer Claude's cleaner code, but it is less capable at difficult problems, and Anthropic's servers are unreliable.

Define “real work”

The intro sounds awfully familiar...

> Sam’s Letter to Employees.

> OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be.

Where did I hear something like that before...

> Founders' IPO Letter

> Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.

I wonder if it's intentional or perhaps some AI-assisted regurgitation prompted by "write me a successful letter to introduce a new corporate structure of a tech company".

"Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn’t in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler."

OpenAI admitting that they're not going to win?

Imagine having a mission of “ensure[ing] that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity” while also believing that it can only be trusted in the hands of the few

> A lot of people around OpenAI in the early days thought AI should only be in the hands of a few trusted people who could “handle it”.

He's very clearly stating that trusting AI to a few hands was an old, naiive idea that they have evolved from. Which establishes their need to keep evolving as the technology matures.

There is a lot to criticize about OpenAI and Sama, but this isn't it.

To the benefit of OpenAI. I think LLMs would still exist, but we wouldn't have access to them.

Whether they are a net positive or a net negative is arguable. If it's a net negative, then unleashing them to the masses was maybe the danger itself.

Is there a sport where the actual sport is moving goalposts?

There is the game of Nomic where a turn involves proposing a rule change.

I wonder if this meets the requirements set by the recent round of outside investors?

Not according to Microsoft: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-satya-nadella-rift-30...

I don't see any comments about the PBC in that article (archive link: https://archive.is/cPLWd)

From least to most speculative:

* The nonprofit is staying the same, and will continue to control the for-profit entity OpenAI created to raise capital

* The for-profit is changing from a capped-profit LLC to a PBC like Anthropic and Xai

* These changes have been at least tacitly agreed to by the attorneys general of California and Delaware

* The non-profit won’t be the largest shareholder in the PBC (likely Microsoft) but will retain control (super voting shares?)

* OpenAI thinks there will be multiple labs that achieve AGI, although possibly on different timelines

Another possibility is that OpenAL thinks _none_ of the labs will achieve AGI in a meaningful timeframe so they are trying to cash out with whatever you want to call the current models. There will only be one or two of those before investors start looking at the incredible losses.

I'm fairly sure that OpenAI has never really believed in AGI - it's like with Uber and "self driving cabs" - it's a lure for the investors.

It's just that this bait has a shelf life and it looks like it's going to expire soon.

The least speculative: PPUs will be converted from capped profit to unlimited profit equity shares at the benefit of PPU holders and at the expense of OpenAI the nonprofit. This is why they are doing it.

I wonder which non-profit will be looted next.

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity

They already fight transparency in this space to prevent harmful bias. Why should I believe anything else they have to say if they refuse to take even small steps toward transparency and open auditing?

Matt Levine on OpenAI's weird capped return structure in November 2023:

And the investors wailed and gnashed their teeth but it’s true, that is what they agreed to, and they had no legal recourse. And OpenAI’s new CEO, and its nonprofit board, cut them a check for their capped return and said “bye” and went back to running OpenAI for the benefit of humanity. It turned out that a benign, carefully governed artificial superintelligence is really good for humanity, and OpenAI quickly solved all of humanity’s problems and ushered in an age of peace and abundance in which nobody wanted for anything or needed any Microsoft products. And capitalism came to an end.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...

I think the main issue is they accidentally created an incredible consumer brand with ChatGPT. They should sell that asset to World.

The recent flap over ChatGPT's fluffery/flattery/glazing of users doesn't bode well for the direction that OpenAI is headed in. Someone at the outfit appeared to think that giving users a dopamine hit would increase time-spent-on-app or some other metric - and that smells like contempt for the intelligence of the user base and a manipulative approach designed not to improve the quality of the output, but to addict the user population to the ChatGPT experience. Your own personal yes-person to praise everything you do, how wonderful. Perfect for writing the scripts for government cabinent ministers to recite when the grand poobah-in-chief comes calling, I suppose.

What it really says is that if a user wants to control the interaction and get the useful responses, direct programmatic calls to the API that control the system prompt are going to be needed. And who knows how much longer even that will be allowed? As ChatGPT reports,

> "OpenAI has updated the ChatGPT UI (especially in GPT-4-turbo and ChatGPT Plus environments) to no longer expose the full system prompt or baseline prompt directly."

Can't wait to hear Ed Zitron's take on this

The explosion of PBC structured corps recently has me thinking it must just be a tax loophole at this point. I can't possibly imagine there is any meaningful enforcement around any of its restrictions or guidelines.

Not a loophole as they pay taxes (unlike non-profits) but a fig leaf to cover commercial activity with some feel-good label. The real purpose of PBC is the legal protection it may afford to the company from shareholders unhappy with less than maximal profit generation. It gives the board some legal space to do some good if they choose to but has no mandate like real non-profits which get a tax break for creating a public good or service, a tax break that can be withdrawn if they do not annually prove that public benefit to the IRS.

PBCs don’t get special tax treatment. As far as I know they’re taxed exactly the same as typical C or S corps.

It’s not a tax thing, it’s a power thing. PBCs transfer power from shareholders to management as long as management can say they were acting for a public benefit.

AI actually wrote this article for them which is the craziest thing

Here’s a breakdown of the *key structural changes*, and an analysis of *potential risks or concerns*:

---

## *What Has Changed*

### 1. *OpenAI’s For-Profit Arm is Becoming a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)*

* *Before:* OpenAI LP (limited partnership with a “capped-profit” model). * *After:* OpenAI LP becomes a *Public Benefit Corporation* (PBC).

*Implications:*

* A PBC is still a *for-profit* entity, but legally required to balance shareholder value with a declared public mission. * OpenAI’s mission (“AGI that benefits all humanity”) becomes part of the legal charter of the new PBC.

---

### 2. *The Nonprofit Remains in Control and Gains Equity*

* The *original OpenAI nonprofit* will *continue to control* the new PBC and will now also *hold equity* in it. * The nonprofit will use this equity stake to fund “mission-aligned” initiatives in areas like health, education, etc.

*Implications:*

* This strengthens the nonprofit’s influence and potentially its resources. * But the balance between nonprofit oversight and for-profit ambition becomes more delicate as stakes rise.

---

### 3. *Elimination of the “Capped-Profit” Structure*

* The old “capped-return” model (investors could only make \~100x on investments) is being dropped. * Instead, OpenAI will now have a *“normal capital structure”* where everyone holds unrestricted equity.

*Implications:*

* This likely makes OpenAI more attractive to investors. * However, it also increases the *incentive to prioritize commercial growth*, which could conflict with mission-first priorities.

---

## *Potential Negative Implications*

### 1. *Increased Commercial Pressure*

* Moving from a capped-profit model to unrestricted equity introduces *stronger financial incentives*. * This could push the company toward *more aggressive monetization*, potentially compromising safety, openness, or alignment goals.

### 2. *Accountability Trade-offs*

* While the nonprofit “controls” the PBC, actual accountability and oversight may be limited if the nonprofit and PBC leadership overlap (as has been a concern before). * Past board turmoil in late 2023 (Altman's temporary ousting) highlighted how difficult it is to hold leadership accountable under complex structures.

### 3. *Risk of “Mission Drift”*

* Over time, with more funding and commercial scale, *stakeholder interests* (e.g., major investors or partners like Microsoft) might influence product and policy decisions. * Even with the mission enshrined in a PBC charter, *profit-driven pressures could subtly shape choices*—especially around safety disclosures, model releases, or regulatory lobbying.

---

## *What Remains the Same (According to the Letter)*

* OpenAI’s *mission* stays unchanged. * The *nonprofit retains formal control*. * There’s a stated commitment to safety, open access, and democratic use of AI.

You missed the part where OpenAI the nonprofit gives away the value that’s between capped profit PPUs and unlimited profit equity shares, enriching current PPUs at the expense of the nonprofit. Surely, this is illegal.

I agree that this is simply Altman extending his ability to control, shape and benefit from OpenAI. Yes, this is clearly (further) subverting the original intent under which the org was created - and that's unfortunate. But in terms of impact on the world, or even just AI safety, I'm not sure the governance of OpenAI matters all that much anymore. The "governance" wasn't that great after the first couple years and OpenAI hasn't been "open" since long before the board spat.

More crucially, since OpenAI's founding and especially over the past 18 months, it's grown increasingly clear that AI leadership probably won't be dominated by one company, progress of "frontier models" is stalling while costs are spiraling, and 'Foom' AGI scenarios are highly unlikely anytime soon. It looks like this is going to be a much longer, slower slog than some hoped and others feared.

Does anybody outside OAI still think of them as anything other that a "normal" for-profit company?

If you can move from capped profit to unlimited profit, it was never actually capped profit, just a fig leaf

Ed Zitron's going to have a field day with this ...

abc.xyz: "Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one"

sam altman: "OpenAI is not a normal company and never will be."

Hmmm

Again?

I'm not gonna get caught in the details, I'm just going to assume this is legalese cognitive dissonance to avoid saying "we want this to stop being an NFP because we want the profits."

>current complex capped-profit structure

Is OpenAI making a profit?

Can you commit to a "swords into ploughshares" goal?

We know it's a sword. And there's war, yadda yadda. However, let's do the cultivating thing instead.

What other AI players we need to convince?

Still waiting for o3-Pro.

This sounds like a good middle ground between going full capitalism and non-profit. This way they can still raise money and also have the same mission, but a weakened one. You can't have everything.

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.

Then why is it paywalled? Why are you making/have made people across the world sift through the worst material on offer by the wide uncensored Internet to train your LLMs? Why do you have a for-profit LLC operating under a non-profit, or for that matter, a "Public Benefit Corporation" that has to answer to shareholders at all?

Related to that:

> or the needs for hundreds of billions of dollars of compute to train models and serve users.

How does that serve humanity? Redirecting billions of dollars to fancy autocomplete who's power demands strain already struggling electrical grids and offset the gains of green energy worldwide?

> A lot of people around OpenAI in the early days thought AI should only be in the hands of a few trusted people who could “handle it”.

No, we thought your plagiarism machine was a disgusting abuse of the public square, and to be clear, this criticism would've been easily handled by simply requesting people opt-in to have their material used for AI training. But we all know why you didn't do that, don't we Sam.

> It will of course not be all used for good, but we trust humanity and think the good will outweigh the bad by orders of magnitude.

Well so far, we've got vulnerable, lonely people being scammed on Facebook, we've got companies charging subscriptions for people to sext their chatbots, we've got various states using it to target their opposition for military intervention, and the White House may have used it to draft the dumbest basis for a trade war in human history. Oh and fake therapists too.

When's the good kick in?

> We believe this is the best path forward—AGI should enable all of humanity^1 to benefit each other.

^1 who subscribe to our services

> Then why is it paywalled? Why are you making/have made people across the world sift through the worst material on offer by the wide uncensored Internet to train your LLMs?

Because they're concerned about AI use the same way Google is concerned about your private data.

[removed]

No, it's good that you feel this. Don't give up on tech, protest.

I've been feeling for some time now that we're sort of in the Vietnam War era of the tech industry.

I feel a strong urge to have more "ok, so where do we go from here?" and "what does a tech industry that promotes net good actually look like?" internal discourse in the community of practice, and some sort of ethical social contract for software engineering.

The open source movement has been fabulous and sometimes adjacent to or one aspect of these concerns, but really we need a movement for socially conscious and responsible software.

We need a tech counter-culture. We had one once, but now we need one.

Not all non-profits are doomed. It's natural that the biggest companies will be the ones who have growth and profit as their primary goal.

But there are still plenty of mission-focused technology non-profits out there. Many of which have lasted decades. For example: Linux Foundation, Internet Archive, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Free Software Foundation, and Python Software Foundation.

Don't get me wrong, I'm also disappointed in the direction and actions of big tech, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the non-profit foundations. They aren't worth a trillion dollars, however they are still doing good and important work.

amen brother

Lots of words to say OpenAI will remain an SABC (Sam Altman Benefit Corporation)

"We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from..." [CHIEF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS IN CALIFORNIA AND DELAWARE]

This indicates that they didn't actually want the nonprofit to retain control and they're only doing it because they were forced to by threats of legal action.

Commercial entities aren’t social beings. They’re asocial goal-maximizers.

Threats of legal action are among the only behavioral signals it can act on while staying in its mandate. Others include regulation and the market.

This is all operating as it was designed, by humans, multiple economic cycles ago.

When I read that, I was actually fairly surprised about how brazen they were about who they called on for this action. They simply just said it.

> We are committed to this path of democratic AI.

So were do I vote? How do I became a candidate to be a representative or a delegate of voters? I assume every single human is eligible for both, as OpenAI serves the humanity?

Democratic AI but we don’t want it regulated by any democratic process

Democratic People's Republic of AI

I wonder if democracy is some kind of corporate speech homonym of some totally different concept I'm familiar with. Perhaps it's even an interesting linguistic case where a word is a homonym of its antonym?

Edit: also apparently known as contronym.

> wonder if democracy is some kind of corporate speech

It generally means broadening access to something. Finance loves democratising access to stupid things, for example.

> word is a homonym of its antonym?

Inflammable in common use.

"democratize" has been often abused: https://intage.us/articles/words/democratize/

Path of, so it's getting there

Via a temporary vanguard board composed of the most conscious and disciplined profit maximizers.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks were also committed to the path of fully democratic government. As soon as the people are ready. In the interim we'll make all the decisions.

They are committed, they didn't say they pushed yet. Or will ever.

Carcinisation in action:

     free (foss) -> non-profit -> capped-profit -> public benefits corporation -> (you guessed it)

No, this only happens if:

1) You're successful.

2) You mess up checks-and-balances at the beginning.

OpenAI did both.

Personally, I think at some point, the AGs ought to take over and push it back into a non-profit format. OAI undermines the concept of a non-profit.

With 2, the real problem is that approximately 0% of the OpenAI employees actually believed in the mission. Pretty much every single one of them signed the letter to the board demanding that if the company's existence ever comes into conflict with humanity's survival, the company's existence comes first.

Turns out the non profit structure wasn't very profitable

There's really nothing "open" about this company. If they want to be, then:

(1) be transparent about exactly which data was collected for the model

(2) release all the source code

If you want to benefit humanity, then put it under a strong copyleft license with no CLA. Simple.

They would do this if their mission was what you wish it was. But it isn't, so they won't.

Arguments by semantics are always tiresome.

what exactly do you think the name OpenAI is supposed to evoke?

Does anyone truly believe Musk had benevolent intentions? But before we even evaluate the substance of that claim, we must ask whether he has standing to make it. In his court filing, Musk uses the word "nonprofit" 111 times, yet fails to explain how reverting OpenAI to a nonprofit structure would save humanity, elevate the public interest, or mitigate AI’s risks. The legal brief offers no humanitarian roadmap, no governance proposal, and no evidence that Musk has the authority to dictate the trajectory of an organization he holds no equity in. It reads like a bait and switch — full of virtue-signaling, devoid of actionable virtue. And he never had a contract or an agreement for with OpenAI to keep it a non-profit.

Musk claimed Fraud, but never asked for his money back in the brief. Could it be his intentions were to limit OpenAI to donations thereby sucking the oxygen out of the venture capital space to fund Xai's Grok?

Musk claimed he donated $100mil, later in a CNBC interview, he said $50-mil. TechCrunch suggests it was way less.

Speakingof humanitarian, how about this 600lbs Oxymoron in the room: A Boston University mathematician has now tracked an estimated 10,000 deaths linked to the Musk's destruction of USAID programs, many of which provided basic health services to vulnerable populations. He may have a death count on his reume in the coming year.

Non profits has regulation than publicly traded companies. Each quarterly filings is like a colonoscopy with Sorbonne Oxley rules etc. Non profits just file a tax statement. Did you know the Chirch of Scientology is a non-profit.

Replace Musk with "any billionaire."

He's a symptom of a problem. He's not actually the problem.

If you are a materialist, the laws of physics are the problem.

But to speak plainly, Musk is a complex figure, frequently problematic, and he often exacts a tool on the people around him. Part of this is attributable to his wealth, part to his particulars. When he goes into "demon mode", to use Walter Isaacson's phrase, you don't want to be in his way.

> If you are a materialist, the laws of physics are the problem.

I'm a citizen, the laws of politics are the problem.

> Musk is a complex figure

Hogwash. He's greedy. There's nothing complex about that.

> and he often exacts a tool on the people around him

Yea it's a one way transfer of wealth from them to him. The _literal_ definition of a "toll."

> When he goes into "demon mode"

When he decides to lie, cheat and steal? Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior?

> you don't want to be in his way.

Name a billionaire who's way you would _like_ to be in. Elon Musk literally stops existing tomorrow. A person who's name you don't currently know will become known and take his place.

His place needs to be removed. It's not a function of his "personality" or "particulars." That's just goofy "temporarily embarrassed billionaire" thinking.

> Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior?

> lionize: give a lot of public attention and approval to (someone); treat as a celebrity: modern athletes are lionized.

Where in my comment do I lionize Musk?

Please calm down. Please try to be charitable and curious rather than accusatory towards me.

> Where in my comment do I lionize Musk?

You attribute to personality what should be attributed to malice. You do this three times.

> Please calm down

I am perfectly calm.

> Please try to be charitable and curious rather than accusatory towards me.

In attempting to explain why my point of view has been misunderstood by you I also attempted to find a reason for it. I do not think my explanation makes you a bad person nor do I think you should be particularly confronted by it.

> In attempting to explain why my point of view has been misunderstood by you I also attempted to find a reason for it.

What have I misunderstood? Help me understand. What is the key point you want to make that you think I misunderstand?

>> (me) When he goes into "demon mode"

> When he decides to lie, cheat and steal? Why do you strain so hard to lionize this behavior?

I hope this is clear: I'm not defending Musk's actions. Above, I'm just using the phrase that Walter Isaacson uses: "demon mode". Have you read the book or watched an interview with Isaacson about it? The phrase is hardly flattering, and I certainly don't use it to lionize Musk. Is there some misunderstanding on this part?

>>>> (me) But to speak plainly, Musk is a complex figure, frequently problematic, and he often exacts a tool on the people around him. Part of this is attributable to his wealth, part to his particulars. When he goes into "demon mode", to use Walter Isaacson's phrase, you don't want to be in his way.

>> (me) Where in my comment do I lionize Musk?

> You attribute to personality what should be attributed to malice. You do this three times.

Please spell this out for me. Where are the three times I do this?

Also, let's step back. Is the core of this disagreement about trying to detect malice in Elon's head? Detecting malice is not easy. Malice may not even be present; many people rationalize actions in such a way so they feel like they are acting justly.

Even if we could detect "malice", wouldn't we want to assess what causes that malice? That's going to be tough to disentangle with him being on the Autism spectrum and also having various mental health struggles.

Along with most philosophers, I think free will (as traditionally understood) is an illusion. From my POV, attempting to blame Musk requires careful explanation. What do we mean? A short lapse of judgment? His willful actions? His intentions? His character? The overall condition of his brain? His upbringing? Which of these is Elon "in control of"? From the materialist POV, none.

From a social and legal POV, we usually draw lines somewhere. We don't want to defenestrate ethics or morality; we still have to find ways to live together. This requires careful thinking about justice: prevention, punishment, reintegration, etc. Overall, the focus shifts to policies that improve societal well-being. It doesn't help to pretend like people could have done otherwise given their situation. We _want_ people to behave better, so we should design systems to encourage that.

I dislike a huge part of what Musk has done, and I think more is likely to surface. Like we said earlier -- and I think we probably agree -- Musk is part of a system. Is he a cause or symptom? It depends on how you frame the problem.

This restructuring is essentially a sophisticated maneuver toward wealth and power maximization shrouded in altruistic language.

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OpenAI is busy rearranging the chairs while their competitors surpass them.

Yup. Haven't used an OpenAI model for anything in 6+ months now, except to check the latest one and confirm that it is still hilariously behind Google/Anthropic.

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Mmh am I the only one who has been offered to participate in a “comparison between 2 chatgpt versions”?

The newer version included sponsored products in its response. I thought that was quite effed up.

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I'm getting really tired of hearing about OpenAI "evolving".

Ok, but can you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? We're looking for curious conversation here, and this is not that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It seems like there are other comments that have the same amount of substance as mine, yet it looks like mine was the only one that was flagged.

Quite possibly! Consistency in moderation is impossible [1]. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here, and the explanation for most of these things is randomness (or the absence of time travel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43823271)

If you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at hn@ycombinator.com.

At the same time, though, we need you (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all commenters) to follow HN's rules regardless of what other commenters are doing.

Think of it like speeding tickets [2]. There are always lots of other drivers speeding just as bad (nay, worse) than you were, and yet it's always you who gets pulled over, right? Or at least it always feels that way.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Here's a critical summary:

Key Structure Changes:

- Abandoning the "capped profit" model (which limited investor returns) in favor of traditional equity structure - Converting for-profit LLC to Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) - Nonprofit remains in control but also becomes a major shareholder

Reading Between the Lines:

1. Power Play: The "nonprofit control" messaging appears to be damage control following previous governance crises. Heavy emphasis on regulator involvement (CA/DE AGs) suggests this was likely not entirely voluntary.

2. Capital Structure Reality: They need "hundreds of billions to trillions" for compute. The capped-profit structure was clearly limiting their ability to raise capital at scale. This move enables unlimited upside for investors while maintaining the PR benefit of nonprofit oversight.

3. Governance Complexity: The "nonprofit controls PBC but is also major shareholder" structure creates interesting conflicts. Who controls the nonprofit? Who appoints its board? These details are conspicuously absent.

4. Competition Positioning: Multiple references to "democratic AI" vs "authoritarian AI" and "many great AGI companies" signal they're positioning against perceived centralized control (likely aimed at competitors).

Red Flags:

- Vague details about actual control mechanisms - No specifics on nonprofit board composition or appointment process - Heavy reliance on buzzwords ("democratic AI") without concrete governance details - Unclear what specific powers the nonprofit retains besides shareholding

This reads like a classic Silicon Valley power consolidation dressed up in altruistic language - enabling massive capital raising while maintaining insider control through a nonprofit structure whose own governance remains opaque.

Was this AI generated?

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Random question, is anyone else unable to see a ‘select all’ on their iPhone?

I was trying to put all the text into gpt4 to see what it thought, but the select all function is gone.

Some websites do that to protect their text IP, which would be crazy to me if that’s what they did considering how their ai is built. Ha