This all seems so weird, and the list of Board members doesn't make this any easier to understand. Apart from the 3 insiders, there are 3 other board members. 2 of them seem complete no names and might not qualify for any important corporate board. In a for profit shareholders in theory control the board, in a non profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
Microsoft has zero ownership of the entity the board controls (the OpenAI nonprofit), and a for-profit firm having seats on a nonprofit board especially if it was because they invested in a for-profit subsidiary of the nonprofit would raise serious issues of the “nonprofit” being run for purposes incompatible with its status.
Sure; but its still weird that Microsoft agreed to the deal with the board in the state that it was; not just no board seat, but three absolute outsiders, two of them extremely unqualified. We may look back on their decision to buy 49% of OpenAI as a big misstep.
Wasn't it a Hail Mary for Microsoft? They're not doing anything else particularly earth shattering, and if this came out without them, they'd be even less relevant. If OpenAI fought this and won without them, Microsoft would have nothing to compete against Google and everyone else with.
Did Microsoft have any other route to AI relevance?
Sure, they could simply copy the GPT papers (as they are entirely public) and implement them inside their own products, as they are doing already with GitHub and Office. There is really no need to hang onto OpenAI's word.
There is one OpenAI board member who has an art degree and is part of some kind of cultish "singularity" spiritual/neo-religious thing. That individual has also never had a real job and is on the board of several other non-profits.
What the hell were they thinking? Just because you are a non-profit doesn't mean you should imitate other non-profits and put crazies on the board.
The only explanation I can find is that their importance went through a step function at the launch of ChatGPT, and before that it didn't matter who was a board member.
No, all native Californians are like this (this just replaces hippie Buddhism with hippie computer worship) and the singularity stuff is the reason OpenAI was founded in the first place. And the reason Elon is mad at them, because they pivoted from it.
Non profits too often can be uniquely bureaucratic, undertrained in governance and efficiency, and more tied to deeper personal interpretations or none at all and being open to bouts of oversimplification.
> I am not even sure of who really has control over things.
Honestly, this is the big problem with Big Non Profit (tm). The entire structure of non-profits is really meant for ladies clubs, Rotary groups, and your church down the street, not openai and ikea.
Ikea has the wildest legal structure, but yes, a lot of IKEA is technically owned by a couple of "nonprofits" which happen to pay out a lot of money to the Kamprad family.
> in a non-profit I am not even sure of who really has control over things
The board is in absolute control in a not-for-profit. The loophole is that some have bylaws that make ad-hoc board meetings and management change votes very difficult to call for non-operating board members, and it can take months to get a motion to fire the CEO up for a vote.
In some not-for-profits, the board often even manages to recruit and seat new board members. Some not-for-profits operate as membership associations, where the organization’s membership elects the board members to terms.
On the few not-for-profits where I was a board member, we started every meeting with a motion to retain the Executive Director (CEO). If the vote failed, so did the Executive Director.
The board does and they are not supposed to have a financial stake in the non-profit. Usually they just vote their friends on. Welcome to the loony tunes that is nonprofit management.
Clearly Microsoft staked its whole product roadmap on 4 random people with no financial skin in the game.
From Tom Perkins’s biography - after serving on boards both big private companies and non-profjts, he said that non profits were much worse. His theory was that with no money on the stake it’s all about egos, and they cause weird situations to happen.
Also, I worked in startups and my ex-gf in various nonprofits, and the amount of drama she saw was way higher than in the commercial world
Sure, the investors own the company and the board answers to them. Nonprofits are significantly disconnected from their own financial incentives. I have witnessed it at every nonprofit I have worked for.
I mean.. the OpenAI foundation is literally not motivated by profit. I guess the main question here is how was the board chosen, and why didn't Sam much sure they were friendly to them.
In the early stage the investor does not own the startup. 20-30% stake would be typical. Hence why a Series A investor usually demands a board seat and special considerations.
Investor here is not someone who puts cash in professionally without running the company. Investor here means whoever owns the stock. There is always an investor in a company even if its just the founder owning 100% stock.
The board reports to the shareholders and the management reports to the board.
In early stage companies it is possible and likely that all three are the same person, that doesn't change the different fiduciary responsibilities for each role they play.
This has not do with beneficial ownership of the underlying asset alone. Principals sometimes do not have that relationship. Asset ownership is a common way to benefit from a entity, but not the only way.
Specifically here Sam Altman does not own shares in the for-profit entity and non profit entities do not have shares.
I don't have direct knowledge on how OpenAI handles it, however it is not uncommon to do revenue sharing, or lease an underlying asset like a brand name (WeWork did this) from the Principal directly, or pay for perks like housing, planes etc, or pay lot of money in Salary/Cash compensation, there are myriad ways to benefit from control without share ownership.
But Jeff was the shareholder and those were his nominees right? Not to mention he was mostly able to pick the board as needed. In for profit corporation there is a clear ultimate ownership in shareholders. No such thing here.
That is one problem with non-profits. They end up with completely unprofessional leadership because they hire their friends who are crazies just like themselves.
When things cool down in a few months we will learn Altman and Brockman were some of the few sane people on the board.
The Illuminati are a front for the Jews™ (not to be confused with Jewish people).
The Jews™ are a front for the Catholic Church.
The Catholic church is a front for the Lizard People.
The Lizard People are a front for the Government.
Nobody is in control. The conspiracy is circular. There is no conspiracy. Everything in this post is false. Only an idiot cannot place his absolute certainty in paradoxes.
Governments will have their own black-budget private LLM networks, they don't need OpenAI. The NSA probably has a whole cluster of them in its data center in Utah, trained on every public and private communication they've slurped up over the years, likely a generation or two ahead of what's available to the public.
This is immensely dumb. What secret cabal of researchers would they be hiring that would be capable of being ahead of Deepmind/OpenAI? Where exactly would they find these people? Shadow MIT? CalTech2?
Military and intelligence technology is almost always ahead of the private sector. Governments have practically infinite money and resources to throw at the problem, including for recruiting and industrial espionage.
The only people who think this are people who have never been associated with a top research org. You NEVER hear about anyone, let alone the top people, going to work for government. They all get scooped up with big tech salaries or stay in academia.
The military would need to be literally breeding geniuses and cultivating a secret scientific ecosystem to be ahead on AI right now.
The military does have a secret scientific ecosystem. Where do you think all of its advanced classified technology and cryptography comes from, the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog?
They don't need you to be their pr department. Their products are based on research done at Google and Meta, they're not the only ones working on this and they're also one of the smaller players in the space.
I never made any of the points you are contesting and my point still stands. And they are not a smaller player in this space, they are the most well known player.
yes. this is a very strange event and given the relationship to what we may call "cutting edge applied DL" technology, right after DevDay, with two key players dropping out. GDB leaving is pretty wild, IMO. indicates something maybe on the engineering level wasn't above board. Anyways, we shall see. I think some conspiratorial thinking is fine, especially if its backed up with some evidence. This comment isn't, but the fact remains this is pretty weird and people should let their minds wander and connect dots that maybe they half-remember. IMO
CIA has been destabilizing and puppeteering governments around the world. Why are you so steadfastly assured that they wouldn't meddle in the US?
Not saying there is proof, but we just found out Ukraine blew up the Russian pipeline so it seems weird to just squash debate at the 'that's too crazy to ever happen'. Way crazier things have happened/are constantly happening.
