The OpenAI transition: where are we going? How do we know if OpenAI is going to make a profit-oriented AI research venture possible, or what have we learned from it?
At Italian Tech Week, which was just after the announcement of the departure of Murati, Altman said that he hoped OpenAI would be better for the transition, as they were for all of their transitions.
Many of the employees of the research lab will find it hard to keep their jobs when their lab is turned into a for-profit company. Many likely joined to focus on AI research, not to build and sell products. Openai is still a nonprofit, which makes it more difficult to guess how a profit-focused version would work.
There’s already evidence OpenAI is focusing on fast launches over cautious ones: a source told The Washington Post in July that the company threw a launch party for GPT-4o “prior to knowing if it was safe to launch.” According to The Wall Street Journal, the safety staffers didn’t have time to double-check their work after working 20 hours a day. The initial results of tests showed GPT-4o wasn’t safe enough to deploy, but it was deployed anyway.
Marking the Last Stand by Opening AI: Making Sure Your Research Lab Is Run Like a For-Profit Organization, Not for Profits
Research labs work on longer timelines than companies chasing revenue. They can delay product releases when necessary, with less pressure to launch quickly and scale up. They can be a bit more conservative about safety.
Whatever the reason, this marks an almost total turnover of OpenAI leadership since last year. Greg Brockman, the president and co-founder of the firm, is seen in the September 2023 cover of the magazine as the last remaining member. But even he’s been on a personal leave of absence since August and isn’t expected to return until next year. He had taken leave and another of their co-workers, John, was also leaving to work for Anthropic.
OpenAI started as a nonprofit lab and later grew a for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI LP. The for-profit arm can raise money to build AGI but the nonprofit has a singular goal: to make sure it benefits humanity.
profits are capped at 100x and excess returns support the nonprofit to prioritize societal benefits over financial gain If the for-profit side strays from its mission, the nonprofit side can take action.
Artificial Intelligence Can Help Warfare, and Why Did Karl Altman Go Tech-Aided to Defend Charlemagne?
When all of the major problems are solved, I am wary of the supposed bonanza that will come. Let’s concede that AI might actually crack humanity’s biggest conundrums. We humans have failed many times when it came to implementing those solutions. We don’t need a big model of language to tell us war is bad. We should not kill each other. Yet wars keep happening.
Universal basic income is something that is important to Altman, he believes it will cushion the blows of lost wages. The people who are wealthy will be less likely to embrace the idea since they don’t know what artificial intelligence is capable of. Some kind souls of the Playa seem to be up in arms about a proposal to tax people worth over $100 million, but only if they have held onto their capital gains longer than a year. It is not true that rich people will use their money to fund a lot of time for the poor. One of the US’s major political parties can’t stand Medicaid, so one can only imagine how populist demagogues will regard UBI.
When many jobs go the way of lamplighters, no one knows what life will be like. A few weeks back, we got a hint of his vision when he asked tech wizards and celebrities to tell us their favorite songs. When explaining why he chose the tune “Underwater” by Rüfüs du Sol, Altman said it was a tribute to Burning Man, which he has attended several times. The festival, he says, “is part of what the post-AGI can look like, where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other and making incredible gifts to get each other.”
The advancement of technology has brought back luxuries that were once a part of the daily life of everyday people, including some unavailable to pharaohs and lords. Charlemagne didn’t like air-conditioning. Working-class people and even some on public assistance have dishwashers, TVs with giant screens, iPhones, and delivery services that bring pumpkin lattes and pet food to their doors. But Altman is not acknowledging the whole story. Many are homeless or impoverished despite massive wealth. paradise is just not evenly distributed according to William Gibson. That is not because technology failed. I suspect the same will be true if AGI arrives, especially since so many jobs will be automated.
Source: No, Sam Altman, AI Won’t Solve All of Humanity’s Problems
Sam Altman: The Strawberry Shortcut or What AI Can Learn About Language Models and OpenAI’s Breakthrough in Artificial Reasoning?
No matter what you think about Sam Altman, he is absolutely correct that Artificial general intelligence will destroy the problems afflicting mankind and create a golden age. I think we should call the idea The Strawberry Shortcut in honor of Openai’s breakthrough in artificial reasoning. Like the shortcake, the premise looks appetizing but is less substantial in the eating.
Maybe he published this to dispute a train of thought that dismisses the apparent gains of large language models as something of an illusion. He said Nuh-uh. We’re getting this big AI bonus because “deep learning works,” as he said in an interview later in the week, mocking those who said that programs like OpenAI’s GPT4o were simply stupid engines delivering the next token in a queue. “Once it can start to prove unproven mathematical theorems, do we really still want to debate: ‘Oh, but it’s just predicting the next token?'” he said.
