from Hacker News

Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit

by arvindh-manian on 12/13/24, 7:36 PM with 640 comments

  • by lsy on 12/13/24, 8:14 PM

    I guess it's not news but it is pretty wild to see the level of millenarianism espoused by all of these guys.

    The board of OpenAI is supposedly going to "determine the fate of the world", robotics to be "completely solved" by 2020, the goal of OpenAI is to "avoid an AGI dictatorship".

    Is nobody in these very rich guys' spheres pushing back on their thought process? So far we are multiple years in with much investment and little return, and no obvious large-scale product-market fit, much less a superintelligence.

    As a bonus, they lay out the OpenAI business model:

    > Our fundraising conversations show that:

    > * Ilya and I are able to convince reputable people that AGI can really happen in the next ≤10 years

    > * There’s appetite for donations from those people

    > * There’s very large appetite for investments from those people

  • by factorialboy on 12/13/24, 8:01 PM

    For-profit isn't the problem. Lying about being non-profit to raise funds, and _then_ become for-profit, that's the underlying concern.

  • by AlanYx on 12/13/24, 8:05 PM

    Ignoring all the drama, this part is interesting:

    "On one call, Elon told us he didn’t care about equity personally but just needed to accumulate $80B for a city on Mars."

  • by tonygiorgio on 12/13/24, 9:54 PM

    Just about the only open part about OpenAI is how their dirty laundry is constantly out in the open.

  • by milleramp on 12/13/24, 8:17 PM

    Is this one of the 12 days of OpenAI?

  • by exprofmaddy on 12/13/24, 9:34 PM

    It seems the humans pursuing AGI lack sufficient natural intelligence. I'm sad that humans with such narrow and misguided perspectives have so much power, money, and influence. I worry this won't end well.

  • by roca on 12/14/24, 1:29 AM

    I'm amazed OpenAI made these disclosures. My main takeaway was how wrong all the predictions of Sutskever and Brockman turned out to be, and how all their promises have been broken. Also interesting that up to 2019 OpenAI was focused on RL rather than LLMs.

  • by freedomben on 12/13/24, 8:01 PM

    > You can’t sue your way to AGI. We have great respect for Elon’s accomplishments and gratitude for his early contributions to OpenAI, but he should be competing in the marketplace rather than the courtroom.

    Isn't that exactly what he's doing with x.ai? Grok and all that? IIRC Elon has the biggest GPU compute cluster in the world right now, and is currently training the next major version of his "competing in the marketplace" product. It will be interesting to see how this blog post ages.

    I'm not dismissing the rest of the post (and indeed I think they make a good case on Elon's hypocrisy!) but the above seems at best like a pretty massive blindspot which (if I were invested in OpenAI) would cause me some concern.

  • by meagher on 12/13/24, 8:26 PM

    People change their minds all the time. What someone wanted in 2017 could be the same or different in 2024?

  • by Alifatisk on 12/14/24, 11:26 AM

    I am used to their articles being sterile and formal, this reads like some teenager spilling their tea on social media.

  • by linotype on 12/13/24, 10:02 PM

    Google/Gemini have none of this baggage.

  • by agnosticmantis on 12/13/24, 10:59 PM

    It's amusing how Sutskever kept musking Musk over the years (overpromising with crazy deadlines and underdelivering):

    In 2017 he wrote

    "Within the next three years, robotics should be completely solved, AI should solve a long-standing unproven theorem, programming competitions should be won consistently by AIs, and there should be convincing chatbots (though no one should pass the Turing test)."

    "We will completely solve the problem of adversarial examples by the end of August."

    Very clever to take a page from Musk's own playbook of confidently promising self-driving by next year for a decade.

  • by dogboat on 12/13/24, 9:03 PM

    Pre transformers paper emails. Fun to read.

  • by 23B1 on 12/13/24, 9:26 PM

    Neither they nor Elon can or should be trusted to tell the truth. The only utility this statement should have is to illustrate whatever public narrative OAI wishes to affect.

  • by thih9 on 12/14/24, 6:42 AM

    > September 2017: We rejected Elon's terms because giving him unilateral control of OpenAI and its technology would be contrary to the mission

    Why the rejection in 2017 when in 2024 the company moved towards a similar goal?

  • by swyx on 12/13/24, 11:35 PM

    > Here is a cool video of our bot doing something rather clever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-vxbREX5ck&feature=youtu.be....

    > The HER algorithm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dz_HuzgMzxo) can learn to solve many low-dimensional robotics tasks that were previously unsolvable very rapidly. It is non-obvious, simple, and effective.

    > In 6 months, we will accomplish at least one of: single-handed Rubik’s cube, pen spinning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDavyRnEPrI), Chinese balls spinning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9N1duIl4Fc) using the HER algorithm

    taken down now. anyone have it?

    > Lock down an overwhelming hardware advantage. The 4-chip card that <redacted> says he can build in 2 years is effectively TPU 3.0 and (given enough quantity) would allow us to be on an almost equal footing with Google on compute.

    who is this? it isnt cerebras. sambanova?

  • by ronsor on 12/13/24, 7:49 PM

    I like this practice of publicly airing out dirty laundry.

  • by vwkd on 12/13/24, 8:57 PM

    Sounds like Elon's "fourth attempt [..] to reframe his claims" might actually be close to the target.

    Otherwise, why would they engage in a publicity battle to sway public sentiment precisely now, if their legal case wasn't weak?

  • by tuyguntn on 12/13/24, 7:58 PM

    So much public drama around AI company, just curious how it would impact their brand and relationship with enterprise companies, who usually seek stability when it comes to their service providers

  • by hermannj314 on 12/13/24, 8:03 PM

    A few weeks ago my OpenAI credits expired and I was billed to replace them. I had no idea this was the business model, fine you got me with your auto-renew scam because you decided my tokens were spoiled.

    At some point, OpenAI became who they said they werent. You can't even get chatgpt to do anything fun anymore as the lawyers have hobbled its creative expression.

    And now they want to fight with Elon over what they supposedly used to believe about money back in 2017.

    Who actually deserves our support going forward?

  • by InfiniteVortex on 12/13/24, 8:01 PM

    regardless of what you think of it, the drama is at least entertaining!

  • by WhatsName on 12/13/24, 7:59 PM

    I wonder if there are PR people out there, who watched the Wordpress vs. WPEngine disaster from the sideline and took notes.

    For me this rhymes with recent history...

  • by OrangeMusic on 12/20/24, 5:20 PM

    As an aside, it's weird (and annoying) that they call him "Elon" rather than "Musk".

  • by ks2048 on 12/14/24, 12:59 AM

    Off-content-comment: I think this is the first time I’ve seen cloudflare “are you a bot” protection on a corporate blog post before.

    I think somehow related to AI companies viewing the web as valuable data to be stolen if you don’t have it and protected property if you do have it.

  • by kelseyfrog on 12/13/24, 8:44 PM

    Maybe a weird question, but how does a capitalist economy work where AGI-performed-labor is categorically less expensive than human-performed labor? Do most people who labor for wages just go unemployed, and then bankrupt, and then die?

  • by Uptrenda on 12/13/24, 11:55 PM

    Why are they airing their dirty laundry like this? None of what they've said makes either side look good. In fact it makes OpenAI look like the money-obsessed hypocrites we always knew them to be.

  • by agnosticmantis on 12/13/24, 9:48 PM

    From Musk's email:

    "Frankly, what surprises me is that the AI community is taking this long to figure out concepts. It doesn’t sound super hard. High-level linking of a large number of deep nets sounds like the right approach or at least a key part of the right approach."

    Genuine question I've always had is, are these charlatans conscious of how full of shit they are, or are they really high on their own stuff?

    Also it grinds my gears when they pull out probabilities out of their asses:

    "The probability of DeepMind creating a deep mind increases every year. Maybe it doesn’t get past 50% in 2 to 3 years, but it likely moves past 10%. That doesn’t sound crazy to me, given their resources."

  • by rendang on 12/14/24, 5:58 AM

    The throwaway diss of Blue Origin was pretty funny.

    The biggest miss from Elon seems to be that he overestimated Google's lead. Did Google really drop the ball on staying in 1st place and if so why?

  • by ouraf on 12/15/24, 1:24 PM

    They are baiting for a lawsuit. Posting this right now isn't very beneficial for openAI, since they themselves want to loose the self inposed restrictions.

  • by Biologist123 on 12/13/24, 9:50 PM

    I’m neither an Elon fanboy nor a hater. But I do wonder both what he possesses and is possessed by to have created not just a successful company, but era-defining companies plural.

  • by leonmusk on 12/13/24, 7:50 PM

    well it seems Elon is playing to win at all costs. Win what though "the culture" from that ian banks book?

  • by VectorLock on 12/13/24, 10:46 PM

    I found all the discussions about Dota pretty amusing. I had no idea it was such a big thing for them early on.

  • by HeavyStorm on 12/15/24, 3:06 AM

    As in opposition to the non profit it currently is?there's absolutely nothing open about OAI.

  • by Havoc on 12/13/24, 8:00 PM

    Not 100% close to the facts, but from a cursory read this seems deeply dishonest on OpenAI's part to me.

    Musk appears to be objecting to a structure having profit driven players ("YC stock along with a salary") directly in the nonprofit...and is suggestion moving it to a parallel structure.

    That's seems like a perfectly valid and frankly ethically/governance sound point to raise. The fact that he mentions incentives specifically to me suggests he was going down that line of reasoning outlined above.

    Framing that as "Elon Musk wanted an OpenAI for-profit"...idk...maybe I'm missing something here, but dishonest framing is definitely the word that comes to mind.

  • by bloomingkales on 12/14/24, 5:58 AM

    This seems quite unprofessional.

  • by WhereIsTheTruth on 12/14/24, 6:39 AM

    I would love to know the identity of their GC, the team that does it all

  • by dgrin91 on 12/13/24, 9:27 PM

    dumb question - in one of the emails they mention ICO. What is that?

    > I have considered the ICO approach and will not support it.

    ...

    > I respect your decision on the ICO idea

    Pretty sure they aren't talking about Initial Coin Offerings. Any clue what they mean?

  • by agnosticmantis on 12/14/24, 12:54 AM

    From Brockman's email:

    "Our biggest tool is the moral high ground. To retain this, we must: Try our best to remain a non-profit. AI is going to shake up the fabric of society, and our fiduciary duty should be to humanity."

    Well, reading this in 2024 with (so-called) "Open"AI going for-profit, it aged like milk.

    Also a few lines later, he writes:

    "We don’t encourage paper writing, and so paper acceptance isn’t a measure we optimize."

    So much for openness and moral high ground!

    This whole thread is a masterpiece in dishonesty, hypocrisy and narcissistic power plays for any wannabe villains.

    It's amusing to see they keep their masks on even in internal communications though. I'd have thought the messiah complex and benevolence parade is only for the public, but I was wrong.

  • by iamnotsure on 12/14/24, 2:21 AM

  • by nothrowaways on 12/13/24, 11:48 PM

    > You can’t sue your way to AGI

  • by m463 on 12/13/24, 7:52 PM

    I wonder who wrote this missive?

  • by WiSaGaN on 12/14/24, 12:02 AM

    Sam Altman said this around a year ago: "i expect ai to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence, which may lead to some very strange outcomes". I am wondering whether AI has any input for this piece that tries to persuade the public to believe the people that are accusing me is not good either.

  • by tuyguntn on 12/13/24, 8:10 PM

    > each board member has a deep understanding of technology, at least a basic understanding of AI and strong & sensible morals.

    > Put increasing effort into the safety/control problem

    ... and we are working to get defense contracts which is used to kill human beings in other countries, or fund organizations who kill humans

  • by dtquad on 12/13/24, 9:26 PM

    Important context: Elon Musk's close friend from the PayPal days and fellow libertarian tech billionaire David Sacks has been selected as the Trump admin's czar for AI and crypto.

    This is why OpenAI and Sam Altman are understandably concerned.

  • by moralestapia on 12/13/24, 7:53 PM

    Yes ... and?

    The part that raises eyebrows is how a non-profit suddenly become a for-profit, from a legal standpoint.

  • by taosx on 12/14/24, 6:10 AM

    Did Elon Musk really only take 9 minutes to read, consider, and respond to Ilya & Greg's thoughtful "Honest Thoughts" email? That seems remarkably brief, crazy.

    I'm surprised by OpenAI's resilience through all this drama. It's impressive to see how far they've come from 2017 to 2024. This journey has given me a whole new appreciation for startups and the individuals behind them. Now I better understand why my own past mediocre attempts didn't succeed.

    Thank you for sharing this information!

  • by pikseladam on 12/16/24, 5:42 AM

    elon lost the bet. now he wants to take revenge. thats all there is.

  • by jcrash on 12/13/24, 8:10 PM

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBoUHay7XBI&t=345s

    one of the few youtube links on this page that is still up

  • by unglaublich on 12/13/24, 7:56 PM

    If even OpenAI, who could benefit greatly from his money, warns you about this person, you might want to take it seriously.

  • by akira2501 on 12/13/24, 7:56 PM

    [flagged]

  • by MaxGripe on 12/13/24, 11:24 PM

    “We founded OpenAI as a non-profit, but to create OpenAGI, profit was necessary!!! However, Elon Musk also wanted profit!!!!111 And now, he also created profits!!! So, everything is OK”

  • by catigula on 12/13/24, 8:15 PM

    Is it even possible for Sam Altman to stop being dishonest? This isn't a method to redress concerns, it's a smear that has nothing to do with the lawsuit.

  • by mediumsmart on 12/13/24, 7:51 PM

    How could he! thank god that did not happen.

  • by andrewinardeer on 12/13/24, 10:33 PM

    Okay. Is OpenAI now deflecting? Deflecting and reframing.

  • by boringg on 12/13/24, 9:29 PM

    If I read anything from this it's the OpenAI is looking weak and worried if they are trying to use this to garner support or, at least, generate negative publicity for x.AI / Musk.

    Altman being the regulatory capture man muscling out competitors via pushing the white house and washington to move for safety, the whole board debacle and converting from not for profit to profit.

    I don't think anyone sees Musks efforts as altruistic.

  • by averageRoyalty on 12/13/24, 9:34 PM

    It's an aside, but these sorts of timelines are very American centric.

    I don't know when your autumn ("fall") or summer are in relation to September. Don't mix keys here, either use months or quarters, not a mix of things including some relative to a specific hemisphere.