> I think it was a real mistake to create OpenAI as a public charity
Sure, with hindsight. But it didn't require much in the way of foresight to predict that some sort of problem would arise from the not-for-profit operating a hot startup that is by definition poorly aligned with the stated goals of the parent company. The writing was on the wall.
I think it could have easily been predicted just from the initial announcements. You can't create a public charity simply from the donations of a few wealthy individuals. A public charity has to meet the public support test. A private foundation would be a better model but someone decided they didn't want to go that route. Maybe should have asked a non-profit lawyer?
Maybe the vision is to eventually bring UBI into it and cap earn outs. Not so wild given Sam’s world coin and his UBI efforts when he was YC president.
The public support test for public charities is a 5-year rolling average, so "eventually" won't help you. The idea of billionaires asking the public for donations to support their wacky ideas is actually quite humorous. Just make it a private foundation and follow the appropriate rules. Bill Gates manages to do it and he's a dinosaur.
Exactly this. OpenAI was started for ostensibly the right reasons. But once they discovered something that would both 1) take a tremendous amount of compute power to scale and develop, and 2) could be heavily monetized, they choose the $ route and that point the mission was doomed, with the board members originally brought in to protect the mission holding their fingers in the dyke.
Speaks more to a fundamental misalignment between societal good and technological progress. The narrative (first born in the Enlightenment) about how reason, unfettered by tradition and nonage, is our best path towards happiness no longer holds. AI doomerism is an expression of this breakdown, but without the intellectual honesty required to dive to the root of the problem and consider whether Socrates may have been right about the corrupting influence of writing stuff down instead of memorizing it.
What's happening right now is people just starting to reckon with the fact that technological progress on it's own is necessarily unaligned with human interests. This problem has always existed, AI just makes it acute and unavoidable since it's no longer possible to invoke the long-tail of "whatever problem this fix creates will just get fixed later". The AI alignment problem is at it's core a problem of reconciling this, and it will inherently fail in absence of explicitly imposing non-Enlightenment values.
Seeking to build openAI as a nonprofit, as well as ousting Altman as CEO are both initial expressions of trying to reconcile the conflict, and seeing these attempts fail will only intensity it. It will be fascinating to watch as researchers slowly come to realize what the roots of the problem are, but also the lack of the social machinery required to combat the problem.
Wishfully I hope there was some intent from the beginning on exposing the impossibility of this contradictory model to the world, so that a global audience can evaluate on how to improve our system to support a better future.
Sure, with hindsight. But it didn't require much in the way of foresight to predict that some sort of problem would arise from the not-for-profit operating a hot startup that is by definition poorly aligned with the stated goals of the parent company. The writing was on the wall.