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@choldgraf The question is … is the public interest still being served by the for-profit? A big initial donor to OpenAI has been asking that question, and I think it’s a *very* fair one: “competitive concerns are causing us to [violate widely-agreed industry best-practice safety standards]” is a sentence a public-interest company should never utter.

California’s attorney general has the power to investigate this, and it should.

@luis_in_brief but isn't that only possible if the non profit is the sole shareholder of the for profit? And if that is the case, how can the for profit have investors? Maybe my first assumption there is wrong?

@luis_in_brief and yeah either way I think it is pretty clear that the non profits original mission was not "withhold all valuable IP from the public and serve as a competitive moat for Microsoft"

@luis_in_brief (and yes one reason I'm partially interested in the non profit question is because I've explored this for 2i2c as well, but thus far have concluded that it's a delicate path to walk for the reasons you describe)

@luis_in_brief it seems very easy to create an extreme version of "donor capture" when your non profit depends on a for-profits funding or investors

@choldgraf @luis_in_brief This is a super interesting thread, thanks Luis and Chris. Can either of you suggest a primer I can read to catch me up on what's publicly known/knowable about OpenAI in this area?

@jfleck @luis_in_brief i don't actually know as much as I should and would enjoy a resource like this as well!

@choldgraf @jfleck I might end up doing a (verrrry brief) one in the newsletter, if not this weekend probably next…)

@luis_in_brief @jfleck thanks for chatting about this with me here btw. I'm glad that there are people like yourself in the world who are thoughtful about this!

@luis_in_brief i could still see that being in the interests of a subset of companies, if they felt they could still control the non profit and give themselves privileged licensing and API access

@luis_in_brief but obviously not in the interests of the public unless you do a bunch of AGI "existential threat" effective altruism acrobatics I guess

@luis_in_brief which, I guess, is exactly what they're doing to justify this

@choldgraf I’m sympathetic to the claims that (1) you need a lot of money to do this public-interest research and (2) true openness might be very problematic for the public interest!

But you give away the public interest game when you say “competitive interests” are part of your closed-ness reasoning in any way, shape, or form…

@luis_in_brief for sure - I'm open to that too, but then you better have *excellent* governance, oversight, accountability, and have extra organizational and strategic transparency to make up for the lack of your operational transparency

@luis_in_brief not run yourself like a startup in non profit clothing

@choldgraf Yupppp. Again, a good topic for the AG to explore.

(I wonder if there’s a space for CA non-profits in the space to put together a letter to the AG?)

@choldgraf It’d have to be pretty nuanced (“look, we’re not against non-profits getting funding! or doing work with for-profits!”) but…

@luis_in_brief I agree w your take - I think many people are too limited in their thinking of what non profits can do. I wish that *more* of them sold things (or services) and just did so in a way that was oriented towards a mission and with good governance and accountability. I think this clear abuse of non-profit status by openai makes it harder to do this the "right way"

@samweingamgee @choldgraf Much of the tax story depends on how much cash flows out of the for-profit to the non-profit (unless they fucked this up, the answer is almost certainly zero) and how you spend your assets (could be tricky here, given the potentially massive size of the asset).

But I do also note that this is almost *exactly* the kind of for-profit shenanigans that almost got *all* “open” non-profits per se banned by the IRS.

@samweingamgee @choldgraf (Which now that I write it that way is probably one paragraph in the hypothetical letter from CA tech non-profits to Rob Bonta…)

@luis_in_brief @samweingamgee ah yeah that's what I was referring to re: Mozilla, wasn't it them that got the whole field into that mess?

@choldgraf @samweingamgee As far as I know, no one really knows exactly what started that. But I think the field’s assumption is that it was more the large corporate “open” projects, who weren’t yet 100% (c)6s, than Mozilla.

@shanecurcuru @choldgraf @luis_in_brief
Their mission statement is also weird: "OpenAIs goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. We think that artificial intelligence technology will help shape the 21st century, and we want to help the world build safe AI technology and ensure that AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible."

@shanecurcuru @choldgraf @luis_in_brief
No mention of a scientific, education, or charitable purpose. At least not as anyone not suffering from late stage silicon valley brain rot would interpret it.

@luis_in_brief @samweingamgee @shanecurcuru it primarily sounds like wishful thinking to me lol.

"Unconstrained by the need for financial return" but "we can't make our work public because of the competitive landscape"