zlacker

What an unbelievable turn of events! To the outside observer, OpenAI is one of the most successful, well-oiled machines, shipping nearly weekly and doing an unbelievably good job marketing itself. Clearly, there's a lot of turmoil going on behind the scenes.

>>lexand+(OP)
We don't really know anything about the internal finances at this point. The product is solid but who knows how fucked up things are. Maybe they were on track to run out of money. GPU compute ain't cheap.

>>__loam+02
None of that can be a reason for a step like this. OpenAI can easily charge much more for their products, and there is a market for even extremely high prices (even if not as big) and given this is a non profit, it doesn't even need to make billions of dollars in money.

>>lexand+(OP)
Ehh the whole “I don’t have equity” thing was a bit strange to me.

>>tempsy+i3
So weird.

>>crop_r+P2
OpenAI exists both as a nonprofit and, for several years now, as a for-profit company [1] that has taken billions of dollars in investment. It needs to make billions of dollars to return to investors just as much as any other for-profit company does.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

>>CrazyS+p5
The non profit is the majority owner of the for profit, and there is no investor pressure here to make billions.

>>lexand+(OP)
And Sam was the face of AI to the general public, which makes these moves all the more perplexing.

>>lexand+(OP)
OpenAI is still riding on a fast wave of success from ChatGPT. Let's see how they're doing in a year.

>>soderf+t7
he wasn't a very good face, most of my friends don't recognize who sam is, they know what chatgpt is though.

>>soderf+t7
I think you're likely vastly overestimating the amount of people in the general public who have any idea who Sam is at all.

>>lexand+(OP)
Definitely lots of tape and bubblegum holding things together. Like any fast growing company! And this one is breaking speed records.

>>crop_r+96
Could that not change as the board changes?

>>cthalu+4e
https://xkcd.com/2501

>>j45+0f
I think the board is required to be a majority non-equity-holders precisely because an equity-holding board will not keep to their non-profit mission.

>>cthalu+4e
Just look at how this news is doing on reddit (a service i conflate a little more with the general public than hacker news which learns towards silicon valley technology) and you can easily see the truth of your statement.

>>tempsy+i3
what was strange about it? seemed pretty straight forward to me

>>strike+Ik
Interestingly parts of this comment section are behaving in Reddit-y ways, posting board members' Linkedins and questioning their credentials, as if their jobs are to just rubber stamp the CEO's calls.

>>s1arti+el
>what was strange about it?

There's 8 billion people on the planet nowadays, of those, about 7.9 billion would not lift a finger if there's no material benefit to them. Hence why it's strange.

>>morale+Xq
I think the ratio is basically the opposite, but thanks for explaining.

>>s1arti+vt
Ok, now I'm curious, do you live in a monastery or a very small community?

>>morale+iy
no, I live in a US urban environment and my experience is that most people enjoy doing good and helping others, especially when it is simple and low effort.

>>rchaud+4q
that's not un-HN. Noone has any clue, and all are speculating, so it is one theory after another. We have dozen posts on capitalization.

>>s1arti+AK
> simple and low effort

You would agree the OpenAI is neither ? the comparison doesn't do well then?

>>manque+Nq1
You set the bar for most people at lifting a finger, not running a global company.

If you want to talk about rarer cases, there at lots of examples of people that literally sacrifice their lives and die for no personal benefit

>>jprete+Ri
Since it's a private non-profit corp it might be whatever they want the rules to be.

Arms-length neutrality on a board in silicon valley might still work like the rest as other comments have stated. Maybe someone can shed some light on it

>>j45+EP1
I’m presuming it was put into place as part of creating the capped-for-profit entity, to make sure the for-profit couldn’t itself permanently misalign the non-profit’s board.