The hype and the credulity of the general public play right into this scam. People will more or less believe anything Sam the Money Gushing Messiah says because the neat demos keep flowing. The question is what's we've lost in all this, which no-one really thinks about.
https://www.publicsource.org/why-is-the-nfl-a-nonprofit/
The total revenue of the NFL has been steadily increasing over the years, with a significant drop in 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic12. Here are some figures:
2001: $4 billion
2010: $8.35 billion
2019: $15 billion
2020: $12.2 billion
2021: $17.19 billion
2022: $18 billionEvery dollar of income generated through television rights fees, licensing agreements, sponsorships, ticket sales, and other means is earned by the 32 clubs and is taxable there. This will remain the case even when the league office and Management Council file returns as taxable entities, and the change in filing status will make no material difference to our business.
no longer a non-profit but no less hypocritical
They could release the source with a licence that restricted commercial use, anything they wanted, that still allowed them to profit.
Instead we get "AI is too dangerous for anyone else to have." The whole thing doesn't inspire confidence.
OpenAI had to start as a non profit because there was no clear path forward. It was research. Kind of like doing research with the goal of curing cancer.
The unexpected breakthroughs came a bit quicker than anticipated and everybody was seeing the dollar signs.
I believe OpenAIs intial intention at the beginning was benign. But they just couldn't let go of the dollars.
The Sherman Fairchild Foundation (which manages the post-humous funds of the guy who made Fairchild Semiconductor) pays its president $500k+ and chairman about the same. https://beta.candid.org/profile/6906786?keyword=Sherman+fair... (Click Form 990 and select a form)
I do love IRS Form 990 in this way. It sheds a lot of light into this.
IMO you could cut the CEOs salary from 6 million to 300k and get a new CEO - and we probably wouldnt see any difference in Firefox results. Perhaps improvement even. Since the poorly paid CEO would try to demonstrate value - and this best is done by bringing back firefox market share.
The median annual wage in 2021 in the US was $45,760,
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/economy/jobs-and-income/job...
Just to put bit of perspective...
There's this weird thing where charities are judged by how much they cost to run and pay their employees to even a greater degree than other organizations, and even by people who would resist that strategy for businesses. It's easy to imagine a good leader executing the mission way more than 500k better than a meh one, and even more dramatically so for 'overhead' in general (as though a nonprofit would consistently be doing their job better by cutting down staffing for vetting grants or improving shipping logistics or whatever).
"In conversations with recruiters we’ve heard from some candidates that OpenAI is communicating that they don’t expect to turn a profit until they reach their mission of Artificial General Intelligence" https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html
Put another way, a $1bn hedge fund is considered a small boutique that typically only employs a handful of people.
"We" got a free-as-in-beer general knowledge chat system leagues better than anything at the time, suitable for most low-impact general knowledge and creative work (easily operable by non-technical users), a ridiculously cheap api for it, and the papers detailing how to replicate it.
The same SOTA with image generation, just hosted by Microsoft/Bing.
Like, not to defend OpenAI, but if the goal was improving the state of general AI, they've done a hell of a lot - much of which your average tech-literate person would not have believed was even possible. Not single-handedly, obviously, but they were major contributors to almost all of the current SOTA. The only thing they haven't done is release the weights, and I feel like everything else they've done has been lost in the discussion, here.
Not at all. With GPT-3 they only released a paper roughly describing it but in no way it allowed replication (and obviously no source code, nor the actual NN model, with or without weights).
GPT-4 was even worse since they didn't even release a paper, just a "system card" that amounted to describing that its outputs were good.
Even I as a software engineer have a minimum salary I expect because I’m good at my job.
Just because it’s a non-profit doesn’t mean I’m going to demand a smaller salary.
And if the non-profit can’t afford me and gets a more junior dev and they’re not very good and their shit breaks… well, they should have paid full price.
That said, there ARE a lot of dirty non-profits that exist just to pay their executives.
Where can I go get or drink from my free as in beer chat system from them then?
I remember one org had so many money pipes going in/out of it that I had to modify my code to make a special case for them.
Even if it was for profit company and it paid out all the surplus earnings to shareholders (owning clubs), it would be taxed zero on zero earnings (they'd just have to ensure all payouts happen within the calendar year).
Non-profits weren't really as much of a thing until the neoliberal era of privatizing everything.
Of course, there are "real" non-profits, those kinds of activities are a real thing, such as organizing solely member funded organizations to serve the people, but in America, this is a marginal amount of the money in the system.
> In 2003 the Internal Revenue Service revoked VSP's tax exempt status citing exclusionary, members-only practices, and high compensation to executives.[3]
Or later in the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VSP_Vision_Care#Non-profit_sta...
> In 2005, a federal district judge in Sacramento, California found that VSP failed to prove that it was not organized for profit nor for the promotion of the greater social welfare, as is required of a 501(c)(4). Instead, the district court found, VSP operates much like a for-profit (with, for example, its executives getting bonuses tied to net income) and primarily for the benefit of its own member/subscribers, not for some greater social good and, thereafter, concluded it was not entitled to tax-exempt status under 501(c)(4).[16]
Nobody in the hedge fund world works for salary.
They work for bonuses. Which for $1bn fund should be another $20m or so (20% profit share of 10% returns), otherwise you suck.
If bonuses aren’t available in non-profits, the base salaries should be much higher.
Training LLMs requires a lot of text, and, as a practical matter, essentially all LLMs have committed copyright infringement on an industrial scale to collect training data.
The US has a fair-use exception with a four-part test:
The second and third parts (nature of the work (creative) and how much of the work is used (all of it)) strongly favor copyright owners. The fourth part (which SCOTUS previous said is the most important part, but has since walked back) is neutral to slightly favoring the copiers: Most LLMs are trained to not simply regurgitate the input, so a colorable argument exists that an LLM has no impact on the market for, say, NY Times articles.
Taken together, parts 2 through 4 are leaning towards impermissible use. That leaves us with the first part: Could it make the difference? The first part really has two subparts: How and what are you using it for?
"How" they are using it is clearly transformational (it defeats the purpose of an LLM if it just regurgitates the input), so that argues in favor of copiers like OpenAI.
But where I think Altman had a brilliant/evil flash of genius is that the "what" test: OpenAI is officially a non-profit, dedicated to helping humanity: That means the usage is non-commercial. Being non-commercial doesn't automatically make the use fair use, but it might make the difference when considering parts 2 through 4, plus the transformativity of the usage.
Guess, what - you missed the loophole.
Take a look at Sarah Palin's Daughter's' charity foundation Against Teen Pregnacy - founded after she, herself, was impregnated as a teen and it was a scandal on Sarah Palin's political shenanigans.... (much like boabert - his Drug/Thievery ~~guild~~ Addiction Foundation, soon to follow)....
Sarah Palins daughter got pregnant as a team, caused shame on the campaign - and started a foundation to help "stop teen pregnancy"
Then when the 503 filed, it was revealed that the Daughter was being paid ~$450,000 a year plus expenses from "managing the foundation" for the donations they solicited.
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If you dont know how "foundation" is the Secret Financial Handshake For "Yep, Ill launder money for you, and you launder money for me!... donate to my TAX DEDUCTABLE FOUNDATION/CHARITY... and Ill do the SAME to yours with the Money you "donated" to me! (excluding my fee of course)
This is literally what Foundations do.
(if you have never looked into the SEC filings for the Salvation Army (I have read some of their filings cover to cover.... biggest financial scam charity in the country, whos finances are available...)
money laundering is a game. Like Polo.
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>>>The company remains governed by the nonprofit and its original charter today. "
https://i.imgur.com/I2K4XF5.png
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NFL can achieve the same taxation level as a for-profit if it's more careful about distributing all surplus earnings before the end of the year.
Someone could certainly abuse the non-profit status there too, but nobody brought those cases up.
Current CEO earns 20 times more -> 6 million per year
tone is the one thing AI has yet to solve.
(plus intoning and atoning... AI has yet on these little Jungians)
How do I form my own Church of Sam. Why would I pay taxes when people believe in me?
