How much should OpenAI’s abandoned promises be worth?
Once upon a time OpenAI promised to be a non-profit, pledged to public benefit.
That pledge gave them tax protections, and brought in stellar staff, many of whom have left, perhaps out of a sense that the mission had been abandoned. One former employee made that point particularly sharply, yesterday:
Now OpenAI wants to renege on its promises, and become a for-profit. Nobody should able to make that switch for free, at no cost, or people will exploit nonprofit rules infinitely, going forward.
So how much should the transition cost?
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The advocacy group Public Citizen, who I am have written about before, has a proposal: the change from nonprofit should cost at least 20% of the business, perhaps more, and the code should be opened for the public benefit:
You can read more about their analysis here.
Gary Marcus is author of Taming Silicon Valley, which touches in part how Silicon Valley often makes pledges it fails to keep.
I'm struggling to see how it can be legally possible (never mind moral) to take people's money on the basis of X and then do Y. In the UK, that used to be called "obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obtaining_pecuniary_advantage_by_deception], but now it's simply called "fraud". Prior to 2019, OpenAI accepted donations (a pecuniary advantage), and hired researchers at lower than market value salaries (also a pecuniary advantage), on the basis that it was a non-profit company, but has since transitioned into a for-profit. How this is not obtaining pecuniary advantage by deception (i.e. fraud) I simply don't know. What am I missing?
Absolutely something people should be discussing….