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Matt Kerrigan's avatar

My operating belief on this has been that recently Sam has kind of become disillusioned with the AGI narrative, and because he was less afraid of any near-term consequences with the technology, that he started pushing for rapid commercialization. He seemed to be speed running every monetization playbook that's been popular over the last two decades in the period of like 3 months, make the iPhone of AI, the app store of AI, run a big AI consultancy, etc. etc.

So I think it just builds on what you're saying but just put into more birds eye view terms: Sam recently changed his own mission from "Prevent AGI from destroying the world" (or whatever) to "monetize the tools we have made now". Ilya and others I think are still on the original mission and saw it as their moral prerogative to continue that mission (with maybe the exception of Adam because he has what I would consider a conflict of interest in Poe).

This has drastically changed how I view OpenAI and the people who work there, I used to think more cynically about their narratives around the AGI narrative and all, I believed it was their marketing strategy, but now I think they are true believers, and that Sam too once was.

A question I have would be, does that interpretation gel with what you know about the board members? Is it your feel that their non-profit mission is so important to them such that they would do what they did?

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macirish's avatar

Quoting from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI

"The nonprofit, OpenAI, Inc., is the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI Global LLC, which, despite being a for-profit company, retains a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI, Inc.'s nonprofit charter. A majority of OpenAI, Inc.'s board is barred from having financial stakes in OpenAI Global LLC.[32] In addition, minority members with a stake in OpenAI Global LLC are barred from certain votes due to conflict of interest.[33] Some researchers have argued that OpenAI Global LLC's switch to for-profit status is inconsistent with OpenAI's claims to be "democratizing" AI.[42]"

Maybe it's just plain, old fashioned, much maligned....greed.

After all -

It's a learning curve, until it's an invoice, then it's a mistake.

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