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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

They started as a non-profit and sort of claimed they would actually be open:

"As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies." - https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

However, a couple paragraphs down might have been a clue to the likely future: "Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research are donating to support OpenAI."

Currently they are not really non-profit and mostly working with Microsoft.

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Many of these people are very good at tax structuring — and IANAL — but it’s pretty hard to believe that what they’re doing with OpenAI is kosher.

They aren't a non-profit at all anymore: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

They're governed by a separate OpenAI Nonprofit which is why I said "sort of", but yes it's more profit than non.

They needed money in order to compete with Google and Facebook, so they switched the model to "investors make a maximum of 10x return and after that they lose their stake" or something like that.

As for being open, I think keeping potentially dangerous tech private for a while while openly sharing the results of research is prudent. The last thing I want is some AI model goes public then we find a way to generate a bunch of computer viruses or propaganda.

Agreed that not releasing models might be a good thing, I'm just pointing out that's not how they initially pitched the organization. I wonder if they might have gotten less favorable publicity when they launched if they just said "we're starting an AI company to compete with Google".

As for the business model, there's nothing wrong with it in principle, it's just not what they said they would do. There's no reason a well-funded nonprofit research organization needs to compete with Google and Facebook. They changed their funding model because they wanted to compete, not because they needed to. And it hasn't been very long since they said "Our 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. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact." You have to assume they knew from the start that they'd probably want to pivot to a business.

I think it's maximum of 100x return. So, it's for profit with practically unlimited return.

> Returns for our first round of investors are capped at 100x their investment (commensurate with the risks in front of us), and we expect this multiple to be lower for future rounds as we make further progress.

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

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