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If you look at what is happening at Twitter and Musk's claims to want to build an alt-right OpenAI you can see the potential for ideological disagreements.
Musk brought money to the table but Altman et al brought experience and reputation. And they have just as much right as Musk to determine the direction of the company.
However… non-profit is largely a tax designation. In exchange for tax exemptions, non-profits can’t basically give their profits to shareholders.
While the IRS does outline general examples of what we think of as charitable organizations, and the thing you claimed probably isn’t terribly clean (they do specify that nobody should profit from it, and one could claim that the for profit OpenAI is profiting from the non-profit, so is Microsoft), being a non-profit generally says next to nothing about morals.
It’s probably closer to an academic institution spinning off a company from the product of its research, which happens quite often.
If it weren't for the spinning up the private company, perhaps they wouldn't have the money to get where they are now and they would be yet another snow flake in the AI Winter?
How much of that was achieved while the company was a non-profit and how much was the value added once they spun off the for profit company?
Did OpenAI the non-profit give any secret sauce to the for-profit arm?
How does this relate to the many spinoffs from educational institutions that also receive donations and/or taxpayer money?
Both of you can now ask ChatGPT to explain the law to you and it will.
They're also clearly not "completely different things." That would imply no overlap, yet I find laws embody plenty of things I find ethical. If you find nothing in the law ethical then I certainly do not want your ethics.
So I'll gladly take law on the whole over a person on the internet's as hoc flavor of ethics.
Even in that time, there were many who could see that regardless of laws, the slaughter was not ethical. Others, committed atrocities for profit and consoled themselves that they were following the law.
It’s generally a bad sign when someone answers questions of ethics with law. People constrained only by the law with no further ethical concerns do terrible things, right up to the limit of what the legal system they live under allows.
To be clear, I am not claiming sama is unconcerned with ethics. I’m pushing back against conflating ethics with legality.
Yes there's outliers. But that's all they are. As ethics change, laws change, and vice versa. Neither exists or even is workable without the other. What is ethical in one time or place or situation changes, just like laws, and for the same reason- they're cultural constructs that evolve.
As to claiming ethics is superior to law, history is also filled with people having different ethics going outside the law and causing great harm, genocides, and wars. Ethics is not defined in any universal sense. One could argue every lawbreaker has different ethics than those not breaking laws.
Again, I prefer a society where people follow societally agreed upon laws over ones where everyone choose their own ethics and acts accordingly.
But of the two, only law is stable enough to run a society. It's what balances all the variety of ethical issues between beliefs.
Being a minority investor doesn't give Musk God powers. And he resigned from the board by his own choice.
I saw Elon push back on GPT's "wokeness"[0], but when did he say he was building an "alt-right" OpenAI?
[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/09/woke-chatgpt-...
Let's break down the statements:
Is there a movement or group often labeled alt-right?
If so, do they use that phrase to label themselves?
Do they tend to have similar beliefs (say for example support police, nearly unlimited free speech rights, smaller govt, lower spending...)?
When these beliefs are not convenient, do they ignore them? (Ignore police and law for Jan 6, use govt to ban speech and books they dislike, increase govt intrusion for things they like, and ignore their own party running up national debt beyond anyone before Trump),?
I'm pretty sure the above facts are not political at all. They are facts. The hypocrisy has pushed a significant number of lifelong conservatives out of the party. It would be a magical progressive that could simply argue so many conservatives to bail out.
> Why do progressives always resort to oblique arguments like this?
None of this has anything to do with whether Elon is supposedly making alt-right OpenAI, or whether Elon is himself alt-right. The only thing you've accomplished is to reveal that you don't know what "alt-right" means.
And he has assembled a team to build an OpenAI rival that aligns with this:
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/fighting-woke-ai-mus...
An article link (which hardly even supports your position) is no substitute for an argument.
As for disgust, YMMV. Lotta people pretty disgusted with Musk, rightly or wrongly I don't care, for what he did to Twitter.
Amusingly the edit button has never once appeared for me, even though sometimes it says "You'll have 30 minutes to edit your tweet." Maybe someday I'll be able to fix my typos and be extra happy.
The strange thing about Musk is that at the end of the day, his companies seem to win over their users. People may be disgusted with Musk, but users just want good features. And he seems to deliver.
He's also a bit crazy, and that's become evident with his decisions of shutting down the API and banning pg for linking to mastodon. But forums have immense inertia. As long as he reverts most of his bad calls, things seem to turn out ok.
But time will tell.
Idk, it seems to me like if you donate money you should be ok with the organization spending it as they see best for their purposes. Sure perhaps some fraud rules if the organization claims to be helping earthquake victims and instead spends it on private yachts for the deaf but I don't think their mismanagement means they're forced to sell the organization.
If you want an organization to do exactly as you want, create it yourself. Co-opting an existing one should be reserved for when there isn't an alternative.
I recommend reading "More Is Different" ...
Edit: not to mention, donating $100M for first rights to pay your own billions for a potentially-emerging for profit is a morally dubious agreement wrt nonprofit management
But let's focus on the thing being funded to be Open and Transparent then Altman turning it into a Closed and Opaque For-Profit and Calling for Regulations to give him a moat because he knows he has none without it. That's the weasel act.
If Musk had been the CEO, ChatGPT would never have been released.
And if you think Musk is some kind of benevolent corporate dictator-champion of free expression, I think you’ve bought into his completely media-fabricated public persona.
Elon wanted to take over because he thought they were falling behind Google...
Elon thought, the company that has taken Bing from a laughing stock to a publicly recognized existential threat to Google... was actually behind.
And you're actually saying it's... morally disgusting... to not let a donation turn into a down payment on your company???
I don't even know how you misunderstand so many things at such a deep level all at once. I really hope this is satire.
The core moral isse is he took in money for Open and Transparent AI and turned it into Closed and Opaque AI. That is the bait-and-switch. You're simply blind to not see it.
Elon promises Open AI 1 Billion dollars => 10% into that commitment Elon tries to take over the company. => Is rebuked by Sam Altman and co. => Elon reneges on the funding for Open and Transparent AI and walks away. => OpenAI goes to Microsoft to replace Elon's money => Microsoft gets to define terms and "Open and Transparent" is no more.
Oh yeah... and Google goes on to make Elon look like an absolute fool by proving that no, OpenAI was not falling behind Google: OpenAI behind behind is the absolutely hilarious excuse he tried to use to take over.
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I don't know how clueless you need to be to call OpenAI's move a bait-and-switch: The only bait and switch was Elon offering 1 Billion dollars as a donation, then trying to turn that into a takeover.
That's morally disgusting behavior, not trying to save your company after a petulant child tried to sink it because you didn't let him turn it into his pet.
Elon promised 1 Billion, and so OpenAI was able to be Open.
But then just 10% into that commitment Elon in the biggest miss of the century, tried to imply that OpenAI was falling behind Google, and wanted to take complete control of the company. However OpenAI took a lot of very smart people looking at what was best for their mission, and rightly refused to let him retroactively turn a 100M dollar donation into a purchase agreement.
And then to double down on his folly, he reneged on the rest of the funding and abandoned his post on a technicality: "Tesla is now AI [ha!] so I can't be on this board despite having just tried to take over the whole thing."
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Without his funding OpenAI did something very sensible and went looking for new partners. It turns out billions for non-proven ideas don't come by easily, and so they ended up with Microsoft: And unlike Elon, Microsoft was upfront! They wanted premier access, they wanted it to be a secret sauce, and that was the deal OpenAI settled for.
Elon's actions in this situation are by far the most "disgusting" thing here. It's like a child trying to kick down a sand castle because "you guys are using my bucket and I don't like what you're building!".
As OpenAI's bet proves 100% right and just completely spits in the face of the hubris he displayed with "you guys are failing and need me to take over", he gets increasingly more outspoken about it in an incredibly childish display of sour grapes.
But then again, can you blame him? He's since admitted that by reneging on the 1 B offer and departing based on a self-invented conflict of interest, he had to cash out immediately. So not only was his wrong, but as OpenAI shapes up to be the biggest thing to happen to computing in the last decade (something he tried to paint Tesla as being about to do!), he's also realizing he gave up on a stake in that. I can't even imagine the gut punch it must be.
He is the source of the issue you're complaining about, not the victim of it.