While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that:
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.
A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.
I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.
I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.
Stealing every intellectual property on the planet to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan
Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief
Sam A. did what?
And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers
I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI
Non-profits are not the property of their donors, but of the general interest, with obligations to the public. It is part of the legal and social obligations of the legal structure of non-profits.
It wasn't illegal so there is some reason why the USA allowed it.
And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.
Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned
Their stated non-profit goal was to benefit all of humanity. Changing OpenAI to benefit their financial backers in a formal sense could be a loss of nearly unbounded value.
Which is probably why they created another, for-profit, entity.
You can argue that it's unlikely the for-profit conservatorship of the non-profit is incompatible with that goal, but legally that becomes very much grey area.
The substantive point of law will most likely be that OpenAI's salami slicing tactic for becoming a for-profit does not properly fall under the statute of limitations. To think otherwise is basically no different than arguing that you can rob a person twice and not be prosecuted for the second robbery because of "double jeopardy".
It's rare that judge's overturn jury verdicts, compared to other judge's verdicts. The constitution leans a lot on jury verdicts, and judges tend to respect that.
What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die
That Musk couldn't even get over the first stumbling block which is the statute of limitations, does not make the win any lesser. It makes it more decisive, since Musk now has to overcome that hurdle before even having a shot at the meat of the case.
I think parent probably means winning on merit or a sense of justice. As in won for a deserved reason rather than a technicality. The technicality here is exceeded the statute of limitations.
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
There is no "sense of justice" that will sway an appeal, it's all about the law. And this jury just found that there was zero merit under law.
Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.
That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.
That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.
Juries issue findings of fact, they don't issue rulings about the law. The issue of whether the statute of limitations applies to any given factual situation is one of law.
This case should have never made it to a jury, there is no case here.
The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.
I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.
Elon fights for the users. He became unpopular when certain obedient people were told to dislike him for fighting for the users. But those people are just obedient to the interests of other billionaires.
Reverse engineering sociopathy is hard, and takes time, and you need to drink a lot of water. Maybe the best outcome for the wellbeing of the jurors, because once you start, you can't stop, and suddenly people begin trying to silence or kill you. EDIT: over and out, follow the White Bear, good luck.
"When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle. They're fighting over who gets to wield the dick that is going to screw us all.
While I have a great deal of sympathy for this point of view, I think the article makes an interesting observation that suggests it actually doesn't matter whether these people are intentionally trying to screw everybody or not--the actual problem is much bigger even than that:
To claim that OpenAI’s mission of cultivating beneficial A.I. was compromised by Sam Altman is to let the entire industry off the hook. Yes, Altman seems to have a rather casual relationship with the truth. But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
> But it is far more interesting, complicated, and useful to take his self-defense at face value—to interpret the many sins of OpenAI, and its competitors, as the result of a good-faith exercise in futility. What if we imagined that he did in fact set out to do good? And discovered—or, perhaps better, failed to discover—along the way that this was structurally impossible?
But that is not what happened. It is neither complicated or interesting, it is just an alternative timeline sci-fi exercise. It can be fun to engage in, but it is not anything that would had anything to do with the current world as it is.
A people interested in good faith attempt to do good dont end up in Sam Altman position. They do good and focus on doing good rather then lie to get more investments so that they can corner the market and become powerful.
Leaked emails I think showed the open source part at the heart of the concept of OpenAI was never serious and was just to help recruit.
I don't know that the hypothetical I described requires that the open source part was sincere. The article focuses on Altman's belief that someone was going to develop AI and he thought it would be bad if Google did it first--meaning, by implication, that it would be good if an organization that he started did it first. But what if it turns out to be bad no matter who did it first?
It’s ridiculous to accuse someone of having a “somewhat loose relationship with the truth” when Elon Musk is sitting right across from him, accusing him of dishonest behavior.
It's too valuable of a tech to remain in the control of any corporation. Open models will find a way. Compute requirements will go down and there will be many of us making it a priority to transform the tech into something open like the Linux kernel vs a closed cloud tech.
Nvidia has 75% profit margins right now. That won't continue forever. It may take quite some time but it will normalize.
I read this quote from a bottle cap of Honest Tea. I’ve used it so many times since then because it speaks so much truth about life today.
> There's really nobody for normal people to root for in this battle.
I believe the reports that Sam Altman is an egomaniacal liar. But I haven't been privy to any of it other than seeing him hype his company's tech in a clearly dishonest manner. That's not great.
I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
In a dystopian world where everything is terrible (the one we live in), I can at least take some pleasure in seeing a person I dislike have a bad time. It still makes me angry that he can just waste the time of the courts out of spite. Can't prevent it, might as well find the silver lining.
You don't have to root for or against anyone in this fight. It's perfectly valid to oppose both actors and both outcomes, and the stakes of the fight.
> I've seen Elon be an active piece of shit, white nationalist, conspiracy promoter, etc, for years. I don't root for Sam Altman. I root against Elon.
A stopped clock is right twice a day Even Elon is sometimes right.
I think paul graham needs to really come clean about why he did this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41034829
This is a weird fantasy among the literati that AI is a "scam", that we can "expose" them with lots of palace intrigue coverage and SBF or Elizabeth Holmes them away and then everything will be right in the world. Some of the best models are Chinese and Open-source and so-so good and Sam Altman is wholly irrelevant to them.
Some folks are in for a very rude awakening.
Stealing every intellectual property on the planet to build a plagiarism machine that is wrong 10% of the time, could be interpreted as a scam by many folks.
That sentence could easily be applied to the human baseline.
Yes, if you're equating same rights to soulless corporations and humans as well as their motives.
On a certain level it is a scam. AI slop, vibe coding, tokenmaxxing, blaming employee layoffs on AI, pretty much any comment CEOs make about AI, etc.
Jargon isn't a scam. I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer. People using dumb terms to describe this doesn't make it less true.
> I get more and better work done with AI, to my own satisfaction and to the benefit of my employer
In the short run, because Anthropic and other providers are heavily subsidizing coding agents to maximize user base. Will your employer still benefit and be satisfied in a couple of years when Anthropic jacks up the price by 5x and dumbs down Opus to the point where 50% of changes are easier to do manually than via an agent?
But none of what OP said was jargon. All except one of those terms are things that are either harmful to employer or kind of fraud.
Rude how?
The fact that Chinese open weight models are useful does not really say anything about whether AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs.
"AI is hyped well beyond its actual worth, or whether the technology will be used for benevolent or nefarious purposes by American oligarchs."
This article is asking none of those questions. It's mostly a high school gossip column about what was said and with what tone and who used Butt pillows by The New Yorker, it reeks of desperation. If they could just find something nefarious on Sam Altman or show him in a bad light that sticks, they could fix it all and make AI go away.
My point stands, they're in for a Rude awakening.
Trying to justify current valuations by misrepresenting current model capabilities is a scam.
A fair valuation of ~$5B each for Anthropic and OpenAI for the occasionally useful tools that they had created would be more reasonable.
$5B valuation on a $30B run rate for Anthropic?
40B ARR and profitable next month.
It's always profitable next month.
These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?
It’s nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.
They do seem to be good at fooling people though.
> nowhere near AGI, and LLMs are not going to lead to it either.
Nevermind what they can do was pure science fiction just 3 years ago?
Are you claiming they have AGI or are "close" to it?
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI
This type of rhetoric is exactly why people think it's a scam
Regardless of the marketing material, LLMs are still just using probabilities to guess what the next token is.
you think it should be deterministic?
> These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI
That is the point under contention.
... where can I get a subscription to this AGI?
Lol. What exactly have you based this "fair valuation" off of? Vibes?
Come on. LinkedIn was bought for 6B.
E.H. promised her investors a magic cure -> sharlatan
Sam B. stole money from everyone -> thief
Sam A. did what?
And Musk wanted to do the same thing. Both agreeded, that a non profit will not make enough money to push the frontier. He is only pissed that he didn't get control of openai and he is now pissed again because he apparently should have done the lawsuite a few years back. Despite him having unlimited money and probably very good laywers
I'm not here to defend the richest of the richest, but E.H. and S.B. are complet different storries to OpenAI
Non-profits are not the property of their donors, but of the general interest, with obligations to the public. It is part of the legal and social obligations of the legal structure of non-profits.
It wasn't illegal so there is some reason why the USA allowed it.
And as mentioned, they agreeed that they will not get the capital openai needs, so what did the USA people loose? A company which whouldn't have been able to do what they are known for anyway.
Again i'm not protecting the rich, i just don't think there is a real scandal and its not the same as the other 2 the newyorker mentioned
Their stated non-profit goal was to benefit all of humanity. Changing OpenAI to benefit their financial backers in a formal sense could be a loss of nearly unbounded value.
Which is probably why they created another, for-profit, entity.
You can argue that it's unlikely the for-profit conservatorship of the non-profit is incompatible with that goal, but legally that becomes very much grey area.
As i wrote in my prev argument, they assumed that as non profit, they wouldt' get the capital needed to even be a frontier lab.
So nothing to loose if their model wouldn't have worked anyway.
And at the current state, its better anyway that China is pushing the non-profit/humantariy aspect of open models.
A favorite quote: "The dubiousness of Altman’s character is [...] priced into his reputation."
Sam didn't "win" the case in the sense that most people will think of when reading this headline.
In the 20th paragraph of the linked article, finally getting to the actual reason:
> On Monday, the jury took only two hours to reach its verdict. Musk’s complaint, the panel found, had indeed exceeded the statute of limitations
Musk is appealing. This fight is far from over.
What is the substance of the appeal? IANAL, but AIUI, it's pretty hard to appeal a finding of fact from a jury.
The substantive point of law will most likely be that OpenAI's salami slicing tactic for becoming a for-profit does not properly fall under the statute of limitations. To think otherwise is basically no different than arguing that you can rob a person twice and not be prosecuted for the second robbery because of "double jeopardy".
It's rare that judge's overturn jury verdicts, compared to other judge's verdicts. The constitution leans a lot on jury verdicts, and judges tend to respect that.
or it is pretty much over before it even began, because he sued way too late...
Lawsuit filed in 2024. Too late for it. AI boomed in 2023. And elon exited in 2021. I hate to say it but Elon lost. And we all lost.
What do you mean? Pandoras box has already been opened. Even if OpenAI disappears, there will be another one to take its marketshare. The tech is too useful to die
That Musk couldn't even get over the first stumbling block which is the statute of limitations, does not make the win any lesser. It makes it more decisive, since Musk now has to overcome that hurdle before even having a shot at the meat of the case.
I think parent probably means winning on merit or a sense of justice. As in won for a deserved reason rather than a technicality. The technicality here is exceeded the statute of limitations.
A win in any manner isn’t landing the same for observers as winning for a just reason.
There is no "sense of justice" that will sway an appeal, it's all about the law. And this jury just found that there was zero merit under law.
Appeals are for finding legal technicalities or edge cases. They do not overturn findings of fact from a jury.
That is, it used to be that way in the US, when the courts were ruled by law. In the modern US, the Supreme Court is a partisan political body, so perhaps people are confident it will get overturned because Musk is now political enough for the Supreme Court to give Musk personal favors for all his massive political contributions.
That sort of rank corruption is the only reason to be confident that Musk could ever win this silly case.
Juries issue findings of fact, they don't issue rulings about the law. The issue of whether the statute of limitations applies to any given factual situation is one of law.
This case should have never made it to a jury, there is no case here.
The judge was cowed by Musk's fame to even bring this to trial, I think. It's an example of how the justice system works differently for this with more wealth and power. There is no case, just massive ego from a person with massive wealth.
I believe an upset to Altman and a re-characterization of OpenAI to a charitable stance would have left investors scrambling, and would likely have hastened an unwinding of the AI bubble to some degree. It feels like we'll be on this merry-go-round a good deal longer now.
An entertaining and scathing writeup.
Dude has 800+ billion net worth. I think he'll be okay.
Elon fights for the users. He became unpopular when certain obedient people were told to dislike him for fighting for the users. But those people are just obedient to the interests of other billionaires.
Elon isn’t fighting for the users, that’s absolute nonesense.
Will we become Musk's slave or Altman's slave?
The kicker on this story is glorious
Exquisite prose merely to call two billionaires insufferable.
Are there any more noble uses for exquisite prose?
https://archive.is/YtMv1
Reverse engineering sociopathy is hard, and takes time, and you need to drink a lot of water. Maybe the best outcome for the wellbeing of the jurors, because once you start, you can't stop, and suddenly people begin trying to silence or kill you. EDIT: over and out, follow the White Bear, good luck.
no recaptcha / works on tor, unlike archive.is:
https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.newyorker.com/news/le...
Elon Musk is far right nazi supporter! Any loss for him is a win for humanity!
"We"? Who "We"?