This looks bad for OpenAI (although it's been pretty obvious that they are far from open for a long time).
But it looks 10x worse for Elon. At least for the public image, he desperately try to maintain.
> As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control.
> In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding,
> The difference is OpenAI had a reputation to protect
OpenAI changed its stance about five years ago. In meanwhile they got billions in investment, hired best employees, created very successful product and took leadership position in AI. Only narrative remaining was that they somehow betrayed original donors by moving away from the charter. This shows that is not the case; original donor(s) are equally megalomaniac and don't give a fuck about the charter.
> Musk can't sink any lower at this point, and his stans will persist.
You sure about that ?
For now they are largely looking away (and boy it's hard !) from his 'far right' adventures. But it was just reported that he met with Trump. And it's pretty clear that if Trump is elected and does cancel EV subsides as he says he will do, Tesla is dead and he knows it.
So now, we have both of those guys, having something each other wants - Trump wants Musks money now, and Musk wants ... taxpayer money once Trump is elected. I bet, Musk reputation can and will go much much lower in coming months.
If your life was changed by investing in TSLA you will look the other way the rest of your life. For many millennials that was their ticket to a good life.
His detractors do a poor job of knocking him down a peg. I am speaking as someone who was there on day 0 of r/realTesla.
Even today with garbage like that recent 60 minutes hit piece on SpaceX, it is easy to dismiss because of all the easily disprovable claims. So much criticism on Musk is just so lazily produced and not properly vetted and its a shame because there is a ton of material to get him with.
Nothing you wrote has a spec of evidence. The current administration has been clearly targeting Elon Musk and Tesla/SpaceX, so why on earth wouldn't Elon support their opponents?
everyone with a logical mind would see it. your political opinion should not cloud your judgement… people like you are the reason we have a senile old man leading our world to wars. I cant fathom why americans hate trump so much but are so lenient of biden and democrats that sent us to the worst conflict the world has seen in decades
The effect of sucking up to someone who previously said this about you might be even worse:
"When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican..."
Musk is a vindictive child and he has an axe to grind against Biden and the "woke" left. You'd think he wouldn't do something self defeating because of some slight but he turned $40 nillion into $10 billion buying Twitter for the stupidest reasons.
I mean his standing is based on what he is capable of, not what he does given the circumstance. We know he would side with Trump if it benefits him. I don't need to see the scenario play out for me to judge him for it.
The truth is, without subsides, Tesla would sell a fraction of what it does now, and it would certainly not be profitable (hell, it probably won't be profitable in 2024, even with the subsides !).
But at the same time, tear downs of their cars show they have healthy 30% margins when their competitors are selling their EVs often at a loss. Their current balance sheet looks much better than their competitors given the assets that they have for the EV transition. If governments are serious about transitioning to EVs then either they kick the other car companies into gear or accept that Tesla(and the Chinese) will be the only real serious players.
His 'stans and TLSA uber-bulls insist Tesla is no longer a car company but an AI one. So they probably don't care anymore.
I know some uber-bulls have long insisted Tesla stop selling cars to the public so they can be horded for the imminent Robotaxi fleet that will soon be deployed en masse by 2020.
Do you mind elaborating why you think it looks bad for OpenAI? I didn't see anything that diminishes their importance as an entity or hurts them in respect to this lawsuit or their reputation. In their internal emails from 2016 they explain what they mean by open.
I hear people complain about the 'Open' a lot recently, but I'm not sure I understand this type of concern. Publications, for companies, are always PR and recruitment efforts (independent of profit or nonprofit status). I recall that OpenAI were very clear about their long term intentions and plans for how to proceed since at least February of 2019 when they announced GPT2 and withheld the code and weights for about 9 months because of concerns with making the technology immediately available to all. In my own mind, they've been consistent in their behavior for the last 5 years, probably longer though I didn't care much about their early RL-related recruitment efforts.
With all due respect, they are not doing a sleight of hand while selling widgets... they are in the process of reshaping society in a way that may have never been achieved previously. Finding out that their initial motives were a facade doesn't portend well for their morality as they continue to gain power.
I still don’t understand why you think their initial motives were a facade. They have always been trying to get to AGI that will be useable by a large fraction of society. I am not sure this means they need to explain exactly how things work at every step along the way or to help competitors also develop AGI any more than Intel or Nvidia had to publish their tapeouts in order for people to buy their chips or for competitors to appear. If OpenAI instead built AI for the purpose of helping them solve an internal/whimsical project then that would not be “open” by any reasonable definition (and such efforts exist, possibly by ultra wealthy corporations but also by nations, including for defense purposes.)
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. 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.
That's obviously changed to "let's make lots of money", which should not be any "non-profit" organization's mission.
I still do not see the point that you are trying to make. Do you think that their current path is somehow constrained (instead of unconstrained) by a need to generate financial returns? I haven’t seen any evidence of a change to the core mission described in the statement.
If you advertise your company as a wholesome benevolent not-for-profit and generate a lot of goodwill for your human enhancing mission and then pull a bait and switch to what looks to be a profit/power motive at all costs. It certainly makes most people who are following the organization sour on your mission and your reputation.
Typically when organizations do something like that it speaks to some considerable underlying issues at the core of the company and the people in charge of it.
It is particularly troubling when it pertains to technology that we all believe to be incredibly important.
I don’t see any changes to the core mission of OpenAI between its founding and now. Maybe some people misinterpret what a nonprofit vs for-profit company status means and confuse the former with other types of organizations like academia or charity. For example, no early founder or investor in a nonprofit can expect to make money simply out of their investment, and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary for OpenAI. Any profits that a nonprofit makes, even those through ownership of the for-profit entity, must go back to the initial cause, and may include paying employees. Salaries in AI are high these days so if you want to stay on top you have to keep them higher than competition. In any case, I think this thread was not as productive as I hoped.
I think the word “open” is sort of a misrepresentation of what the company is today. I don’t mind personally but I can also see why people in the OSS community would.
Now, I’m not too concerned with any of the large LLM companies and their PR stunts, but from my solely EU enterprise perspective I see OpenAI as mostly a store-front for Microsoft. We get all the enterprise co-pilot products as part of our Microsoft licensing (which is bartered through a 3rd party vendor to make it seem like all the co-pilot stuff we get is “free” when it goes on the budget).
All of those tools are obviously direct results of the work OpenAI does and many of them are truly brilliant. I work in an investment bank that builds green energy plants and sells them with investor money. As you might imagine, nobody outside of our sales department is very good at creating PowerPoints. Especially our financial departments used to a “joy” to watch when they presented their stuff on monthly/quarterly meetings… seriously it was like they were in a competition to fit the most words into a single slide. With co-pilot their stuff looks absolutely brilliant. Still not on the level of our sales department, but brilliant and it’s even helped their presentations not last 90 million years. And this is just a tiny fraction of what we get out of co-pilot. Sure… I mostly use it to make stupid images of ducks, cats, and space marines with wolf heads for my code related presentations, and, to give me links to the right Microsoft domination I’m looking for in the ocean of pages. But it’s still the fruits of OpenAI.
Hell, the fact that they’re doing their stuff on Azure basically means that a lot of those 10 Microsoft billion are going directly back to Microsoft themselves as OpenAI purchases computing power. Yet it remains a “free” entity, so that Microsoft doesn’t run into EU anti-trust issues.
Despite this gloom and doom with an added bit of tinfoil hat, I do think OpenAI themselves are still true to their original mission. But in the boring business sense in an enterprise world, I also think they are simultaneously sort of owned by the largest “for enterprise” tech company in the world.
It was his money to give, he's not obligated to giving it out without some form of control. But yes that does seem pretty excessive, he basically wanted to pull a Tesla there.
They both are all about publicity and that's the name of the game. Doesn't matter who wins at the end, it's going to be absolutely all out in the Open. Hey.
It's not just that Elon wanted control, it's that Elon wanted it to become closed and for-profit. This exposes Elon as a bald-faced hypocrite with cynical intentions motivating the lawsuit.
Sam's reticence to publicly defend himself until now has backfired. Elon has fully controlled the public narrative and perception forming and it is hard to dislodge perceptions after they've settled.
> In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding. Reid Hoffman bridged the gap to cover salaries and operations.
I misspoke. He may have just resigned from the board when he didn't get what he wanted.
I was talking about his public image - 'founder' of Tesla, doing everything for the love of humanity etc.
It's all bullshit, and these emails show it again. He is an extraordinary businessman of course - but everything he does, he does for money and power - mostly coming from government subsides btw. Until recently though, he managed to make most believe that it was to save the planet and the humanity.
Yes, he has shown his true self when he called the British diver, who was rescuing kids out of cave in Thailand, a pedophile. That was more than 5 years ago.
Morals, ethics, and not being a jerk aside, Musk has now proven that he is just plain not thinking things through, when he:
1) Released the original Boring Company idea about tiny tunnels under LA to alleviate road traffic, which could easily be shot down by anyone modeling it on a single paper napkin.
2) Got caught up in ontological (theistic) arguments about alien scientists who had surely created a computer simulation in which we all live.
3) In an effort to prevent the inevitable AI overlords from controlling us, bought a company to create a ubiquitous neural interface so that computers have read/write access to our brains, of which somehow the AI overlords will not take advantage.
This was all as of 2018.
I still give him credit for previous accomplishments, but in aggregate, it is arguable that Elon Musk's new found ability to avoid thinking things through might be our "Great Filter."
Even though I truly despise the man that Musk is today, he is not comparable to Trump, prior to politics. Trump always scammed and lied, while Musk did have a real foundation of accomplishments.
I may be trying to compensate for having been an Elon stan pre-2018ish, but I do have to give him a lot credit for being the founder of SpaceX, which is the best launch provider on the planet. He was also the CEO who made Tesla what it is. He did accelerate the adoption of EVs. He truly believed in the physics of both of those endeavors, he was right, and I loved him for it. A true inspiration.
BUT.. around 2018 he got high on his own supply. I had watched every Elon video up to that point, and there is one old one where he said ~"I fear that I could get too ego driven, and have no one around to call me on my shit, and that really worries me." He was right to worry about that, because he sailed right through that with a vengeance. The first couple years of that were tolerable, but now, what a devolution. I hate to admit it, but it really broke my heart.
Now back to my first paragraph, Musk is worse than Trump politically, aka the part that matters now, because he is sucking a lot of intelligent people down to the lowest of human nature. It deeply disgusts me.
But it looks 10x worse for Elon. At least for the public image, he desperately try to maintain.
> As we discussed a for-profit structure in order to further the mission, Elon wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control. > In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding,