Posted by spenvo 7/1/2025
got it
Mercs don't take money, they earn it.
Why not be both?
they went from open to closed. they went from advocating ubi to for profit. they went from pacific to selling defense tech. they went from a council overseeing the project to a single man in control.
and thats fine, go make all the money you can, but don't try do this sick act where you try to convince people to thank you for acting in your own self interest.
Let’s assume for a moment that OpenAI is the only company that can build AGI (specious claim), then the question I would have for Sam Altman: what is OpenAI’s plan once that milestone is reached, given his other argument:
> And maybe more importantly than that, we actually care about building AGI in a good way,” he added. “Other companies care more about this as an instrumental goal to some other mission. But this is our top thing, and always will be.
If building AGI is OpenAI’s only goal (unlike other companies), will OpenAI cease to exist once mission is accomplished or will a new mission be devised?
>The two companies reportedly signed an agreement last year stating OpenAI has only achieved AGI when it develops AI systems that can generate at least $100 billion in profits.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/microsoft-and-openai-have-...
A leaked email from Ilya early on even said they never planned to open source stuff long term, it was just to entice researchers at the beginning.
Whole company is founded on lies and Altman was even fired from YC over self detailing or something in I think a deleted YC blog post if I remember right.
I constantly get quasi-religious vibes from the current AI "leaders" (Altman, Amodei, and quite a few of the people who have left both companies to start their own). I never got those sort of vibes from Hinton, LeCun, or Bengio. The latest crop really does seem to believe that they're building some sort of "god" and that their god getting built first before one of their competitors builds a false god is paramount (in the literal meaning of the term) for the future of the human race.
What can AGI give us that would end scarcity, when our scarcity is artificial? New farming mechanisms that mean nobody go hungry? We already throw away most of our food. We don't lack food, our resource allocation mechanism (Capitalism) just requires some people to be hungry.
What about new medicines? Magic new pills that cure cancer - why would these be given away for free when they can be sold, instead?
Maybe AGI will recommend the perfect form of fair and equitable governance! Well, it almost certainly will be a recommendation that strips some power from people who don't want to give up any power at all, and it's not like they'll give it up without a fight. Not that they'll need to fight - billionaires exist today and have convinced people to fight for them, against people's own self interest, somehow (I still don't understand this).
So, I'll modify Mark Fisher's quote - it's easier to imagine the creation of AGI than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
One of the observable features of capitalism is that there are no hungry people. Capitalism has completely solved the problem of hunger. People are hungry when they don't have capitalism.
>billionaires exist today and have convinced people to fight for them
People usually fighting for themselves. It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being. Or even more often - a side effect of social well-being. People fighting for billionaires to protect social well-being, not to protect billionaires.
>it's easier to imagine the creation of AGI than it is to imagine the end of capitalism
There is no need to even imagine the end of capitalism - we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.
This is as fascinating to me as if someone walked up to me and said "Birds don't exist." It's a statement that's instantly, demonstrably provably wrong by simply turning and pointing at a bird, or in this case, by Googling "Child hunger in the usa," and seeing a shitload of links demonstrating that 12.8% of US households are food insecure.
Or, the secondary point, that hunger is only when no capitalism, demonstrably untrue, since the countries that ensure capitalism can continue to thrive by providing cheap labor, have visible extreme hunger, such as India. India isn't capitalist? America isn't capitalist? Madagascar isn't capitalist? Palestine?
> It's just that billionaires often are not enemies of society, but source of social well-being.
How can someone not be an enemy of society when they maintain artificial scarcity by hoarding such a massive portion of society's output, and then acting to hoard and concentrate our collective wealth even more into their own hands? Since when has "greed" not been a universally reviled trait?
> we see it all the time, most of the world can hardly be called capitalist. And the less capitalism there is, the worse.
I genuinely can't understand what you're seeing in the world to think the global economy is not capitalist in nature.
This is definitely not a manipulation of statistics and not a trivialization of food insecurity that are relevant to many parts of the world. And then they wonder why people choose to support billionaires instead of you lying cannibals.
> such as India
> Madagascar isn't capitalist? Palestine?
No? This countries has nothing to do with an economy built on the principles of the inviolability of private property and economic freedom. USA has more socialism than this countries have capitalism.
> How can someone not be an enemy of society when they maintain artificial scarcity by hoarding such a massive portion of society's output
because it is not portion of society's output that matters, but size of that output. What's the point of even distribution if size of the share is not enough even to not to die from starvation?
> Since when has "greed" not been a universally reviled trait?
Question is not either greed reviled trait or not. Greed is a fact of human nature. The question is what this ineradicable human quality leads to in specific economic systems: to universal prosperity, as under capitalism, or to various abominations like mass starvation, as without it.
There is no manipulation of statistics here, anyone that's worked in a school could tell you this, including me, personally. There are hungry children in the USA. It should be telling to you and your view on life, and the ideas you consume, that you believe a vast conspiracy to manipulate statistics is more likely than capitalism causing hunger.
> And then they wonder why people choose to support billionaires instead of you lying cannibals.
I really don't understand this insult lol, but I think it's funny that you think billionaires have more support than not. It's fine, the cycle of history that ends with the many poor realizing they outnumber the few rich 100,000:1 definitely will never ever happen again, they should keep concentrating wealth into a few people, it's totally safe this time.
> This countries has nothing to do with an economy built on the principles of the inviolability of private property and economic freedom.
Wrong, they're capitalist.
> USA has more socialism than this countries have capitalism.
Nope, wrong.
> What's the point of even distribution if size of the share is not enough even to not to die from starvation?
I don't get it, are you admitting that people do go hungry in the USA then? Well, regardless, the majority of the food in the USA is thrown away, or subsidies are provided to farmers to not grow it. It's not an issue of scarcity, it's an issue of distribution. Capitalism has no mechanism to guarantee people don't go hungry - if people going hungry is profitable (or ensuring they're fed is not profitable), then, this will occur under capitalism.
> to universal prosperity, as under capitalism, or to various abominations like mass starvation, as without it.
Mass starvation happens today, under global capitalism. Mass starvation happened in the USA once because the stock market crashed (among some other reasons). Capitalism is no more immune to mass starvation than other economic systems. Capitalism also apparently leads to people unnecessarily dying from overwork (exploiting cheap labor in other countries), lack of healthcare (America's for-profit healthcare system), etc.
Your blinders on the true nature of capitalism will only turn people away from it into my friends' welcoming arms. If you're truly interested in maintaining capitalism, you need to get better at defending it, the way neoliberals are. Get better at admitting the faults of capitalism in a way that lets you sustain them, or people are going to abandon it altogether. This dogmatic denial of the flaws of capitalism are funny to watch, but do you no good.
After spending so many billions on this stuff, are they really going to pay it all off selling API credits?
> OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.
IMO, AGI is already a very nebulous term. Superintelligence seems even more hand-wavy. It might be useful to define and understand limits of "intelligence" first.
i’m noticing more and more lately that our new monarchs really do have broken thought patterns. they see their own abuse towards others as perfectly ok but hilariously demand people treat them fairly.
small children learn things that these guys struggle to understand.
He's very good at creating headlines and getting people talking online. There's no doubt he's good at what he does, but I don't know why anyone takes anything he says seriously.
Being a billionaire seems to be inherently bad for human brains.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/friendship-ended-with-mudasir
This is the same Sam Altman who abandoned OpenAI’s founding mission in favour of profit?
No it can’t be
For example, I'm on a mission to build a better code editor for the world. That's cost me 4 years of my life and several hundred thousand dollars.
He wanted one, so he bought it for 3 billion. I think he's doomed to fail there for pretty much the exact reasons he states here...
"missionary" pfff...
1) They are far from profitability. 2) Meta is aggressively making their top talent more expensive, and outright draining it. 3) Deepseek/Baidu/etc are dramatically undercutting them. 4) Anthropic and (to a lesser extent?) Google appear to be beating them (or, charitably, matching them) on AI's best use case so far: coding. 5) Altman is becoming less like-able with every unnecessary episode of drama; and OpenAI has most of the stink from the initial (valid) grievance of "AI-companies are stealing from artists". The endless hype and FUD cycles, going back to 2022, have worn industry people out, as well as the flip flop on "please regulate us". 6) Its original, core strategic alliance with Microsoft is extremely strained. 7) and, related to #6, its corporate structure is extremely unorthodox and likely needs to change in order to attract more investment, which it must (to train new frontier models). Microsoft would need to sign off on the new structure. 8) Musk is sniping at its heels, especially through legal actions.
Barring a major breakthrough with GPT-5, which I don't see happening, how do they prevail through all of this and become a sustainable frontier AI lab and company? Maybe the answer is they drop the frontier model aspect of their business? If we are really far from AGI and are instead in a plateau of diminishing returns that may not be a huge deal, because having a 5% better model likely doesn't matter that much to their primary bright spot:
Brand loyalty from the average person to ChatGPT is the best bright spot, and OpenAI successfully eating Google's search market. Their numbers there have been truly massive from the beginning, and are I think the most defensible. Google AI Overviews continue to be completely awful in comparison.
XAI has Elon's fortune to burn, and Spacex to fund it.
Gemini has the ad and search business of Google to fund it.
Meta has the ad revenue of IG+FB+WhatsApp+Messenger.
Whereas OpenAI $10 billion in annual revenue, but low switching costs for both consumers and developers using their APIs.
If you stay at the forefront of frontier models, you need to keep burning money like crazy, that requires raising rounds repeatedly for OpenAI, whereas the tech giants can just use their fortunes doing it.
OpenAI has enough runway to figure things out and place themselves in a healthier position.
And come to think of it, loosing a few researchers to other companies may not be so bad. Like you said that others have cash to burn. They might spend that cash more liberally and experiment with bolder riskier products and either fail spectacularly or succeed exponentially. And OpenAI can still learn from it well enough and still benefit even though it was never their cash.
So, what happened? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the culture and/or infra at Meta? If it was just because Zuckerburg bet on the wrong horses to lead their LLM initiatives, what makes us think he got it right this time?
I doubt that OpenAI needs or wants to be a sustainable company right now. They can probably continue to drum up hype and investor money for many years. As long as people keep writing them blank checks, why not keep spending them? Best case they invent AGI, worst case they go bankrupt, which is irrelevant since it's not their own money they're risking.
LLMs trained on open data will regress because there is too much LLM generated slop polluting the corpus now. In order for models to improve and adapt to current events they need fresh human created data, which requires a mechanism to separate human from AI content, which requires owning a platform where content is created, so that you can deploy surveillance tools to correctly identify human created content.
They will either have to acquire a data source or build their own moving forward imo. I could see them buying reddit.
Sam Altman also owns something like ~10% of reddits stock since they went public.
I can't imagine how they will compete if they need to continue burning and needing to raise capital until 2030.
This is a repeat of the fight for talent that always happens with these things. It's all mercenary - it's all just business. Otherwise they'd remain an NGO.
I can't help but think that it would have been a much better move for him to get fired from OpenAI. Allow that to do it's own thing and start other ventures with a clean reputation, and millions instead of billions in the bank.
That Mark must have come after the Mark that created a site in college where the visitor compared two women and ranked which of the two were "hotter".
So yeah. Naked ambition. They're both just creaming their pants for power.
Ultimately, he’ll just realize that humanity doesn’t give a fuck, and that he’s in it for himself only.
And the typical butterfly-to-caterpillar transition will be complete.
All of this to say, they delude themselves that the future of humanity needs "AI" or we are doomed. Ironically, the creation and expansion of LLM's drastically increased the power usage of humanity to its own detriment.
Big Tech has become a doomsday cult.