Posted by paulpauper 11/1/2025
What am I missing? I'm genuinely curious.
Also, the largest theft in human history surely has to be the East India Company extracting something like 50 trillion from India over 200 years, right?
I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.
Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?
Sure, it's divided up amongst all the descendants now, but it was quite a heist.
Divide total GDP by the population and turn it into one unit.
Ug's best smashing rock would be 1.
One criterion that might work is whether there's some greater power around that says it's theft, and is able/willing to enforce that in some manner.
So for example a successful conquest isn't theft, but a failed conquest is probably attempted theft (and vandalism of course).
"empires and conquest" is literally armed robbery.
It was always theft. Having been done in the past does not make them less theft. The reason East India Company is shown as example for such things is that it is the first human organization that did those on an industrial scale and genocidally.
https://yourstory.com/2014/08/bengal-famine-genocide
It was already starving Indians by forcing them to plant opium instead of food crops to sell to the Chinese to kill them for money (20 million/year estimated dead from opium) in the late 18th century. And when the Chinese finally tried to stop it, Opium wars happened. The justification shown for that war was 'Free trade'. The justifications still havent changed, neither the practices. This should tell you why East India Company is specifically evil, because it is the first large scale application of the evil you see today and it invented a lot of its methods.
To the extent the answer is ‘much lower’ then he could have spent a whole blog post congratulating California ag and Sam for landing the single largest new public charity in real dollar terms maybe ever.
If the point is “it sticks in my craw that the team won’t keep working how they used to plan on working even when the team has already left” then, fair enough. But I disagree with theft as an angle; there are too many counter factuals to think through before you should make a strong case it’s theft.
Put another way - I think the writer hates Sam and so we get this. I’m guessing we will not be reading an article where Ilya leaving and starting a C corp with no charitable component is called theft.
> It seems that Altman has a lot of detractors here, and I'm not sure why
Why are you confused/surprised that Altman has detractors?
But, you're right, that's no reason to refrain from criticizing them for it.
Plus, why do people think OAI is still special? Facebook, Google, and many smaller companies are doing the exact same work developing models.
Imagine if an executive was running the world’s largest charity for cancer research, which was chartered to make sure a cure remained in the public trust and raised millions with that promise.
But then once they discovered a cure for cancer the executive instead decided to transfer that cure to a ruthlessly competitive company they personally owned a large percentage of and then become a billionaire many times over.
Sam doesn’t do anything for free, even though he is already a billionaire 2-3 times over.
The property of a charity is being pillaged for the benefit of private parties, like Microsoft, existing employees, and yes of course Altman himself via various means.
You can “well actually” this all day, but at the beginning of the story there’s a charity with millions of dollars to do research and the promise to keep the resulting advancements in the public trust.
At the end of the story there will be billions of dollars in the hands of private individuals and the IP the charity created in the hands of a ruthless for profit company.
I am unable to find any concrete claim of specific tax avoidance. Only these exasperated “but taxes” comments.
All the sources I can find say that the revenue of ChatGPT was through the for-profit division, and that they’ve been paying taxes on all their revenue.
Is there some other tax that they’ve avoided paying?
Everything of their restructuring was signed off on by multiple states’ attorneys general. And their for-profit entity pays taxes like any other company.
Making them pay tax on stuff they did while a non-profit is making up laws on the fly - a strong, rule-of-law-based system is critical for the US to function properly.
You can’t just arbitrarily make decisions based on what you think should happen because it’s fair or unfair.
If you want OpenAI to pay back taxes, you need to change the laws first.
It's not about changing the laws, it's about enforcing the ones we have fairly. Too many orgs and companies buy politicians, and now ballrooms for them
I would not trust the corporations and politicians to be forthcoming or transparent on this
https://www.fplglaw.com/insights/california-nonprofit-law-es...
- AGI being cheap to develop, or
- finding funders willing to risk billions for capped returns.
Neither happened. And I'm not sure the public would invest 100's of billions on the promise of AGI. I'm glad there are investors willing to take that chance. We all benefit either way if it is achieved.
I am not sure that making labour obsolete, and putting the replacement in the hands of a handful of investor will result in everybody benefiting.
I believe that AGI will be a net benefit to whomever controls it.
I would argue that if a profit driven company rents something valuable out to others, you should expect it would benefit them just as much if not more, than those paying for that privilege. Rented things may be useful, but they certainly are not a net benefit to the system as a whole.
Information interconnection is meaningfully different from AGI, and the environment ATT and Bell existed within no longer exist.
Drop those assumptions and my point stands that throughout history, monopolistically-controlled transformative technologies (telephones, electricity, vaccines, railroads) have still delivered net benefits to society, even if imperfectly distributed. This is just historical fact.
Yeah, like I said, room for improvement. I find the argument that AGI or sAGI should be feared, or is likely to turn "evil" absurd in the best case. So your arguing against a strawman I already find stupid.
Telephones, increased the speed of information transfer, it couldn't produce on it's own. Electricity allowed transmission of energy from one place to another, and doesn't produce inherent value in isolation, vaccines are in an entirely different class of advancement, (so I have to idea how you mean to apply it to the expected benefits of AGI? I assume you believe AGI will have something to do with reducing disability), railroads again, like energy or telephones, involved moving something of value from one place to another.
AGI is supposed to produce a potentially limitless amount of inherent value on its own, right? It will do more than just move around components of value, but more like a diamond mine, it will output something valuable as a commodity. Something that can easily be controlled... oh but it's also not concrete, you can never have your own, it's only available for rental, and you have to agree to the ToS. That sounds just like all previous inventions, right?
You're welcome to cite any historical facts you like, but when you're unwilling or unable to draw concrete parallels, or form convincing conclusions yourself, and hand wave, well most impressivive inventions in the past were good so I feel AGI will be cool too!
Also, the critical difference (ignoring the environmental differences between then and now) between the inventions you cited, and AGI, is the difficulty in replicating any technology. Other than "it happened before to most technologies" is there reason I should believe that AGI would be easy to replicate for any company that wants to compete against the people actively working to increase the size of their moat? copper wire, and train tracks are easy to install. Do you expect AGI will be easy for everyone to train?