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by pseudonom- 930 days ago
Are you aware of the history and governance structure of OpenAI?
1 comments

No, and I don't think it particularly matters. In practice, the people who signal they'll make their friends rich will have the most backers. The board is just there to give the appearance of checks and balances. If these two claims sound outrageous consider that this is exactly how it's playing out.

But you seem to have something in mind. Tell me.

OpenAI was formed as a nonprofit with a specific charter ("OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.") and the capped-profit entity under which daily operations occur formed years later with the claim that it was instrumentally useful for pursuing that charter. The capped-profit entity remains a subsidiary of the nonprofit. The board in the dispute is the board of the overseeing nonprofit.

So there are many particulars that mean pattern matching to a standard board dispute will lose something. I think it's likely many of the primary actors have, at various times, had non-strictly-pecuniary motives. That one side won doesn't mean that the other side was always a farce.

Ok thank you, but I haven't changed my mind. In practice people with more power will get their way, regardless of what's written on the charter of some company.