[richardw]

I might be too generous, but my interpretation is that the ground changed so fast that they needed to shift to continue the mission given the new reality. After ChatGPT, every for-profit and its dog is going hard. Talent can join the only Mother Teresa in the middle, or compete with them as they stupidly open all the source the second they discover anything. You can’t compete with the biggest labs in the world who have infinite GPU, with selfless open sourcers running training on their home PC’s. And you need to be in the game to have any influence over the eventual direction. I’d still bet the goal is the same, but how it’s done has changed by necessity.

[stubish]

> After ChatGPT, every for-profit and its dog is going hard.

After ChatGPT was not released to the public, every for-profit raced to reproduce and improve on it. The decision not to release early and often with a restrictive license helped create that competition for funds and talent. If the company had been truly open, competition would have either had the choice of moving quickly, spending less money and contributing to the common core, or spending more money, going slower as they clean room implement the open code they can't use, and trying to compete alone. This might have been a huge win for the open source model, making the profitable decision to be to contribute to the commons.

[ethbr1]

> And you need to be in the game to have any influence over the eventual direction

Effective altruism, eh?

[richardw]

No idea, don’t know what they stand for. This is logic. What do you do if you’re Sam Altman and ChatGPT has blown up like it has, and demands resources just to run the GPU’s. What is his next move? It’s not business as usual.

The risk is that he’s too confident and screws it up. Or continues on the growth path and becomes the person everyone seems to accuse him of being. But I think he’s not interested in petty shit, scratching around for a few bucks. Why, when you can (try) save the world.

[ethbr1]

Money for resources to run ChatGPT is the tail wagging the dog, though.

If you need money to run the publicly released thing you underpriced to seize market share...

... you could also just, not?

And stick to research and releasing results.

At what point does it stop being "necessary" for OpenAI to do bad things to stay competitive and start being about them just running the standard VC playbook underneath a non-profit umbrella?

[_heimdall]

Unless the charter leaves room for such a drastic pivot, I'm not sure how well this would hold up. Whether the original charter is binding is up for lawyers to debate, but as written it seems to spell out the mission clearly and with little wiggle room for interpretation. Maybe they could go after the definition of when open sourcing would benefit the public?

[lumost]

Other possibility is that they claim they spent the non-profut funds prior to going for-profit? It would be dubious to claim damages if the entity was effectively bankrupt prior to for profit creation.

[_heimdall]

Wouldn't that require notification to all interested parties of the nonprofit since its effectively killing off the nonprofit and starting a new entity?

[aorloff]

These are things to consider when you decide to build a company using a novel charter instead of a standard startup

[bmitc]

All of this was intentional. The goal the whole time was to eventually pull the rug out from the non-profit. This should be considered fraud.

[sumitkumar]

The original charter is nothing more than a marketing copy. And companies are legally allowed to change their marketing copy over time and are not bound to stick to it in behavior. The marketing was for the investors and they should be the first to know that such promises are subject to how reality unfolds. In other words a team can raise money by promising milestones but they are allowed to pivot the whole business and not just abandon milestones if the reality of the business demands it.

[bmitc]

That is not true for non-profits. The charter is legally binding.