Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. They’ve touted the company’s unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe.
But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI.
In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company. Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a “WTF” emoji in Slack.
WTF indeed.
It’s WeWork and Adam Neumann all over again.
You couldn’t pay me to invest in this shit and it feels a little insane that seemingly intelligent VC’s are doing so.
Removed by mod
Definitely.
Also, don’t invest in companies that hand total control to one person. That’s a recipe for having that one idiot blow all of your money, like Adam Neumann did. (Fun fact: Toward the end of WeWork’s heyday, Neumann was burning $3k in cash a minute.)
i want them trained on me so that our future robot overlords will respect me… maybe create some simulacrum of my consciousness to live on forever
You think they would expend resources recreating nobodies like us? Sam gets his digital construct immortality and we squat.
i’ve been obsessively commenting on reddit for years… i’ll live on forever