Item — HN Reader

Nobody should have any illusion about the purpose of most business - make money. The "safety" is a nice to have if it does not diminish the profits of the business. This is the cold hard truth.

If you start to look through the optics of business == money making machine, you can start to think at rational regulations to curb this in order to protect the regular people. The regulations should keep business in check while allowing them to make reasonable profits.

3 comments

It's not long ago they were a non-profit. This sudden change to a for-profit business structure, complete with "businesses exist to make money" defence, is giving me whiplash.

I find the whole thing pretty depressing. They went to all that effort with the organization and setup of the company at the beginning to try to bake this "good for humanity" stuff into its DNA and legal structure and it all completely evaporated once they struck gold with ChatGPT. Time and time again we see noble intentions being completely destroyed by the pressures and powers of capitalism.

Really wish the board had held the line on firing sama.

> Time and time again we see noble intentions being completely destroyed by the pressures and powers of capitalism.

It is not capitalism, it is human nature. Look at the social stratification that inevitably appears every time communism was tried. If you ignore human nature you will always be disappointed. We need to work with the reality we have on the ground and not with an ideal new human that will flourish in a make believe society.

You got me wrong, I did not defended OpenAI - the 180 they did from non profit to for profit was disgusting from a moral point of view. What I was describing is how most businesses operate and how to look at them and not be disappointed.

It was never about safety.

"Safety" was just a mechanism for complete control of the best LLM available.

When every AI provider did not trust their competitor to deliver "AGI" safely, what they really mean was they did not want that competitor to own the definition of "AGI" which means an IPOing first.

Using local models from China that is on par with the US ones takes away that control, and this is why Anthropic has no open weight models at all and their CEO continues to spread fear about open weight models.

This is no longer about money, it's about power.

> This is no longer about money, it's about power

This is more Altman-speak. Before it was about how AI was going to end the world. That started backfiring, so now we're talking about political power. That power, however, ultimately flows from the wealth AI generates.

It's about the money. They're for-profit corporations.

If AI achieves what these guys envision, money probably won't mean much.

What would they do with money? Pay people to work?

Pay them to dance.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Dancing is a profession, and people do get paid to do it.

Woosh doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Yes, please kindly explain.

Kind of? Assuming OpenAI was actually 2-3 years ahead of other LLM companies, it would be hard to put a value to that tech advantage

Has AI generated any wealth?

There'd be a recession otherwise, no?

I think they meant the resulting LLMs, not the speculation of AI which is currently the biggest driver right now

You get it. To everyone who thinks ai is a money furnace they don’t understand the output of the furnace is power and they are happy with the conversion even if the markets aren’t.

Money is power, and nothing but.

But power is not only money.