Comment by superkuh
3 years ago
It isn't surprising to me that the world's leading AI company is signalling it's okay with slowing down all large scale LLM training that would allow other companies to be competitive. This is familiar territory for Microsoft (edit: guess I'm wrong, they don't get the 49% stock till later).
Why do people conflate OpenAI with Microsoft? Microsoft has an investment in OpenAI and provides infrastructure for them, but they are separate organizations.
Some of these replies are quibbling about percents of investment, but the elephant in the room is that the government and military and intelligence agencies have almost surely become involved by this point, and they must be providing some amounts of dark investment somehow at minimum. At maximum it's a new Manhattan-scale project.
You can go down the rabbit hole if you want, but if you want only the most superficial glimpse of it then consider that OpenAI board member Will Hurd was a CIA undercover agent and also a representative in the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and also he is a trustee of In-Q-Tel which is the private investment arm of the CIA.
It's funny that you think the US military (or any military for that matter) is anywhere as competent as a modern tech company (which ALSO have their own incompetence problems).
Buddy, these guys are so far behind the times, they're constantly playing catch-up from 10-20 years ago.
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Also, consider the situation in which another state is putting significant resources into a similar project. Would it not follow that it is in the best interest of the U.S. to then fund and support OpenAI? The strategic calculus becomes almost trivial if we presume that "AI" really is going to be as transformative and "possible" as we imagine it being. It's why the Manhattan Project analogy works so well.
What is it about AI that makes people fall for conspiracy theories? If the US wants to reassure that AI will be regulated it wouldn't do it in secret. The ban on AI would be identical to a ban on guided munitions. Building a hobby rocket that uses GPS guidance for landing is illegal as it could be converted into a weapon. This is harder to enforce than AI but the regulation is highly successful.
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They do own 49% [1]. So, sure they are separate organizations. But, when someone owns 49% of your house they have some sway in the decision making that happens. When you look at this from a integrations standpoint, where MS is going to have this baked into all their products, you can expand this logic way more. They are for sure influencing roadmap in areas they are interested in.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/23/23567448/microsoft-openai...
Not entirely accurate. They don’t own 49% yet [0].
Microsoft invested $10B, and get 75% of OpenAI’s profits until they receive $10B and _then_ they get their 49% stock certificate.
[0] https://www.semafor.com/article/01/09/2023/microsoft-eyes-10...
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Look at it this way, if I repeatedly deposit $9999 into my bank account to avoid regulatory oversight for depositing $10000 then I'm still breaking the law by trying to avoid the regulatory trigger. This is called "structuring" and it is a criminal act.
But if I do this in a stock context and buy 49% control of multiple companies over and over, with all the same obviousness of my intentional avoidance of the regulatory trigger, it's considered a smart move and pretty much the status quo.
Yes, the practice of law says Microsoft does not own openai. But it's also obvious what's going on when companies do this.
Microsoft is the majority shareholder. That they're legally distinct organizations isn't as meaningful as it would be if Microsoft didn't effectively own OpenAI.
They might be the largest but at 49% they aren’t a majority shareholder; that requires >50%.
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