Comment by Traster
22 days ago
Can we just bring some reality to this conversation. The non-profit still exists, it owns a significant chunk of a now almost trillion dollar company, and the for-profit wouldn't be profitable if it weren't for Billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft.
There is no counter factual where OpenAI exists as a non-profit and still inexplicably gets handed billions of dollars of compute to train LLMs. The for-profit company is a different thing from the non-profit and it exists for perfectly understandable reasons and I'm unsure why anyone other than Elon Musk pretends this doesn't make sense.
What is your proposed counter factual where the non-profit entity retains all ownership of the venture, but somehow finds hundreds of billions of dollars to train LLMs?
An alternative chain of events might be one where OpenAI, Inc. only operated through income and donations, which would probably lead to them scaling more slowly. They could also take on loans.
Having thought about this whole thing more I believe that non-profits should not be a separate type of entity that gets special tax treatment. People have different ideas of what constitutes legitimate non-profit activity. It just opens things up for tax avoidance and scams.