We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen.
I think the irony of the name is certainly worth pointing out, but I don't see an issue with their capped-profit switch.
Well, of course. But we'd get similarly powerful models elsewhere. Maybe a few weeks or months later. Maybe even a few weeks or months earlier, if, say, OpenAI sucked up a lot of talent and used it wastefully, which I don't find implausible at all.
So, I agree instead with meowface, and think it could even have been a 5+ year delay rather than 2 or 3. If you look at breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements, 5 years is not a long timescale. (And if OpenAI hadn't have made their breakthroughs, production of the highest-end GPUs/TPUs would be nowhere near where it is today.)
(I'm not attempting to justify OpenAI's structure or behaviour, just want to comment on one point.)
I think the world is much better off with them having switched the structure vs. throwing their hands in the air and giving up because they were stuck as a non-profit forever.
The for profit part is fine, but how is the non-profit currently fulfilling any of its mission?
That doesn't justify fraud, for instance.
Unfortunately, people are becoming increasingly illiterate with regards to what is legal and what is not.
Read. [1]
>If they did something illegal why weren't they charged years ago?
Because the Microsoft/OpenAI deal was not even a thing "years ago". (Duh.)
That aside, I will answer the charitable interpretation of your question by sharing a bit of knowledge about how the law process works (in the Western hemisphere).
To put someone who committed fraud in jail, law enforcement conducts an investigation to gather evidence, leading to criminal charges filed by the prosecutor.
The defendant is arraigned, and pre-trial motions may be filed before the case goes to trial, where both sides present their arguments and evidence.
If found guilty, the court imposes a sentence, which can include incarceration, restitution, and fines. The defendant may appeal the verdict.
This is a very simplified overview of the whole ordeal, which could go on for years and years depending on the complexity of the case.
1: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/05/e...
"We never would've gotten [thing that exists today] if [thing that happened] didn't happen", is practically a tautology. As you saw from the willingness of Microsoft to throw compute as well as to hire ex-OpenAI folks, as you can see from the many "spinoffs" others have started (such as Anthropic), whether or not we would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 is immaterial to this discussion. What people here are asking for is open AI, which we might, all things considered, have actually gotten from a bona fide non profit.
