How can we still believe that companies are not there to sell us out, really?
What's the "us" in the sentence?
Companies exist to make their owners money, by providing goods and services to customers.
If non profits are allowed to become for profit entities it breaks the entire system. Then every startup should start as a non profit, allow everyone to write off all of their investments, operate with no taxes, and once they are big enough switch to a for profit entity.
That doesn't make it legally ok, but it does make their initial (though not subsequent) surprise forgivable.
Their own later self, and everyone else copying the same behaviour, not so much.
There’s a sort of irresistible momentum that happens when enough money pools together, and no person can resist it. You see it with apple’s customer-hostile app store policies that are a result of the money being too good, and now with OpenAI.
I wonder how this problem ever gets solved at the level of society. Enough money pooling together always wins out over public interest.
I think you’d need a government organization on the level of Manhattan Project to really compete, but unfortunately there don’t seem to be many Robert Oppenheimers and Vannevar Bushes working in the public sector anymore.
But I agree, leaving this work up to shit eating PE firms and smarmy VC bros is asking for disaster.
I don’t get why people shrug, or even celebrate this, instead of demanding jail time.
See also: Sports, politics.
Also it seems the 'muh ai safety' doomerism was indeed just a calculated bit to throw off the competition.
At least the current situation better reflects the reality. They're in it to make money, externalities be damned.
Apparently OpenAI needs to be regulated more to ensure AI benefits everybody. As opposed to now where AI only benefits those that can pay 20$ a month? OpenAI has repeatedly stated their goal is “intelligence too cheap to meter”, which seems fine to me with respect to the ephemeral goal of “AI benefitting society”. If they make some profits along the way (which they apparently are not right now), that’s fine too. Compare this to NVIDIA, which is blatantly overcharging 30,000$+ for a single data center GPU when it could be 5000$, and I wouldn’t say OpenAI is even among the most greedy companies in the space.
Sure, that's unchecked capitalism for you, but it's not a compelling reason for giving them a pass or looking the other way.
