granzymes

I'm not really worried about the labs, it's misaligned governments that keep me up at night.

ASI landing during the current administration is not ideal. I also would prefer to avoid needing to indoctrinate myself in Xi Jinping Thought.

>I have focused in this essay only on the first point, as I believe it is by far the most urgent. However, I hold a deep hope and appreciation for the benefits that further technological progress will bring. Future aligned AI could advance science, develop new therapies, and bring about broad material abundance. Friendly and honest AI can help people navigate difficulties they face in their life and meaningfully improve their happiness and sense of fulfillment. OpenAI puts a tremendous amount of effort into bringing these benefits about. One current example I am proud of - and my loved ones have found helpful - is the deep investment into ChatGPT’s ability to provide health information.

>As great as the long-term promise of AI may be, the majority of our focus should be on the next few years. We are facing a transition to a world with incredibly intelligent machines, and we need to ensure that transition works out well for humanity. We need to find ways to preserve human agency and enshrine an intrinsic value to being human, in a world where most tasks could be performed by AI. To prevent extreme concentration of power in a world where undertakings that would have taken thousands of experts now will be achievable by a few people operating a large computer. And to ensure that humans remain in control of the future and are not left behind by unchecked progress, brought about by an alien intellect exceeding our own.

I finished this essay feeling more hopeful than I did at the outset, but I am still very concerned about concentration of power. I want to believe that humanity is trending towards a good outcome here, but some days it's hard to have faith.

It’s a cost-saving measure and a marketing story.

If the goal was to launch on a day when GitHub had issues, most days are good launch days.

At this point I assume Google is just budgeting for a $1B annual tax for operating in the EU.

We call things AI until they start working. See also: robots (your washing machine is a robot, but it works so you don’t think of it that way).

The “overlap” is that all machine learning is AI, but not all AI is machine learning.

>The proposal would also involve other US AI companies giving a similar stake to the government, the FT reported, although it is not clear yet whether companies such as Anthropic, Google and Meta would agree to the plan.

I can't see Google or Meta shareholders agreeing to this? That said, Google, Meta, and SpaceX are all still founder-controlled using supervoting shares.

To be clear, that is not "Google's memo". It's a memo by a guy who happened to work at Google. There is a diversity of opinions at a company that employs 180,000 people.

HN is of course not a monolith, but from my recollection most of the frustration and criticism w/r/t Mozilla is about its product strategy and executive team, not its corporate structure. Some other examples of nonprofits with for-profit subsidiaries include National Geographic, the AARP, and most research universities.

On Altman, the trial showed that Altman does not have any equity in the for-profit. He does have some indirect exposure through his investments in YC, since YC has a small position in OpenAI.

I'm curious why you think that creating a for-profit subsidiary is objectionable, since it is extremely common for large nonprofits. A good example for this forum would be Mozilla, but many more were mentioned during the trial.

Also curious what conflicts of interest you have in mind.

Elon's purchase offer was in 2025, after the success of ChatGPT showed that OpenAI's IP (much if not most of it developed after 2019) could be commercially valuable. I think it is also debatable whether Elon's purchase offer was in good faith.

It was not clear in 2019 that OpenAI's IP would ultimately be worth billions. That was well before the current AI boom.

>I for one will only buy Chinese RAM from now on, no matter the prices.

Memory is a commodity, so I think you will be very lonely in your quest.