OpenAI owes us $180 billion
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What is the promise of OpenAI's technology for humanity?
Chat GPT. You either love it or you hate it, am I right? You love it because it tells you why your back keeps doing that. You hate it because it uses a boatload of fresh water to do so. Or maybe you hate it because after OpenAI trained chat on centuries of humanity's creative labor, its leader, Sam Altman, said he wants to sell it right back to us.
We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.
Cool! But wait! ChatGPT's parent company, OpenAI, has the potential to do tons of good, too. Turns out they've got $180 billion of charitable monies to give away to humanity, to help our cause. That's more than double what the Gates Foundation has to play with. OpenAI owes us $180 billion. But are we going to get it? On today's Explain from Vox. Here we go.
How did OpenAI transition from nonprofit to for-profit?
Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision. That bad? Maybe vamp it up a tad? I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear. Create a video in the vampire theme and make it the funniest, I mean. It went viral. Bob's business, a revival. Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com. Hey, chat. Introduce Today Explained, the podcast.
Of course. Today Explained is a daily news podcast from Vox.
Each episode takes a single- No, just introduce it like you're introducing the show.
What are the implications of OpenAI's $180 billion charitable commitment?
Like, this is Today Explained.
Ah, got it. This is Today Explained. Show me the money, chat. Sarah Hirshander from Vox is here to tell us where to start.
I think we would have to start back in 2015. So that's when OpenAI started. OpenAI began as a nonprofit. It began as this nonprofit AI lab founded by a few donors, including some extremely familiar names like Elon Musk and Sam Altman.
It's very important that we have the advent of AI in a good way.
And they founded it as a nonprofit to develop AI in a way that is safe and that will benefit humanity. And they created it as a nonprofit lab instead of as a corporation or as like a for-profit startup, which is normally what we would see for this kind of thing, because they figured that this technology was going to be so transformative that we need to make sure there's no profit motive involved. So nobody is going to make money off of what we're making.
The reason for our structure and the reason it's so weird is we think this technology, the benefits, the access to it, the governance of it, belongs to humanity as a whole. You should not, if this really works, it's quite a powerful technology and you should not trust one company and certainly not one person with it.
How does OpenAI's business model impact its original mission?
That was 2015. Fast forward a few years and AI starts getting a lot of buzz because of a new product called ChatGPT that OpenAI, the nonprofit lab, developed.
A new artificial intelligence tool is going viral for cranking out entire essays in a matter of seconds. We have about 100 million weekly active users now on ChatGPT. OpenAI is the most advanced and the most widely used AI platform in the world now.
So over time, OpenAI was saying, you know, we need a lot more money to be able to do this properly. It costs a lot of money to develop AI. It costs money to, like, hire people. The computing power, all of it costs a lot of money. So, like, we need investors. We can't just rely on donations and sort of the tax breaks that we get as a nonprofit to develop this stuff. And so they created this like what's called like a capped profit subsidiary, which was like a little for profit arm that they could use to raise that money. It would still be under the control of the nonprofit as kind of like the umbrella parent organization. But they were able to raise some money to some extent. A lot more money started pouring in, a lot more interest from investors started pouring in, and OpenAI was kind of struggling to reconcile the nonprofit part of their mission and the fact that they were becoming this enormous, one of the most well-known tech companies in the country.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the promise of OpenAI's technology for humanity?
0:00–0:59
2
How did OpenAI transition from nonprofit to for-profit?
0:59–1:43
3
What are the implications of OpenAI's $180 billion charitable commitment?
1:43–3:02
4
How does OpenAI's business model impact its original mission?
3:02–4:25
5
What controversies surround OpenAI's dealings with the Pentagon?
4:25–5:59
6
What are the legal challenges OpenAI faces regarding nonprofit laws?
5:59–7:27
7
How does the conflict of interest affect OpenAI's credibility?
7:27–9:11
8
What does the future hold for OpenAI and its charitable efforts?
9:11–25:00