Evolving OpenAI's Structure

https://www.noemamag.com/artificial-general-intelligence-is-...

Here is a mainstream opinion about why AGI is already here. Written by one of the authors the most widely read AI textbook: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence:_A_Mod...

I agree with you, but that’s kindof beside the point. Open AI’s thesis is that they will work towards AGI, and eventually succeed. In the context of that premise, Open AI still doesn’t believe AGI would be winner-takes-all. I think that’s an interesting discussion whether you believe the premise or not.

Agreed and, if anything, you are too generous. They aren’t just not “close”, they aren’t even working in the same category as anything that might be construed as independently intelligent.

I agree with you

I wonder, do you have a hypothesis as to what would be a measurement that would differentiate AGI vs Not-AGI?

Their multimodal models are a rudimentary form of AGI.

EDIT: There can be levels of AGI. Google DeepMind have proposed a framework that would classify ChatGPT as "Emerging AGI".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02462

IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).

Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.

MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.

> ban all non-US LLM providers

What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.

> I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."

Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.

If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.

For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.

But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.

Switching between Apple and Google/Android ecosystems is expensive and painful.

Switching from ChatGPT to the many competitors is neither expensive nor painful.

Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.

Either that, or this AI boom mirrors prior booms. Those booms saw a lot of progress made, a lot of money raised, then collapsed and led to enough financial loss that AI went into hibernation for 10+ years.

There's a lot of literature on this, and if you've been in the industry for any amount of time since the 1950s, you have seen at least one AI winter.

> AGI is matter of when, not if

We have zero evidence for this. (Folks said the same shit in the 80s.)

Progress is not just a function of technical possibility( even if it exists) it is also economics.

It has taken tens to hundred of billions of dollars without equivalent economic justification(yet) before to reach here. I am not saying economic justification doesn't exist or wont come in the future, just that the upfront investment and risk is already in order of magnitude of what the largest tech companies can expend.

If the the next generation requires hundreds of billions or trillions [2] upfront and a very long time to make returns, no one company (or even country) could allocate that kind of resources.

Many cases of such economically limited innovations[1], nuclear fusion is the classic always 20 years away example. Another close one is anything space related, we cannot replicate in next 5 years what we already achieved from 50 years ago of say landing on the moon and so on.

From a just a economic perspective it is a definitely a "If", without even going into the technology challenges.

[1]Innovations in cost of key components can reshape economics equation, it does happen (as with spaceX) but it also not guaranteed like in fusion.

[2] The next gen may not be close enough to AGI. AGI could require 2-3 more generations ( and equivalent orders of magnitude of resources), which is something the world is unlikely to expend resources on even if it had them.

AGI is matter of when, not if

probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong

I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective.

Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI.

That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.

There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).

The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.

I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more.

So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.

Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.

> AGI is matter of when, not if.

LLMs destroying any sort of capacity (and incentive) for the population to think pushes this further and further out each day

Could you elaborate on the progress that has been made? To me, it seems only small/incremental changes are made between models with all of them still hallucinating. I can see no clear steps towards AGI.

"X increased exponentially in the past, therefore it will increase exponentially in the same way in the future" is fallacious. There is nothing guaranteeing indefinite uncapped growth in capabilities of LLMs. An exponential curve and a sigmoidal curve look the same until a certain point.

If they think AGI is imminent the value of that payday is very limited. I think the grandparent is more correct: OpenAI is admitting that near term AGI - which, being that the only one anyone really cares about is the case with exponential self improvement - isn't happening any time soon. But that much is obvious anyway despite the hyperbolic nonsense now common around AI discussions.

> Just to get things right. The big AI LLM hype started end of 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, ....

GPT-2 was released in 2019, GPT-3 in 2020. I'd say 2020 is significant because that's when people seriously considered the Turing test passed reliably for the first time. But for the sake of this argument, it hardly matters what date years back we choose. There's been enough time since then to see the plateau.

> Most people in society connect AI directly to ChatGPT and hence OpenAI.

I'd double-check that assumption. Many people I've spoken to take a moment to remember that "AI" stands for artificial intelligence. Outside of tongue-in-cheek jokes, OpenAI has about 50% market share in LLMs, but you can't forget that Samsung makes AI washing machines, let alone all the purely fraudulent uses of the "AI" label.

> And there has been a lot of progress in image generation, video generation, ...

These are entirely different architectures from LLM/chat though. But you're right that OpenAI does that, too. When I said that they don't stray much from chat, I was thinking more about AlexNet and the broad applications of ML in general. But you're right, OpenAI also did/does diffusion, GANs, transformer vision.

This doesn't change my views much on chat being "not seeing the forest for the trees" though. In the big picture, I think there aren't many hockey sticks/exponentials left in LLMs to discover. That is not true about other AI/ML.

No, it's still just a toy. Until they can make the models actually consistently good at things, they aren't going to be useful. Right now they still BS you far too much to trust them, and because you have to double check their work every time they are worse than no tool at all.

To extend your illustration, 5 years ago no one could train an LLM with the capabilities of a 13 year old human; now many companies can both train LLMs and integrate them into products.

> taken it from a toy to genuinely insanely useful.

Really?

Yep, compared to beating the Turing test, the progress has been linear with exponentially growing investment. That's diminishing marginal returns.

Yes. But they have also improved a lot. Incremental just means that the function is going up without breaking points. We haven't seen anything revolutionary, just evolutionary in the last 3 years. But the models do provide 2 or 3 times more value. So their pace of advancement is not slow.

> AI companies are already automating huge swaths of document analysis, customer service. Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients

I don't think there is serious argument that LLMs won't generate tremendous value. The question is who will capture it. PCs generated massive value. But other than a handful of manufacturers and designers (namely, Apple, HP, Lenovo, Dell and ASUS), most PC builders went bankrupt. And out of the value generated by PCs in the world, the vast majority was captured by other businesses and consumers.

Doctors were using Google to diagnose patients before. The thing is, it's still the doctor delivering the diagnosis, the doctor writing the prescription, and the doctor billing insurance. Unless and until patients or hospitals are willing and legally able to use ChatGPT as a replacement for a doctor (unwise), ChatGPT is not about to eat any doctor's lunch.

When the wright brothers made their plane they didn't expect today that there are thousands of planes flying at a time.

When the Internet was developed they didn't imagine the world wide Web.

When cars started to get popular people still thought there would be those who are going to stick with horses.

I think you're right on the AI we're just on the cusp of it and it'll be a hundred times bigger than we can imagine.

Back when oil was discovered and started to be used it was about equal to 500 laborers now automated. One AI computer with some video cards are now worth x number of knowledge workers. That never stop working as long as the electricity keeps flowing.

> Doctors are straight up using ChatGPT to diagnose patients

This makes me want to invest in malpractice lawyers, not OpenAI

Yes. The answer is yes.

The world is changing and that is scary.

But didn't they spend $9 billion? If I have a machine that magically turns $9 billion of investor money into $4 billion in revenue, I need to have a pretty awesome story for how in the future I am going to be making enormous piles of money to pay back that investment. If it looks like frontier models are going to be a commodity and it is not going to be winner-take-all... that's a lot harder story to tell.

I guarantee you that I could surpass that revenue if I started a business that would give people back $9 if they gave me $4.

OpenAI models are already of the most expensive, they don’t have a lot of levers to pull.

Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time.

OpenAI (or, more specifically, Chat GPT) is CocaCola, not Facebook.

They have the brand recognition and consumer goodwill no other brand in AI has, incredibly so with school students, who will soon go into the professional world and bring that goodwill with them.

I think better models are enough to dethrone OpenAI in API, B2C and internal enterprise use cases, but OpenAI has consumer mindshare, and they're going to be the king of chatbots forever. Unless somebody else figures out something which is better by orders of magnitude and that Open AI can't copy quickly, it's going to stay that way.

Apple had the opportunity to do something really great here. With Siri's deep device integration on one hand and Apple's willingness to force 3rd-party devs to do the right thing for users on the other, they could have had a compelling product that nobody else could copy, but it seems like they're not willing to go that route, mostly for privacy, antitrust and internal competency reasons, in that order. Google is on the right track and might get something similar (although not as polished as typical Apple) done, but Android's mindshare among tech-savvy consumers isn't great enough for it to get traction.

Yep, I mostly interact with these AIs through Cursor. When I want to ask it a question, there's a little dropdown box and I can select openai/anthropic/deepseek whatever model. It's as easy as that to switch.

From talking to people, the average user relies on memories and chat history, which is not easy to migrate. I imagine that's the part of the strategy to keep people from hopping model providers.

Brand counts for a lot

It doesn’t?

That name recognition made Coca Cola into a very successful global corporation.

But whether the competition will emerge as Pepsi or as RC-Cola is still tbd.

or that they would drink it if a well designed, delicious, but no HFCS nor sugar alternative were marketed with funding

As recently as the Silicon Valley tv show, the joke was that every startup pitch claimed they were “making the world a better place”.

Like everything, it's projection. Those who loudly scream against something are almost always the ones engaging in it.

Google screamed against service revenue and advertising while building the world's largest advertising empire. Facebook screamed against misinformation and surveillance while enabling it on a global scale. Netflix screamed against the overpriced cable TV industry while turning streaming into modern overpriced cable television. Uber screamed against the entrenched taxi industry harming workers and passengers while creating an unregulated monster that harmed workers and passengers.

Altman and OpenAI are no different in this regard, loudly screaming against AI harming humanity while doing everything in their capacity to create AI tools that will knowingly harm humanity while enriching themselves.

If people trust the performance instead of the actions and their outcomes, then we can't convince them otherwise.

Yup, if Elon hadn't gotten so jealous and spiteful to him I'm sure he'd be one of Elon's leading sycophants.

correct. "liberal" as in the general ideas that ie expanding the franchise is important, press freedoms are good, that government can do good things for people and for capital etc. Wikipedia's intro paragraph does a good job of describing what I was getting at (below). In prior decades Republicans in the US would have been categorized as "liberal" under this definition; in recent years, not so much.

>Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and often mutually conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Worldcoin is opt-in, which is the opposite of authoritarian. Nobody who doesn’t like it is required to participate.

What kind of a future is that? If China marches towards a dystopia, why should Europe dutifully follow?

We can selectively ban uses without banning the technology wholesale; e.g., nuclear power generation is permitted, while nuclear weapons are strictly controlled.

This thought process it not different than it was with nuclear weapons.

The primary difference is the observability - with satellites we had some confidence that other nations respected treaties, or that they had enough reaction time for mutual destruction, but with this AI development we lack all that.

[dead]

I guess they think that the “digital god” has a chance to become real (and soon, even), unlike the non-digital one?

Roko's Basilisk is basically Pascal's wager with GPUs.

[dead]

Ooo I know, Cybermen! Yay.

The explanation seemed pretty obvious to me: They set up a nonprofit to deliver an AI that was Open.

Then things went unexpectedly well, people were valuing them at billions of dollars, and they suddenly decided they weren't open any more. Suddenly they were all about Altman's Interests Safety (AI Safety for short).

The board tried to fulfil its obligation to get the nonprofit to do the things in its charter, and they were unsuccessful.

The explanation was pretty clear and coherent: The CEO was no longer adhering to the mission of the non-profit (which the board was upholding).

But they found themselves alone in that it turns out the employees (who were employed by the for-profit company) and investors (MSFT in particular) didn't care about the mission and wanted to follow the money instead.

So the board had no choice but to capitulate and leave.

The question is not if they could, it is if they would.

Google offers a great many things for free. Should they get beneficial tax treatment for it?

That's like saying AWS is free. ChatGPT has a limited use free tier just like most other SaaS products out there.

They don't collect data?

Define “free”.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! "Bad evil man wants to get rich! We should enrich Google and Microsoft instead!"

> Why would we need to be more creative? The explanation of him wanting more money is perfectly adequate. Being rich results in a kind of limitation of scope for ambition.

The dude announces new initiatives from the White House, regularly briefs Senators and senior DoD leaders, and is the top get for interviews around the world for AI topics.

There’s a lot more to be ambitious about than just money.

how? The internet says 400 m weekly chatgpt users, 19 m weekly Anthropic, 47.3 m Monthly Gemini, Grok 6.7 m daily, 430 m Baidu.