OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
884 comments
·May 21, 2025Bjorkbat
A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor.
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
herval
that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.
m-s-y
How so? I don’t believe that Ive is going along with the purchase.
Animats
No? It's not a acqui-hire? The article says "joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware."
Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
browningstreet
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.
..
OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.
..
OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
gist
Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)
I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
burningChrome
Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company.
He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else.
The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business:
After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13]
When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14]
Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16]
Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
doubtit
Probably not given that there is nothing inherently unique about either except being born into privileged class.
Their rise is coupled to a broader social movement that I think a majority are inclined to move on from.
If Ive had the reputation among the industry he once had he would not be partnered up with a company dependent on MS to survive. Sam is playing a marketing angle here. OpenAI’s geniuses have left. They’re just another tech company. Just trying to rekindle/cling to 00s-10s hype since their sense of identity and success are forever changed by all the attention.
leoc
Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy.
dudus
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
Jackson__
They've already claimed that there will be no "GPT-5" LLM, and that instead what they want to call "GPT-5" is a fusion of their various models like 4o, dalle, their video model, etc. That in and of itself is a move that makes it quite clear to me they've hit a wall on the intelligence side.
Add these purchases, and it seems like they are extremely desperate.
gnopgnip
From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash
alexey-salmin
This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.
jermaustin1
It kind of is, when they were given $500B and told to make a return in 10-ish years. They have to put the capital in play where it has the largest ROI potential. They are gambling that Jony has another iPhone in him.
I don't know enough about any of this to weigh in on it, but when you take investor money, you aren't supposed to sit on it or do slow burn (at least not VC money), its meant to be gasoline, and you moonshot with it.
rahul342
> OpenAI already owns a 23% stake in io as part of a deal from last year, meaning it needs about $5 billion for the acquisition, the Times reported, citing unnamed people familiar with the matter.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/heres-why-openai-is-buying...
brentm
Appears from the outside as a very expensive aquihire but if you're getting the guy who essentially created the iPhone it could be worth it.
gnopgnip
They previously invested and already owned 23% of the company. So no cash for this Aquisition
no_wizard
I have a gut feeling alot of this is going to go negative for OpenAI. I simply don't see what they're going to produce in a reasonable amount of time that justifies hardware, for example.
I'm open to being wrong, very open, but I need to see evidence. Hard evidence.
rcarmo
Well, Windsurf is no longer worth what they paid for it. Let's see how the rest goes.
mlnj
What else are they going to do with all that money?
Raise billions and billions under the guise of AGI coming tomorrow and they just become a too big to fail company gobbling up any competition.
You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?
mattlondon
> You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?
Apart from, y'know, DeepMind - remember those guys? The ones with the SOTA models at the top of the leaderboards? The ones who just launched Veo3 and blew everyone away?
It feels like OpenAI has kinda jumped-the-shark at this stage. They don't seem to be especially competitive any more, and all the news coming out of them is tinkering at the edges or acquisitions that no-one really cares about.
When are they going to start competing on actual AI again?
mlnj
I meant from Open AI.
After a lot of the drama and a ton of talent leaving all they seem to have left now is a pile of cash that they can spend eliminating competition. Meanwhile like others have rightly pointed out, talent at Google and even Mistral have been crushing it.
kridsdale1
90s Netscape vibes
fakedang
Don't forget their Abilene chip factory.
zombiwoof
Clearly foundation models don’t make money or a viable business on their own
vonneumannstan
You can say the same about any piece of software...
RC_ITR
Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock.
Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat.
OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models and paying for inference.
kridsdale1
Staff are not cheap either. 300k cash salary for most of them from what I hear. Plus 600 to 1M in funny money.
belter
The AI hype seems driven more by stock valuations than genuine productivity gains.
Developers now spend excessive time crafting prompts and managing AI generated pull requests :-) tasks that a simple email to a junior coder could have handled efficiently. We need a study that shows the lost productivity.
When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding.”
- Matt Garman – CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - June 2024
- Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque - 2023
- Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft - April 2025
- Jensen Huang CEO, NVIDIA - Feb 2024
- OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil - March 2025
- Mark Zuckerberg - Jan 2025
- Dario Amodei - Anthropic CEO - March 2025zelphirkalt
The loss of productivity is,as many things are, not directly measurable. Mediocre code making it into the codebase and hindering future development and increasing maintenance time, or even being the cause for some ideas to never be discovered, how are we going to measure that? How are we going to measure engineers no longer properly knowing the codebases?
Businesses will wake up when it is too late and the damage to the engineering side of their products is already done. Or perhaps won't wake up at all, and somehow (to their management levels) inexplicably fail.
dev_l1x_be
Manager pipe dreams that AI (read LLMs) replacing programmers. There might be a rude awakening when in fact AI replaces some admin type managers.
mooreds
Are these quotes all from 2025? Would be awesome to put actual dates on them so we can revisit in N years and see if they were right or just hyping.
the_arun
Apart from developer productivity, have we seen anything made 1000x better using GenAI?
rchaud
US shareholder capitalism is increasingly dependent on pushing a fantasy where X Company will eventually operate as an unregulated monopoly with armies of machines run by a small group of contract labour with no benefits and no wage bargaining power.
dowager_dan99
claims that AI will reduce the need for engineers are “entirely self-serving horseshit”
-- James Gosling - May 2025
rvz
> When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:
Correct. This is how most bubbles are kept up as they are all exposed in the hype cycle.
You will not hear about the mistakes [0] [1] [2] it makes when AI gets it wrong or hallucinates and all the AI boosters can do will be "it only gets better" and promise that we will soon be operating airplanes without humans. [3]
Surely you would feel safer if you or your family boarded a plane that was fully operated by ChatGPT, because it is somewhat closer to "AGI"?
I really don't think so.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/openai-explains-why-chatgp...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/668315/anthropic-claude-legal-...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/15/xai-blames-groks-obsession...
[3] https://www.flyingmag.com/replacing-airline-pilots-with-ai/
oldpersonintx2
vs:
"I will be indispensable forever"
- random people on HNdr_dshiv
Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
cj
I’ve been using #5 for a few weeks now (Limitless.ai pendant, clips to clothes, records and transcribes everything all day)
It sounds cool, and the idea of asking questions about your day seems like it would be cool, but a few weeks later I’m finding myself forgetting to take it with me. The value just isn’t there yet. (And why have a clip on microphone when everyone already has a microphone in our pocket?)
It’s a cool toy though. Also a creepy toy since it can double as an eavesdropping device.
I have a feeling these AI companies will fall back to selling our data for advertising purposes once these companies realize their core products aren’t valuable enough for consumers to want to pay for the cost of it.
Animats
The form factor that suggests is an AR headset. Google, Meta, and others have those. They're all flops. Too bulky.
Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
null
CuriouslyC
I use mic input with the chat gpt app in public all the time, if you use a low whisper voice and hold the phone close you can be basically inaudible more than 3 feet away and the TTS still does a great job.
samtp
What exact use cases do I get from being able to talk to chatGPT when I am out in public? I can think of close to 0 value add to have an AI voice in my head when I'm taking a walk in the park or out to dinner.
coffeemug
People stare at their phones while walking, having dinner, and driving. It's not a big leap to imagine replacing that with subvocal conversations with AI.
samtp
Having ongoing conversations with a sentence completion algorithm while out in public sounds extremely depressing tbh.
AlexandrB
This is better than staring at your phone how?
nickthegreek
i already do that with my iphone by mapping the action button to start conversation. if this product isn’t replacing the phone, then it needs to do something my phone (or watch, or glasses) doesn’t do.
colordrops
A friend of mine is constantly asking it questions everytime something comes up. She opens her phone, loads the app, hits the mic button, then listens with the phone to her ear. Would work a lot better as some sort of device.
a_bonobo
'every extension is also an amputation' - Marshal McLuhan
(since Neil Stephenson's recent essay brought that quote up)
samtp
Just tell her to buy some earbuds that can trigger the assistant on your phone. Bam, problem solved.
eqmvii
when i think of them, i just call 1-800-chat-gpt
no_wizard
Hello and welcome to ChatGPT phone. If you know the query you would like to make, press one now.
jdubs1984
On a dedicated device no less…what’s the point?! You have a phone.
CPLX
I’m as much of a deep Ai skeptic as anyone but I can definitely think of use cases for while driving or walking, like asking questions about my own schedule or what people have emailed or asked me for in the last hour, or where I can get something specific to eat nearby and so on.
Not sure it’s worth the hype but there are use cases. I do think it’s an interesting contrast with crypto, where there aren’t really.
no_wizard
What I want is for it to surface information to me, not me have to query it.
Where is that AI? For example, if I usually eat between 2-4 PM, and I'm in the middle of time square, start suggesting places to eat based on my transaction history, or location history of restaurants I frequent. Something like that would be useful.
If I have to ask, I might as well look at my phone most of the time. It'd likely be faster in most cases.
I don't need something like that, where it must be queried to be useful, like asking it to read back my text messages, but I sure would love it if when my wife messaged me, it was smart enough to play the message unprompted if my headphones are already connected and active
samtp
For both use cases I don't see how it would be any different that what anyone can currently do on their mobile device. And even if they were novel use cases, they are nowhere near solving a need that causes more than a few hundred people to pay money for a device or service.
deadbabe
You can participate in more highly intelligent discussions, great for a dinner party or a date or an interview. Everywhere you go you can know it all, many use cases. The people who don’t do it, will be at a severe disadvantage.
samtp
So other people sitting at the table with you are supposed to be impressed or interested in you regurgitating words said to you by an AI voice in your head? Honestly if I went on a date and the other person was also having a conversation with an AI chatbot, I'd run as fast away as possible because that is insane.
Verdex
I have a relative who likes to lookup Wikipedia articles that he finds interesting and then read them to rooms full of people.
It's like, I can read Wikipedia myself.
Somehow I don't think anyone is going to be impressed by someone regurgitating chatgpt.
raincole
Why would the other people on the table be interested in what you're saying when they can talk to their ChatGPT too?
lofaszvanitt
Here is this vengeful looking, four legged, half bear sized wild cat before me, tell it to turn around and look for a squirrel instead!
anonzzzies
So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
zoogeny
I agree we are watching the turning point.
If raw AI power is the key, Google seems to be in pole position form here on out. They can make their own TPUs, have their own data center. No need to "Stargate" with Oracle and Softbank in tow. Google also has Android, YouTube and G-Suite.
However, OpenAI has been going down the product route for a few years now. After a spout of high-profile research exits it is clear Altman has purged the ranks and can now focus on product development.
So if product is a sufficient USP, and if Altman can deliver a better product, they still have a chance. I guess that is where Ive comes into picture. And Google is notoriously bad at product that is internally developed.
samtp
A lot of ifs there. When judging how likely Altman would be to deliver a better product, what other product has he delivered besides an orb that scans your eyeballs in exchange for crypto?
asadm
bingo. chatgpt does some summarization/memory thing recently. It's meh tbh.
vjvjvjvjghv
It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle. What has that company been doing to be worth 6.5 billion?
ryanSrich
I consider myself extremely plugged in to what's going on with AI and I still couldn't tell you what Ive's company does without looking it up
criddell
Maybe the company is inconsequential and this is just about hiring Ive?
madeofpalk
Ive will not be joining OpenAI, and they’re also not buying Ive’s design firm LoveFrom.
ryanSrich
Oh I'm sure that's the reason, but it still makes zero sense. Ive is incredibly overrated as a designer and visionary.
samtp
Do they even have a website?
s1mon
As far as I could tell, no. Seems to be fairly stealthy. I even asked ChatGPT with Deep Research, and there's not really much detail out there.
dismalaf
I looked it up, still no idea what his company does.
wnevets
> It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle.
it's a big club and you ain't in it [1]
abraae
I think of it in terms of Vegas-style casinos or cruise ships. About $2B for a casino, $1B for a cruise ship.
So imagine Johny Ives to be worth a couple of cruise ships tied up outside 2 hulking casinos.
kridsdale1
They made a very pretty font.
The_Blade
that is more useful than more or less anything else that AI has practically achieved
bsimpson
It's been <20y since YouTube was acquired for $1B, which felt like an imaginary valuation at the time, but it was for a company that actually had traction with users.
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
victor22
Same conclusion I got. This is weird as fuck. They seem kinda desperate.
paxys
Money isn't real anymore.
rchaud
Money is real. Privately held company valuations are not. This is an all-stock deal, so what it's "worth" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running, or how much they can offload to Mayasoshi Son and Arab Gulf sovereign funds.
tmpz22
Money is very, very, real for people below the poverty line.
flaterkk
Vibe codin-... acquiring?
TeeWEE
Wow Sam Altman is so full of himself... I would never want to work for this narcist. Just watch this video. https://x.com/sama/status/1925242282523103408
jes5199
this is designed to appeal directly to a certain kind of self-mythologizing Bay Area techie, the kind that was common in the early 2010s. It’s meant to signal continuity, “we’re just like you, we loved Steve Jobs”
apparently it worked on some people: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io
joshstrange
I thought this was going to be some hit-piece tweet then I saw it was a tweet from Sam Altman himself. That video... Wow. I got in 2min before I had to stop. I thought you might be over-exaggerated but full of /themselves/ doesn't even begin to describe it.
Ship something, then you can create a video like that, not before.
mehh
I tried but it was too much, first I thought it was a spoof, then perhaps AI generated and then couldn't watch no more!
mk_stjames
From the same people that brought you "Vibe Coding", comes "Vibe Acquisitions".
hinkley
Vibes goeth before a fall.
ants_everywhere
I have a feeling OpenAI will eventually be looked back on as the company that forced Google to release its internal AI product and then died a slow death.
elAhmo
Buying a company without a product (or anything announced), without a website, with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
This industry is amazing.
firtoz
> with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
What do you mean?
> Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI
fckgw
Sounds like OpenAI is basically just becoming a client of LoveFrom, Ive's design firm.
xgolwks
What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
tiffanyh
> Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast
Relevant thread where Sam acknowledges the plan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
abxyz
it’s not true, contemporaneous accounts disprove it (although that’s not to say Sam Altman is not a snake, Sam Altman is a snake that nobody should trust)
null
-__---____-ZXyw
Hear hear. If the AGI doesn't work out, as it likely won't, he can always run for mayor of Wexford Town
baxtr
The only thing I still find good about SA is his opposition to Musk.
echelon
Posted by former CEO Yishan Wong, no less.
davidmurphy
whoa!!
yen223
Am I the only one who read samaltman's comment as obvious sarcasm?
firtoz
Or they're bragging.
Jarwain
I mean no, but it could also be plausible deniability?
NicuCalcea
> Other than that, child's play for me.
Such an insufferable response.
ctkhn
Conner Omalley character stuff
brap
Sam also ran a crypto scam called WorldCoin. Their secret sauce was tricking poor people in Africa.
GolfPopper
Runs, I think. WorldCoin is still around, just re-branded as 'World Network'. I didn't spot the usual leadership bios on a quick search.
echelon
Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.
mgiampapa
Signing posts with a hash tied to a thing that might prove you are human instead of a LLM astroturfing might actually be a good value proposition for blockchain.
cjohnson318
Yeah same here. My dad has been talking about the End Times and the Mark of the Beast for 40 years now. Now, in addition to all that, it's Q-ANON and MAGA. Fun times. Liberal police are coming for your guns and your Bible, you heard it here first.
jazzyjackson
Also a plot point in Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Sixth Day, where his eyeballs get scanned as a matter of course before transporting a VIP, (sign here, eyeballs here please, thank you) and later used to clone him.
subsaharancoder
John Hagee is very much alive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hagee
hn_acc1
I mean, on the one hand, sure, but on the other hand - the "anointed one" himself, DJT, is pushing AI, so I'm sure it will be fine. Unlike that heathen Joe Biden who attends more church services in a month than DJT in a year. And as I eventually learned (grew up similar to yourself, but german pentecostal in canada, also exvangelical now), if they are against helping people and against welfare/basic human rights/basic income/equality, they're truly christians in the eyes of those telegelicals. I guess somehow the "you will always have the poor among you, me you will not always have" quote from Jesus means that to be "a biblical nation", we have to ensure there are always poor people..
AStonesThrow
I mean, it was difficult for people to ignore a company that sold their first computer for a retail price of $666 and chose as their logo a rainbow fruit with a single chomp on the side.
And then rose up in competition against a company whose logo is literally a cross, and code-named an OS "Chi-Rho" [Cairo, XP] -- yes, it's a little "on the nose" by now.
It's also a hoot to just see LDS missionaries waiving their iPhones around with the Genesis Apple clearly visible. To be honest, as a Catholic I have seen no overtly demonic or Antichrist features in Apple Computer themselves, and frankly most tech companies try to adapt postures as agnostic and irreligious anyway, just due to globalism and market share. The {Free|Open|Net}BSD daemons and logo/mascots have long been subsumed into Apple's juggernaut anyway!
Gothmog69
How did they trick them by giving them free money?
s_ting765
Free crypto. There's a difference.
HenryBemis
They are paying 'one worldcoin' (I've read sold about $50) to places that give zero value to their privacy (too difficult to care for privacy when starving to death and the monthly salary is $10). They are targeting poor countries (South America, Africa).
Once they have collected 'enough' faces to use on their AI, they could possibly pull the plug or keep it as a social experiment.
I was thinking, there is no way Russia or China will allow them to operate in their countries, and (combined) they got 1.5bn people.
I can also see them trying that to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other autocratic ..stan places, where the local dictator would only allow this if they got to use the data for their own nefarious purposes.
bigyabai
TINSTAAFL
DrBurrito
My understanding is that there are two types of stock, and the non profit controls the voting stock majority. This cannot be diluted. All other stock gives a (capped) fraction of the profits. This cannot be diluted by these operations, but the cap also can be a bad deal.
JamesBarney
This is 100% definitely how it works. The number of board seats the non-profit gets is not dependent on how many outstanding shares there are.
SlimIon729
That's an interesting point about the different stock classes and voting rights. It adds another layer to how these kinds of acquisitions and valuations might play out in the long run, especially concerning the non-profit's influence. How often are such dual-class stock structures truly effective in maintaining the original mission when large sums and external valuations come into play?
DrBurrito
The case of OpenAI is very unique. The structure is very successful. See Meta, Google, Palantir.
Some take the form of different stock classes, with some classes having voting rights, and others no vote at all; other schemes are stock with supervoting rights.
tgma
This is news to me. Do you have any reference for this? FWIW they did a restructuring that got rid of the capped-profit regime very recently.
DrBurrito
Ah right, the restructuring seems to change some things:
From here: https://openai.com/index/evolving-our-structure/
The nonprofit will continue to control the PBC, and will become a big shareholder in the PBC, in an amount supported by independent financial advisors, giving the nonprofit resources to support programs so AI can benefit many different communities, consistent with the mission. And as the PBC grows, the nonprofit’s resources will grow, so it can do even more. We’re excited to soon get recommendations from our nonprofit commission on how we can help make sure AI benefits everyone—not just a few. Their ideas will focus on how our nonprofit work can support a more democratic AI future, and have real impact in areas like health, education, public services, and scientific discovery.
The previous structure is here: https://openai.com/our-structure/
catigula
That is interesting given that reddit has gone from a cultural powerhouse to something most people talk about shamefully, if at all.
haunter
>something most people talk about shamefully, if at all
Only if you go there for rage bait content.
Small subs are better than ever. And no Lemmy is not an alternative.
OsrsNeedsf2P
> And no Lemmy is not an alternative.
Which is sad - I've been using Lemmy exclusively for 5ish years now and the smaller communities haven't really taken root. Reddit still controls the long tail of internet discourse
karn97
Only if you dislike free speech and love insta permanent bans which track you across google accounts and installations. Intrusive garbage.
jrvieira
> Only if you go there for rage bait content
The app is not impartial in the content it chooses to push. I got identified as a target for very specific content and in the context of this discussion, it's the polar opposite of what reddit used to be.
ks2048
I don't know if reddit is better than ever, but the continued existence and popularity of old.reddit.com seems to be a sign that it is not well-run. (in the sense of they wrecked their UX years ago and never fixed it).
boramalper
> And no Lemmy is not an alternative.
Depends on the community we're talking about here but I found Lemmy to be a great alternative for tech communities.
kjkjadksj
Small subs are worse than ever IMO. Either totally dead or they hit a critical mass where product shills have come in and established the dogma of the subreddit.
bigyabai
No, Reddit is still shameful. The central issue ruins everything, moderation is placed on a pedestal beyond reproach even when it's trying to sabotage it's own community! The only point Reddit staff will ever step in is when these subreddits try to protest and threaten their bottom-line. They would rather run a pyramid scheme that's profitable, than address the central governance crisis.
You can't "no true scotsreddit" your way out of this issue because it's an overarching issue with the platform itself. Even 4chan has more better protection against influence campaigns, it's pathetic how Reddit's own administration lets itself be defined by it's lowest-common-denominator.
whalesalad
until you get shadowbanned. my 15+ year account is dead because I logged-out of the iOS app and logged-in to the web app on my phone, it triggered the suspicious/spam filter and boom I am dead. tried many times to get it restored, no dice.
the funny thing is the only indication that this happened was keybase alerting me that my proof was gone.
I can login and use reddit as usual, but nothing I do has any effect. It's like I am in a sandbox. Try to view my profile publicly and it does not exist.
dyauspitr
It has gone from a cultural powerhouse for a niche audience to something most people talk about.
bongodongobob
Culture powerhouse? Lol, for nerds maybe. I'm pretty sure most of my non tech friends have never visited the site.
thunkingdeep
The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.
thinkingtoilet
The organizations/nation states/whatever who astroturf on reddit disagree with you. It definitely matters in shaping opinions. It's not as influential as tiktok of course, but that doesn't mean it's not influential.
askafriend
Yes, TikTok and Instagram...some of the most valuable media, entertainment and communication businesses in history.
vipshek
I find this perspective bizarre. Though I'm not happy about it all being centralized, the closest thing we have these days to the very niche phpBB forums of the 2000s is various subreddits focused on very specific topics. Scrolling through the front page is slop, sure, but whenever I'm looking for perspectives on a niche topic, searching for "<topic> reddit" is the first thing I do. And I know many people without any connection to the software industry who feel the same way.
ryoshu
Major advertisers are trying to figure out Reddit now, but it's a mixed bag and the costs are high compared to other platforms. It's no longer a niche.
some_random
I have no idea how anyone could have seriously tried to use reddit and be on HN and come to that conclusion. Yes some of the reddit defaults are slop but many clearly have significantly more value than short form video, and that's before you start discussing the niche communities that live there.
Jaxkr
> In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram
Insane take. Reddit hosts deep threaded discussions on almost any topic imaginable. In its prime it was the best forum on the internet. There’s a reason people commonly add “reddit” to the end of their search queries.
Unfortunately it feels like the community has gotten much dumber after they banned third party apps and restricted API access. It’s also lost almost all of its Aaron Swartz style hacktivist culture.
Reddit, in its prime, was incredible and beloved by almost everyone I know (most of which are far outside the HN sphere)
leptons
>The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere.
Most of reddit doesn't read HN, and there 100s of millions of people on reddit, so your perspective seems a bit narrow.
rexer
Odd. Your take is the one I see most common on HN. My experience has been that Reddit has gone mainstream and most people find it quite valuable
rafram
Really? My perception (and their metrics seem to back this up) is that “normal people” are really on Reddit now. It’s the #7 most visited site in the world. It exploded during the pandemic - not just a site for internet nerds anymore.
noir_lord
Not even a site for internet nerds anymore.
Reddit isn’t for me any longer, when they break old.reddit.com I’m done with it, I go weeks without commenting as it is.
catigula
My perception is that the site is horrifically partisan and punishing for average users.
The key is to not mistake your social circle with "normal".
to11mtm
My dangerous question.... how much of those 'visits' are AI bot crawlers?
Based on their other behavior, it wouldn't surprise me if Reddit both used crawler hits to pump up numbers while decrying AI bots and doing things that broke long-standing community tooling and apps....
gibbitz
Everyone ads reddit to their searches to get human generated information these days. Not sure if that's still a guarantee, but it's a funny irony IRT what this thread is about...
BeFlatXIII
Which is why it's garbage these days.
neves
One of the most informative posts here. I thought that since Altman's coup the no profit status wouldn't be a problem.
tgma
It's interesting I posted exactly this hypothesis an hour or so ago and immediately got flagged despite not being manifestly offensive or anything. Very suspicious.
bloqs
Yeah, that is extremely suspect...
spruce_tips
interesting, but not surprising
M3L0NM4N
I want to know why a burner account posted this comment. There could be many reasons, some more entertaining than others. Of course the answer could be boring, but do you care to elaborate?
WorkerBee28474
> This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals
I'll add that conventional finance wisdom says that you should only buy companies using stock when you believe your stock is overvalued. That way you get more bang for your buck than cash or undervalued stock.
mrbungie
All that YC/VC experience paid off, they're the masters of gutting things from the inside out in the name of growth.
https://archive.is/HgpSJ