OpenAI Takes Its Mask Off To Reveal What It Really Is
OpenAI is shifting from a nonprofit to a for-profit model, valued at $150 billion, amid leadership changes including the departure of key executives, while CEO Sam Altman consolidates power.
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OpenAI is undergoing significant leadership changes, with the departure of key executives including Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, and others who played crucial roles in the company's development. This restructuring coincides with reports that OpenAI plans to shift from its nonprofit origins to a for-profit model, potentially valuing the company at $150 billion. CEO Sam Altman, who has a history of consolidating power, is expected to benefit significantly from this transition, possibly receiving 7% equity worth around $10.5 billion. The company has faced internal conflicts regarding its mission and direction, particularly between those advocating for its original nonprofit ethos and those pushing for profit-driven growth. Despite these changes, Altman maintains that the leadership transitions are amicable and aimed at ensuring a smooth handover to new leadership. The ongoing evolution of OpenAI reflects a long-standing tension between its public image of transparency and altruism and its internal operations, which have increasingly focused on profitability and competition. The recent executive departures suggest that Altman's control over the company is solidifying, aligning its structure more closely with his vision.
- OpenAI is transitioning from a nonprofit to a for-profit model, potentially valued at $150 billion.
- Key executives, including CTO Mira Murati, have departed amid leadership changes.
- CEO Sam Altman is consolidating power, with significant financial benefits expected from the restructuring.
- Internal conflicts have arisen over the company's mission and direction.
- The changes reflect a shift towards a more profit-driven approach, diverging from OpenAI's original altruistic goals.
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8 commentsThat said, thanks to the efforts of Meta and others, open-source AI running on your desktop is moving along at quite a pace. I can generate images superior to what is available via DALL-E/Meta/ChatGPT, and more or less completely uncensored, thanks to running FLUX.1[dev] locally (albeit slower) on the https://drawthings.ai/ app, and I can do language model work locally that gets very close to approaching, in some cases surpassing, GPT4o (albeit slower), on my M1 Macbook Pro (also uncensored, if that's what you want), and now thanks to Llama 3.2 I can also process images locally.
The only remaining things left are a good substitute for ElevenLabs' still-amazing ability to create realistic voice models of people based on a sample, voice input, multimodal interactive voice chat (i.e. Advanced Voice), more easily accessible function-calling running locally (regarding web requests, you might be able to block OpenAI, but can't block curl running from my house!), and o1-style chain-of-thought reasoning, but I think we have enough clues about how the latter works that we should see something any day now to compete with it.
(going on a tangent for a minute...)
I really want a whole-house computer that runs locally and is in charge of everything, responds like an LLM to voice commands in any voice I want (recognizing who is speaking as well), knows a bunch of things about me, has a personality I can customize like OpenAI's "custom instructions", and executes whatever functions I give it access to (searching the web, running code it's written, etc.), plus can stick to schedules. I'd be happy to pay a small licensing fee for the use of someone's voice.
I have a nightly job that coaxes me to bed at 11pm in Raphael's voice (from Baldur's Gate 3) using a dynamically-generated script from Claude. It's absolutely amazing and Andrew Wincott should seriously reach out to me to try to make a product out of it because I seem to have hit the jackpot with his voice model...
Here are 2 examples of its output: https://vocaroo.com/1kotE1UgYCoy https://vocaroo.com/1lUyZbGIHPIH (I do not know how long this will stay up on this free service, but perhaps that's for the best...)
OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41651548
OpenAI to Become For-Profit Company
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