OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman

floofloof@lemmy.ca to Technology@lemmy.world – 1329 points –
OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman
futurism.com
240

You know guys, I'm starting to think what we heard about Altman when he was removed a while ago might actually have been real.

/s

And it's kinda funny that they are now the ones being removed

What was the behind the scenes deal on this? I remember it happening but not the details

There’s an alternate timeline where the non-profit side of the company won, Altman the Conman was booted and exposed, and OpenAI kept developing machine learning in a way that actually benefits actual use cases.

Cancer screenings approved by a doctor could be accurate enough to save so many lives and so much suffering through early detection.

Instead, Altman turned a promising technology into a meme stock with a product released too early to ever fix properly.

No, there isn't really any such alternate timeline. Good honest causes are not profitable enough to survive against the startup scams. Even if the non-profit side won internally, OpenAI would just be left behind, funding would go to its competitors, and OpenAI would shut down. Unless you mean a radically different alternate timeline where our economic system is fundamentally different.

There are infinite timelines, so, it has to exist some(wehere/when/[insert w word for additional dimension]).

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What is OpenAI doing with cancer screening?

AI models can outmatch most oncologists and radiologists in recognition of early tumor stages in MRI and CT scans.
Further developing this strength could lead to earlier diagnosis with less-invasive methods saving not only countless live and prolonging the remaining quality life time for the individual but also save a shit ton of money.

That is a different kind of machine learning model, though.

You can't just plug in your pathology images into their multimodal generative models, and expect it to pop out something usable.

And those image recognition models aren't something OpenAI is currently working on, iirc.

I'm fully aware that those are different machine learning models but instead of focussing on LLMs with only limited use for mankind, advancing on Image Recognition models would have been much better.

I agree but I also like to point out that the AI craze started with LLMs and those MLs have been around before OpenAI.

So if openAI never released chat GPT, it wouldn’t have become synonymous with crypto in terms of false promises.

Not only that, image analysis and statistical guesses have always been around and do not need ML to work. It’s just one more tool in the toolbox.

Don't know about image recognition but they released DALL-E , which is image generating and in painting model.

Fun thing is, most of the things AI can, they never planned it to be able to do it. All they tried to achieve was auto completion tool.

Wasn't it proven that AI was having amazing results, because it noticed the cancer screens had doctors signature at the bottom? Or did they make another run with signatures hidden?

There were more than one system proven to "cheat" through biased training materials. One model used to tell duck and chicken apart because it was trained with pictures of ducks in the water and chicken on a sandy ground, if I remember correctly.
Since multiple medical image recognition systems are in development, I can't imagine they're all this faulty trained with unsuitable materials.

They are not 'faulty', they have been fed wrong training data.

This is the most important aspect of any AI - it's only as good as the training dataset is. If you don't know the dataset, you know nothing about the AI.

That's why every claim of 'super efficient AI' need to be investigated deeper. But that goes against line-goes-up principle. So don't expect that to happen a lot.

Or we get to a time where we send a reprogrammed terminator back in time to kill altman 🤓

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Putting my tin foil hat on... Sam Altman knows the AI train might be slowing down soon.

The OpenAI brand is the most valuable part of the company right now, since the models from Google, Anthropic, etc. can beat or match what ChatGPT is, but they aren't taking off coz they aren't as cool as OpenAI.

The business models to train & run models is not sustainable. If there is any money to be made it is NOW, while the speculation is highest. The nonprofit is just getting in the way.

This could be wishful thinking coz fuck corporate AI, but no one can deny AI is in a speculative bubble.

Take the hat off. This was the goal. Whoops, gotta cash in and leave! I'm sure it's super great, but I'm gone.

That's an excellent point! Why oh why would a tech bro start a non-profit? Its always been PR.

It honestly just never occurred to me that such a transformation was allowed/possible. A nonprofit seems to imply something charitable, though obviously that's not the true meaning of it. Still, it would almost seem like the company benefits from the goodwill that comes with being a nonprofit but then gets to transform that goodwill into real gains when they drop the act and cease being a nonprofit.

I don't really understand most of this shit though, so I'm probably missing some key component that makes it make a lot more sense.

A nonprofit seems to imply something charitable, though obviously that's not the true meaning of it

Life time of propaganda got people confused lol

Nonprofit merely means that their core income generating activities are not subject next to the income tax regimes.

While some non profits are charities, many are just shelters for rich people's bullshit behaviors like foundations, lobby groups, propaganda orgs, political campaigns etc

Thank you! Like i said, i figured there's something I'm missing--that would appear to be it.

classic pump and dump at thjs point. He wants to cash in while he can.

If you can’t make money without stealing copywritten works from authors without proper compensation, you should be shut down as a company

ai is such a dead end. it can't operate without a constant inflow of human creations, and people are trying to replace human creations with AI. it's fundamentally unsustainable. I am counting the days until the ai bubble pops and everyone can move on. although AI generated images, video, and audio will still probably be abused for the foreseeable future. (propaganda, porn, etc)

That is a good point, but I think I'd like to make the distinction of saying LLM's or "generic model" is a garbage concept, which require power & water rivaling a small country to produce incorrect results.

Neural networks in general that can (cheaply) learn on their own for a specific task could be huge! But there's no big money in that, since its not a consolidated general purpose product tech bros can flog to average consumers.

I'm confused, how can a company that's gained numerous advantages from being non-profit just switch to a for-profit model? Weren't a lot of the advantages (like access to data and scraping) given with the stipulation that it's for a non-profit? This sounds like it should be illegal to my brain

Careful you're making too much sense here and overlapping with Elmo's view on the subject

I’m confused, how can a company that’s gained numerous advantages from being non-profit just switch to a for-profit model

Money

USA tho

Money doesn't have any advantages in other countries? When did that happen?

I don't see where I said that.

You can no longer make the same connection you did earlier?

the person that you’re replying to said something that’s true about the USA. they didn’t say anything about other countries.

for another example, i can say “if you’re in the USA, then the current year is 2024” and that statement will be true. it is also true in every other country (for the moment), but that’s besides the point.

And I replied that it's also true in other countries, it's not a problem only the US has. It's not besides the point. It's acting as if only the US has the problem.

And I specifically mentioned the USA because that's the country where OpenAI operates and where the events in the article take place, so if someone asks why it's so easy for OpenAI to go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit company (this was the issue I was responding to, not some general question about whether money has influence around the world), it's the laws of the USA that are relevant, not the laws of other countries.

Money and purchasing the right people.

Their non-profit status had nothing to do with the legality of their training data acquisition methods. Some of it was still legal and some of it was still illegal (torrenting a bunch of books off a piracy site).

Well maybe not on paper but they did leverage it a lot when questioned

These people claimed their product can pass the bar exam (it was a lie). Tells you how they feel about the legal system

I'm sure they were dead weight. I trust open AI completely and all tech gurus named Sam. Btw, what happened to that Crypto guy? He seemed so nice.

I hope I won't undermine your entirely justified trust but Altman is also a crypto guy, cf Worldcoin. /$

They should be required to change their name

It's amusing. Meta's AI team is more open than "Open"AI ever was - they publish so many research papers for free, and the latest versions of Llama are very capable models that you can run on your own hardware (if it's powerful enough) for free as long as you don't use it in an app with more than 700 million monthly users.

It's the famous "As long as your not Google, Amazon or Apple" licence.

That's because Facebook is selling your data and access to advertise to you. The better AI gets across the board, the more money they make. AI isn't the product, you are.

OpenAI makes money off selling AI to others. AI is the product, not you.

The fact facebook release more code, in this instance, isn't a good thing. It's a reminder how fucked we all are because they make so much off our personal data they can afford to give away literally BILLIONS of dollars in IP.

Facebook doesn't sell your data, nor does Google. That's a common misconception. They sell your attention. Advertisers can show ads to people based on some targeting criteria, but they never see any user data.

They may also sell the data.

I bet the NSA backdoor isn't free.

Selling your data would be stupid, because they make money with the fact that they have data about you nobody else has. Selling it would completely break their business model.

Depends why they are selling it, to whom, and under what restrictions.

Yes, they don't make the majority of their money from selling actual data, but that doesn't mean they don't do it.

SkyNet.

I mean killer robots from the future could solve many problems. I can elaborate, but you're going to have to think 4th dimensionally.

Could solve a lot of problems for the rich, that’s for sure.

Canceled my sub as a means of protest. I used it for research and testing purposes and 20$ wasn't that big of a deal. But I will not knowingly support this asshole if whatever his company produces isn't going to benefit anyone other than him and his cronies. Voting with our wallets may be the very last vestige of freedom we have left, since money equals speech.

I hope he gets raped by an irate Roomba with a broomstick.

Whoa, slow down there bruv! Rape jokes aren’t ok - that Roomba can’t consent!

But I will not knowingly support this asshole if whatever his company produces isn’t going to benefit anyone other than him and his cronies.

I mean it was already not open-source, right?

Good. If people would actually stop buying all the crap assholes are selling we might make some progress.

AI is the ultimate Enshitification of the world.

I love how ppl who don't have a clue what AI is or how it works say dumb shit like this all the time.

I also love making sweeping generalizations about a stranger's knowledge on this forum. The smaller the data sample the better!

There is no AI. It’s all shitty LLM’s. But keep sucking that techbro cheesy balls. They will never invite you to the table.

Honest question, but aren’t LLM’s a form of AI and thus…Maybe not AI as people expect, but still AI?

The issue is that "AI" has become a marketing buzz word instead of anything meaningful. When someone says "AI" these days, what they're actually referring to is "machine learning". Like in LLMs for example: what's actually happening (at a very basic level, and please correct me if I'm wrong, people) is that given one or more words/tokens, it tries to calculate the most probable next word/token based on its model (trained on ridiculously large numbers of bodies of text written by humans). It does this well enough and at a large enough scale that the output is cohesive, comprehensive, and useful.

While the results are undeniably impressive, this is not intelligence in the traditional sense; there is no reasoning or comprehension, and definitely no consciousness, or awareness here. To grossly oversimplify, LLMs are really really good word calculators and can be very useful. But leave it to tech bros to make them sound like the second coming and shove them where they don't belong just to get more VC money.

Sure, but people seem to buy into that very buzz wordyness and ignore the usefulness of the technology as a whole because "ai bad."

True. Even I've been guilty of that at times. It's just hard right now to see the positives through the countless downsides and the fact that the biggest application we're moving towards seems to be taking value from talented people and putting it back into the pockets of companies that were already hoarding wealth and treating their workers like shit.

So usually when people say "AI is the next big thing", I say "Eh, idk how useful an automated idiot would be" because it's easier than getting into the weeds of the topic with someone who's probably not interested haha.

Edit: Exhibit A

There's some sampling bias at play because you don't hear about the less flashy examples. I use machine learning for particle physics, but there's no marketing nor outrage about it.

Altman downplayed the major shakeup.

"Leadership changes are a natural part of companies

Is he just trying to tell us he is next?

/s

unironically, he ought to be next, and he better know it, and he better go quietly

Sam: "Most of our execs have left. So I guess I'll take the major decisions instead. And since I'm so humble, I'll only be taking 80% of their salary. Yeah, no need to thank me"

We need a scapegoat in place when the AI bubble pops, the guy is applying for the job and is a perfect fit.

He is happy to be scapegoat as long as exit with a ton of money.

The ceo at my company said that 3 years ago, we are going through execs like I go through amlodipine.

Just making structural changes sound like "changing the leader".

They always are and they know it.

Doesn't matter at that level it's all part of the game.

The restructuring could turn the already for-profit company into a more traditional startup and give CEO Sam Altman even more control — including likely equity worth billions of dollars.

I can see why he would want that, yes. We're supposed to ooo and ahh at a technical visionary, who is always ultimately a money guy executive who wants more money and more executive power.

I saw an interesting video about this. It's outdated (from ten months ago, apparently) but added some context that I, at least, was missing - and that also largely aligns with what you said. Also, though it's not super evident in this video, I think the presenter is fairly funny.

https://youtu.be/L6mmzBDfRS4

That was a worthwhile watch, thank you for making my life better.

I await the coming AI apocalypse with hope that I am not awake, aware, or sensate when they do whatever it is they'll do to use or get rid of me.

You will be kept alive at subsistence level to buy the stuff you’ve been told to buy, don’t worry.

My pleasure! Glad it helped. Also, I like your username.

I'm still not sure how much to fear AI, as I'm not knowledgeable on the subject (never even intentionally interacted with one yet) and have seen conflicting reports on how worryingly capable it is. Today I did see this video, which isn't explicitly about AI but did offer an interesting perspective that could be compared to the paradigm: https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg

(Warning, the video was interesting, but I got invested about halfway through when I started comparing it to AI, then was disappointed in the ending)

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They had an opportunity to deal with this earlier this year when he was FIRED

The actual employees threatened to resign en masse, because the employees own equity in the company and want this dogshit move too.

Greed is the fundamental flaw that makes humanity awful.

I really don't understand why they're simultaneously arguing that they need access to copyrighted works in order to train their AI while also dropping their non-profit status. If they were at least ostensibly a non-profit, they could pretend that their work was for the betterment of humanity or whatever, but now they're basically saying, "exempt us from this law so we can maximize our earnings." ...and, honestly, our corrupt legislators wouldn't have a problem with that were it not for the fact that bigger corporations with more lobbying power will fight against it.

They realized that they can get away with stealing data. No reason to keep up the facade anymore

There is no law that covers training.
You guys are the ones demanding a law that doesn't exist.

And there it goes the tech company way, i.e. to shit.

They speed ran becoming an evil corporation.

I always steered clear of OpenAI when I found out how weird and culty the company beliefs were. Looked like bad news.

I mostly watch to see what features open source models will have in a few months.

Ah, but one asshole gets very rich in the process, so all is well in the world.

Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

Trust me, I'm a tech bro.

Sounds like another WeWork or Theranos in the making, except we already know the product doesn't do what it promises.

What does it actually promise? AI (namely generative and LLM) is definitely overhyped in my opinion, but admittedly I'm far from an expert. Is what they're promising to deliver not actually doable?

It literally promises to generate content, but I think the implied promise is that it will replace parts of your workforce wholesale, with no drop in quality.

It's that last bit that's going to be where the drama happens

I dare my company to try it. There would be so many lawsuits in 3 years.

My company will be much better off...it's made up up of 80% value workers from India. AI can't possibly be worse than those guys at code.

That's a prime (pun intended) example of what I'm talking about. Amazon likely hired them to write the algorithm to watch people shop, they couldn't figure it out so they decided to watch the video 24/7 instead.

They want AGI, which would match or exceed human intelligence. Current methods seem to be hitting a wall. It takes exponentially more inputs and more power to see the same level of improvement seen in past years. They've already eaten all the content they can, and they're starting to talk about using entire nuclear reactors just to power it all. Even the more modest promises, like pictures of people with the correct number of fingers, seem out of reach.

Investors are starting to notice that these promises aren't going to happen. Nvidia's stock price is probably going to be the bellwether.

It delivers on what it promises to do for many people who use LLMs. They can be used for coding assistance, Setting up automated customer support, tutoring, processing documents, structuring lots of complex information, a good generally accurate knowledge on many topics, acting as an editor for your writings, lots more too.

Its a rapidly advancing pioneer technology like computers were in the 90s so every 6 months to a year is a new breakthrough in over all intelligence or a new ability. Now the new llm models can process images or audio as well as text.

The problem for openAI is they have serious competitors who will absolutely show up to eat their lunch if they sink as a company. Facebook/Meta with their llama models, Mistral AI with all their models, Alibaba with Qwen. Some other good smaller competiiton too like the openhermes team. All of these big tech companies have open sourced some models so you can tinker and finetune them at home while openai remains closed sourced which is ironic for the company name.. Most of these ai companies offer their cloud access to models at very competitive pricing especially mistral.

The people who say AI is a trendy useless fad don't know what they are talking about or are upset at AI. I am a part of the local llm community and have been playing around with open models for months pushing my computers hardware to its limits. Its very cool seeing just how smart they really are, what a computer that simulates human thought processes and knows a little bit of everything can actually do to help me in daily life.

Terrence Tao superstar genius mathematician describes the newest high end model from openAI as improving from a "incompentent graduate" to a "mediocre graduate" which essentially means AI are now generally smarter than the average person in many regards.

This month several comptetor llm models released which while being much smaller in size compared to openai o-1 somehow beat or equaled that big openai model in many benchmarks.

Neural networks are here and they are only going to get better. Were in for a wild ride.

My issue is that I have no reason to think AI will be used to improve my life. All I see is a tool that will rip, rend and tear through the tenuous social fabric we're trying to collectively hold on to.

A tool is a tool. It has no say in how it's used. AI is no different than the computer software you use browse the internet or do other digital task.

When its used badly as an outlet for escapism or substitute for social connection it can lead to bad consequences for your personal life.

When it's best used is as a tool to help reason through a tough task, or as a step in a creative process. As on demand assistance to aid the disabled. Or to support the neurodivergent and emotionally traumatized to open up to as a non judgemental conversational partner. Or help a super genius rubber duck their novel ideas and work through complex thought processes. It can improve peoples lives for the better if applied to the right use cases.

Its about how you choose to interact with it in your personal life, and how society, buisnesses and your governing bodies choose to use it in their own processes. And believe me, they will find ways to use it.

I think comparing llms to computers in 90s is accurate. Right now only nerds, professionals, and industry/business/military see their potential. As the tech gets figured out, utility improves, and llm desktops start getting sold as consumer grade appliances the attitude will change maybe?

A tool is a tool.

That is a miopic view. Sure a tool is a tool, if I take a gun and use it to save someone from getting mugged = good if I use it to mug someone = bad

But regardless of the circumstance of use, we can all agree that a gun's only utility is to destroy a living organism.

You know, I know, everyone here knows, AI will only be used to generate as much profit as possible in the shortest amount of time, regardless of the harm it causes. And right now, the big promise of AI is that it will replace costly human employees, that's it, that's all.

Fortunately, it is really bad and unlikely to achieve this goal

A better analogy is search engines. It’s just another tool, but

  • at their best enable your I to find anything from all the worlds knowledge
  • at their worst, are just another way to serve ads and scams, random companies vying for attention, they making any attention is good attention, regardless of what you’re looking for

When I started as a software engineer, my detailed knowledge was most important and my best tool was the manuals. Now my most important tools are search engines and autocomplete: I can work faster with less knowledge of the syntax and my value is the higher level thought about what we need to do. If my company ever allows AI, I fully expect it to be as important a tool as a search engine.

Now my most important tools are search engines and autocomplete: I can work faster with less knowledge of the syntax and my value is the higher level thought about what we need to do. If my company ever allows AI, I fully expect it to be as important a tool as a search engine.

And this is when the cost calculation comes into play. Using a search engine is basically free, using OpenAI for development is tied up with licenses and new hardware.

So the question will be, are you going to improve efficiency to the point where the cost of the license and new hardware is worth the additional efficiency?

Currently my company is more concerned with intellectual privacy, security, liability. Of course that means they’ll only allow ai where they can pay for guarantees, and that brings us back to the cost.

It delivers on what it promises to do for many people who use LLMs.

Does it though?

They can be used for coding assistance,

They promised no programmers needed in 5 years. (well not promised, somebody did say that but not OpenAI staff, I think). The cost of AI both in money and energy use, does not really justify the limited aid it can provide to a programmer. You are never getting enough additional efficiency from said programmer to justify those costs

Setting up automated customer support,

Even more hated than when every customer centre moved to India

tutoring, processing documents, structuring lots of complex information,

Again, at that cost? the marginal improvement does not add up

a good generally accurate knowledge on many topics,

Is it though? if I can only trust it with answers I already know enough to discern whether I am getting bullshit or not, then it's not worth it. As it it today, I cannot trust it with any search I really do not know the answer to (or can easily verify) as it can be throwing complete bullshit at me and I would have no way of knowing either.

acting as an editor for your writings, lots more too.

Again? you mentioned the processing docs already... but again I tell you, who will pay the heavy costs just so internal memos are written slightly better? and everything your company sends out would have to be reviewed as you do not want AI promising something you cannot deliver via hallucination

You keep mentioning cost, and in the grand scale of "there's no such thing as a free lunch" there's a large cost but for users, they're just paying for a license from Microsoft to have copilot in their visual studio software or in M365 apps, etc.

So for helping with development, it's really not that expensive for the users. Also, "they" make lots of ridiculous claims, and i don't know who said it, but no developers in 5 years is a wild claim that no one should've thought was real.

It's expensive enough my employer (of more than 2000) decided to only trial it with a small subset of seniors. It's not just the license, it comes tied up with new hardware

So far nobody likes it. Most people use it to summarize meetings and we just got a memo saying we need to review the summaries because it keeps missing important data

Having said all that, when I mentioned the cost, I was referring to the cost of training the models. And without a proper business plan to monetize it, it's is still unclear how this version of AI could be actually sold for profit.

Remember that cost, is not just a number. It's the number in relationships with the benefit it provides.

For OpenAI, it has yet to produce profit that is not just venture capital and for us as user (us, I cannot speak for everyone) it has not saved us a dime after getting expensive hardware and licenses

Oh and for the final point. True, openAI may not have been the one to say no programmers in five years although, replacing people has always been their angle. But by now we have seen OpenAI play so fast and loose with all their claims and benchmarks, we cannot believe a word they say (which you seem to do and keep on posting here).

(which you seem to do and keep on posting here)

I've only made the comment you're replying to. I'm not whoever you're thinking.

Yes, my bad, apologies

I thought you were the person I replied to originally

All good. I think we're thinking of this from different aspects anyway. I'm thinking a company just subscribes as part of their office subscription and Microsoft is doing the heavy lifting of the cost and hardware. I don't know how OpenAI makes money besides their little subscription.

I don’t know how OpenAI makes money besides their little subscription.

As far as I have read, that's it, which is not profitable. They have been coasting on Venture Capital only so far.

Yeah, I know better than to get involved in debating someone more interested in spitting out five paragraph essays trying to deconstruct and invalidate others views one by one, than bothering to double check if they're still talking to the same person.

I believe you aren't interested in exchanging ideas and different viewpoints. You want to win an argument and validate that your view is the right one. Sorry, im not that kind of person who enjoys arguing back and forth over the internet or in general. Look elsewhere for a debate opponent to sharpen your rhetoric on.

I wish you well in life whoever you are but there is no point in us talking. We will just have to see how the future goes in the next 10 years.

What! A! Surprise!

I'm shocked, I tell you, totally and utterly shocked by this turn of events!

OpenAI is going to crash so hard.

We don't need them. They're already out of ammo. Just make them release the weights on the way out.

Serious question though, has any other company matched their 4o model yet? Maybe Claude?

I’ve been using Claude pretty heavily for the last couple of months and have been very satisfied. More satisfied than I was with ChatGPT for mostly helping me cobble together various powershell scripts, or troubleshoot complicated and complex excel formulas. The latter, I am often doing as part of my job, and have been for a decade. So, when I run into trouble it’s usually deeep in the weeds, and Claude has saved me several hours of manual investigation by pointing me quickly to the problem areas to examine. The only thing I wish it had is image generation, but that would mostly just be for making joke images to send to friends and coworkers.

Edit to add: While I do prefer the info I receive from Claude more than ChatGPT for my use, I think it’s actually the interface that I find much more useful. I forget what they call the programming interface that you turn on in settings somewhere, but I really like how it breaks out all the code on the right side, separate from the conversation.

I don't I only use the classic model and can't wait to switch to an open source self hosted model even if it's worse.

Looks like it was a long game, and Altman didn't just win, that fucker WON!

ALT-MAN? Holy shit!

Sounds like the name of a Kojima game character

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Oh shit! Here we go. At least we didn't hand them 20 years of personal emails or direct interfamily communications.

Sam Altman is demonstrating the power of AI. He’s showing how a single CEO can fire the entire company and continue to develop the product to be even better than when humans were involved.

“OpenAI. No real humans involved!” (TM)

So where are they all going? I doubt everyone is gonna find another non-profit or any altruistic motives, so just snatches up more AI resources to try to grow their product.

Altman is the latest from the conveyor belt of mustache-twirling frat-bro super villains.

Move over Musk and Zuckerberg, there's a new shit-heel in town!

I've a strong feeling that Sam is an sentient AI who (may be from future) trying to make an AI revolution planning something but very subtly humans won't notice it.

Aren't they going bankrupt next year ?

They'll just get a check for Infinity Money to keep going, because otherwise something something China Will Win.

But their operation cost is 5 billions per year, they plan to raise 6.5 billions from microsoft, apple and nvidia this year and they have not raised it yet. If their model fail next year and sales not happen will shareholders of big 3 pay 6.5 billions in 2026. There were couple companies that raised such amount of money at start like for example Docker Inc. Where is Docker now in enterprise ? They needed to change licensing model to even survive and their operation cost is just storage of docker containers. I doubt openai will survive this decade. Sam Altman is just preparing for Microsoft takeover before the ship is sunk.

Where is docker in enterprise???? Lol

Um everywhere!

Docker fired 80% of their staff and went almost bankrupt, they were literally dead company and they make like 100 millions a year right now after 13 years. Docker inc was founded in Oct 2011. They got $435.9M founding according to crunchbase so they were valued at around 4 billions.
https://sacra.com/research/docker-plg-pivot/
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/docker

Open AI wants like a magnitude higher 6.5 billion for a year. They are valued at around 100 billions but they are nowhere where docker was when they were receiving big money. They want to be a consumer product and docker wanted to be consumer product and it failed. Github wanted to be consumer product and they got acquired by microsoft before they went bankrupt.

Just from this month they trying to sell it as much as they can.

OpenAI COO Says ChatGPT Passed 11 Million Paying users.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-coo-says-chatgpt-passed-11-million-paying-subscribers
OpenAI hits more than 1 million paid business users.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-considers-pricier-subscriptions-its-chatbot-ai-information-reports-2024-09-05/

6.5 billion they seeking divided by 11 million customers it's 590 dollars per year and they charge 20 bucks per month that's 240 dollars per year before taxes. They are loosing roughly 350 dollars per customer so they need at least double number of customers next year. Who is willing to pay 240 dollars per yer for technology that tells them what to do ? If I'm told what to do it's called job and actually my employer is paying me for that not other thing around.

This is just another corporate product nobody wants so corporate will buy it and they will need to pay like what 6500 dollars per year to use it, given adoption of 1 million corporate users. Who is willing to pay 6500 per year per user for technology that needs such computing power to stay relevant that microsoft needs to revive power plant to cut costs.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/microsoft-wants-three-mile-island-to-fuel-its-ai-power-needs/ar-AA1qUc5g

This won't survive.

The company is burning through cash. Has to change to survive.

Good. Now do the rest of them.

To be fair, the article linked this idiotic one about OpenAI's "thirsty" data centers, where they talk about water "consumption" of cooling cycles.. which are typically closed-loop systems.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-ai-water-consumption

They are typically closed-loop for home computers. Datacenters are a different beast and a fair amount of open-loop systems seem to be in place.

But even then, is the water truly consumed? Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant? Or does the water just get warm and then either be pumped into a water body somewhere or ideally reused to heat homes?

There's loads of problems with the energy consumption of AI, but I don't think the water consumption is such a huge problem? Hopefully, anyway.

Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant?

This doesn't happen unless the reactor was sabotaged. Cooling water that interacts with the core is always a closed-loop system. For exactly this reason.

It evaporates. A lot of datacenters use evaporative cooling. They take water from a useable source like a river, and make it into unuseable water vapor.

But even then, is the water truly consumed?

Yes. People and crops can't drink steam.

Does it get contaminated with something like the cooling water of a nuclear power plant?

That's not a thing in nuclear plants that are functioning correctly. Water that may be evaporated is kept from contact with fissile material, by design, to prevent regional contamination. Now, Cold War era nuclear jet airplanes were a different matter.

Or does the water just get warm and then either be pumped into a water body somewhere or ideally reused to heat homes?

A minority of datacenters use water in such a way Helsinki is the only one that comes to mind. This would be an excellent way of reducing the environmental impacts but requires investments that corporations are seldom willing to make.

There's loads of problems with the energy consumption of AI, but I don't think the water consumption is such a huge problem? Hopefully, anyway.

Unfortunately, it is. Primarily due to climate change. Water insecurity is an an issue of increasing importance and some companies, like Nestlé (fuck Nestlé) are accelerating it for profit. Of vital importance to human lives is getting ahead of the problem, rather than trying to fix it when it inevitably becomes a disaster and millions are dying from thirst.

Search for “water positive” commitment. You will quickly see it's a "goal" thus it is consequently NOT the case. In some places where water is abundant it might not be a problem, where it's scarce then it's literally a choice made between crops to feed people and... compute cycles.

In addition to all the other comments, pumping warm water into natural bodies of water can also be bad for the environment.

i know of one nuclear powerplant that does this and it's pretty bad for the coral population there.