cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21121074
OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining.
This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI’s increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.
I’d respect the VC grift of “rich people give us way too much money and we do nothing with it and become moderately well off” if it didn’t cause so much damage.
Like, its basically the idea of paying people to do stuff that might not be “productive” but gets them to try things out. But there is no oversight, no regulation, no incentive to care what happens as a result in 3 years time, let alone 50. We should be doing it, but with like restaurants and FOSS programmers and engineers. Move landscapers to public lands to clear out invasives. Move the spacex dorks to nasa and work on an actual 50 year plan to get men on mars in an actually smart way. Have the ‘AI’ dorks actually work to resolve problems that COULD be solved with neural nets/LLMs. Pay them to just do something weird and unique that might not be the “best” but employs them and offers something unique to the community.
Instead, its ultimately grift, useless movement of capital and resources to appear as growth, fumbling about blindly hoping to hit the next dotcom bubble. Real “Useless jobs” when actually productive meaningful work exists, with the same skills that these people have, but isn’t “good” enough for the demons of capitalism to invest in.