Least shocking news ever. This has clearly been in the works for a while. Not that it’ll matter at this point, given that the notion of OpenAI making any profit is kind of a pipe dream right now.
This is mostly just a play to get investors to sink more money into covering their absolutely insane cash burn for another year.
They might not make a profit, but Altman will be able to extract a lot of wealth by using 7% of a billions of dollars valuation. Even if he doesn’t sell any he can use it as collateral against loans to effectively turn them into cash.
Oh, absolutely. Altman is going to plunder this sinking ship for everything it’s worth, and then bail into a CTO position somewhere else. All the C suite at OpenAI will win big no matter what, everyone else there will get fucked.
But wouldn’t he have to repay such loans?
Yes, with the money he’d earn off the money he borrowed. This is why taxing unrealized gains is a national conversation. “It’s not money until you sell it” but you can borrow it like it’s money and make actual other money with it likes it’s money.
Lmao, this has been a scam from the start.
When you organize a nonprofit, you dedicate it to the public benefit. it’s not supposed to ever have owners, everything it does it supposed to be for me and you. as far as I’m concerned, this is a multi billion dollar larceny against the general public and we really need better laws that preserve our nonprofit institutions. Just even trying to plan this out is a crime against humanity
With healthcare systems and churches as some of the biggest offenders.
I also come to the conclusion that this was planned from the start–that if it ever took off, they would change the status and profit from it. They took tax breaks for years in the early days and now want to take a capital benefit.
ClosedAI
Aaaaand
Pop goes the AI bubble.
Last stages of capitalism for tech is usually in the form of an ipo of some sort which is what this will lead to.
There will be other cool shit obviously with integrations and tools that will hopefully trickle down to open source models but the writing is on the wall. This is a cash out and enshittify move.
The best news out of it is we will start to see less and less “our company is Ai and we shoved Ai into said thing” as the companies late to the game will continue to shoot their shot until OpenAI has completely dominated the market and investors stop caring.
The AI’s closed due to AIs.
