Lookup Worldcoin for instance.

This situation is arguably better than an alternative where Google or another big tech monopoly had also monopolized LLMs (which seems like the most likely winner otherwise, however they may have also never voluntarily ventured in to publicly releasing LLM tools because of the copyright issues and risk of cannibalizing their existing ad business.) Feels like this story isn't finished and writing a book is premature.

I never understood these sorts of statements. I feel historical events maybe after the Victorian age can claim to be theft, otherwise it's just empires and conquest.

Adjusted for inflation, wouldn't Alexander the Great's plundering of Persia, which at the time comprised 40% of the world's population, be the greatest theft in human history, using your logic?

To the extent the answer is ‘much lower’ then he could have spent a whole blog post congratulating California ag and Sam for landing the single largest new public charity in real dollar terms maybe ever.

If the point is “it sticks in my craw that the team won’t keep working how they used to plan on working even when the team has already left” then, fair enough. But I disagree with theft as an angle; there are too many counter factuals to think through before you should make a strong case it’s theft.

Put another way - I think the writer hates Sam and so we get this. I’m guessing we will not be reading an article where Ilya leaving and starting a C corp with no charitable component is called theft.

Also, the article is very clear - the wealth transfer is moving the money/capital controlled by a non-profit to stockholders of a for-profit company. The non-profit lost that property, the share holders gained that property. It seems like taking an implicit assumption something like "the same people are running the for-profit on the same basis they ran the non-profit so where's the theft" - feel free to make that argument but mix the claim with "I don't understand" doesn't seem like a fair approach.

Plus, why do people think OAI is still special? Facebook, Google, and many smaller companies are doing the exact same work developing models.

Is there like a public list of all employees who have transitioned or something? As far as I know there have been some high profile departures.

an ipo is a way to seek more capital. they don't think they can achieve agi solely through private investment.

Google on multimodality: has been truly impressive over the last six months and has the deep advantages of Chrome, YouTube, and being the default web indexer, but it's entirely plausible they flub the landing on deep product integration.

Chinese companies and pricing: facts, and it's telling to me that OpenAI seems to have abandoned their rhetorical campaign from earlier this year teasing that "maybe we could charge $20000 a month" https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/05/openai-reportedly-plans-to....

Coding: Anthropic has been impressive but reliability and possible throttling of Claude has users (myself included) looking for alternatives.

Social: I think OpenAI has the biggest opportunity here, as OpenAI is closest to being a consumer oriented company of the model hyperscalers and they have a gigantic user base that they can take to whatever AI-based platform category replaces social. I'm somewhat skeptical that Meta at this point has their finger on the pulse of social users, and I think Superintelligence Labs isn't well designed to capitalize on Meta's advantages in segueing from social to whatever replaces social.

The average joe is not using them though, for the general public AI is ChatGpt.

Imagine if an executive was running the world’s largest charity for cancer research, which was chartered to make sure a cure remained in the public trust and raised millions with that promise.

But then once they discovered a cure for cancer the executive instead decided to transfer that cure to a ruthlessly competitive company they personally owned a large percentage of and then become a billionaire many times over.