> Certainly, no one with any sense will be “donating” any money in OpenAI without some strong and specific guarantees of what they’re going to be getting in return.

And what about the taxpayer? What are these guys/gals fighting over if it isn't future profits?

Has anyone else read the reporting on the non-profit's corp structure?

> OpenAI also created a subsidiary of For-Profit-LP, OpenAI LLC (let’s call that “For-Profit-LLC”), of which Microsoft is a minority owner and For-Profit-LP is the majority owner. For-Profit-LLC’s operating agreement cautions that “it would be wise to view an investment in [For-Profit-LLC] in the spirit of a donation, with the understanding that it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-AGI [artificial general intelligence] world.”[0]

I really have no idea why companies like Microsoft are putting so much money into a for profit entity, and calling it like a donation. Am I just skeptical or is everyone winking at each other, and acting too cute by half?

[0]: https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2024/03/05/the-untold-no...

Microsoft at least got licenses to a bunch of tech in return for their “donations”.

> I really have no idea why companies like Microsoft are putting so much money into a for profit entity, and calling it like a donation. Am I just skeptical or is everyone winking at each other, and acting too cute by half?

All those "donators" went up in arms and threatened to sue/quit when they thought that those "donations" wouldn't return profits. It is a for-profit in all but name today.

Does the pope count as a precedent? Lots of donations head the pope’s way every day.

The church provides a number of charitable services in healthcare, education etc across the world particularly in the developing world. If you add them all up they provide the most globally.

They actually do things compared to this "open" and "non profit" front of a technology company.

You're comparing apples (openness) to oranges (doing stuff).

It would be weird to even ask "How much open source code and research does the Catholic Church publish?"

The church does stuff away for free, sure, but then so too does ChatGPT have this shockingly powerful free tier.

> How much open source code and research does the Catholic Church publish?

The Catholic church has not only engaged in centuries of religious scholarship, it has given the knowledge freely to anyone. They even set up buildings where you can go and they will teach you what they have found, most people go on Sunday.

That isn't to mention their patronizing of the arts supported the greatest painters and composers that humanity has ever produced.

Now how many hungry has OpenAI fed?

> The Catholic church has not only engaged in centuries of religious scholarship, it has given the knowledge freely to anyone. They even set up buildings where you can go and they will teach you what they have found, most people go on Sunday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Apostolic_Archive

Also, one of the biggest issues that Martin Luther had with Catholicism was that it put the clergy between the faithful and god.

*The Thirty Years' War enters, stage left*.

> Now how many hungry has OpenAI fed?

Around as many as the number of Python programs that the Catholic Church has written with Hindi comments, which was one of the first things I tried on ChatGPT.

There's also a reason why I said "apples (openness) to oranges (doing stuff)".

OpenAI also didn't send nine crusades to liberate the holy lands from the Muslims. Someone probably thinks that makes them "woke" or something.

On the otherhand measuring and organization like the Catholic church and judging it today by its worst behavior over 500 years ago (while ignoring the environment it was in at the time no one ever mentions the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople going on concurrently) and ignoring the massive changes in teaching, theology and behavior that has happened in the intervening centuries.

Yes, but as my entire point is this is a bad comparison…

…as OpenAI is only a few years old, wasn't the first few years of Christianity, before Catholicism split from other denominations, "oh no, we need to stop our converts committing suicide immediately because they want to get out of their awful lives and into the heaven we promised them and they're afraid they might sin again between baptism and death if they don't off themselves"?

Even with the weird end of the "Rapture of the Nerds" (the attitude not the book, I've not read the book), I don't think we're seeing so much of that resulting from AI development. And that's despite more users than there were Europeans in 1500 AD, let alone 1 AD.

That is what most companies would call a recruitment event.

I like how you focused on the fiefdom aspect accurately, while others focused on the nonprofit aspect

And the Vatican is rightly subject to a lot of criticism and scrutiny every time their activities stray in the for-profit realm. A few years their banks were effectively banned from the global banking system because they were too shady - they're not shady because they like to be shady, but because they work hard to hide activities that are not, er, "in character" with their stated non-profit mission. They had to clean up their act before they were allowed back in. The state of their numerous properties and businesses in Italy is constantly under legal challenge, with various different outcomes at various points in time.

The pope is not a model.

Well, the donations the pope collects aren't gathered trough entirely rational arguments, so that helps get away with lots of issues.

And the pope is quite bound by ancient texts and the the pronouncements of previous popes. While no way exists to depose him if he disregards them, having the cardinals declare the current pope was illegitimately appointed and appointing a new one was fairly common back in the days.

> I doubt there’s a precedent for a CEO of a “non-profit” effectively answerable to no-one and able to use it as their personal fiefdom

this is actually already why non profits have difficulty raising money

many people view charities as unaccountable scams

most non profits are funded solely by the board and the endowment is managed to grow tax free. If you start reading the IRS forms 990 you’ll see pretty wild and inspirational things

That's not actually very common in non-profits. In the Apache foundation, there's membership that elects the board.

While the membership is determined by the executives appointed by the board, there's at least some thought given to the idea of holding the people on the top accountable.

> That's not actually very common in non-profits.

there is a lot wrong with that assumption based on a single anecdote.

private foundations can have a single board member and that board member can be the single donor. although the IRS does not care in granting tax-exempt status, not all states offer a single board member for their own non-profit entity catalogue, but relevant states do like Delaware. of course Delaware does right? additionally, it doesn't matter what a state's non-profit entity selection has as any entity can obtain non-profit tax exempt status from the IRS technically, even unincorporated entities like sole-proprietorships ie. your general person when operating the charitable mission. Not likely it'll be approved though.

there is some transparency of this which is not aggregated, in the 990 series of tax disclosures that non-profits have to provide, this can show how many board members or directors there are, if that's whats important for you to prove. I don't think that's important, but this is about "common" or not and I don't have the aggregate data, that's where to get partial data.

none of these forms tell you the bylaws of the organization, these are still private documents. the bylaws dictate board member selection.

next, if Donor Advised Funds count as non-profits in your mind, that's a slam dunk as those are all pools of capital for grant making run by a single donor.

and where the transparency totally fails is in exempt non-profits, these report only the "postcard" 990-N and is entirely on an honor system that they have less than $50,000 in "annual receipts". these are cheap to create and nobody knows anything about them, what's actually on their balance sheet, there are basically no audits as they are tax exempt and there is no reason to determine what's missing.

I usually don't write this stuff as its more beneficial if the people had more disjointed opinions about tax matters, but I don't think Congress will ever reach consensus on any opinion people harbor so its fine. One of those examples where truth is less familiar than fiction.