Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

Emergency pod: Elon tries to crash OpenAI's party (with Rose Chan Loui)

On Monday Musk made the OpenAI nonprofit foundation an offer they want to refuse, but might have trouble doing so: $97.4 billion for its stake in the for-profit company, plus the freedom to stick with its current charitable mission.

For a normal company takeover bid, this would already be spicy. But OpenAI’s unique structure — a nonprofit foundation controlling a for-profit corporation — turns the gambit into an audacious attack on the plan OpenAI announced in December to free itself from nonprofit oversight.

As today’s guest Rose Chan Loui — founding executive director of UCLA Law’s Lowell Milken Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofits — explains, OpenAI’s nonprofit board now faces a challenging choice.

Links to learn more, highlights, video, and full transcript.

The nonprofit has a legal duty to pursue its charitable mission of ensuring that AI benefits all of humanity to the best of its ability. And if Musk’s bid would better accomplish that mission than the for-profit’s proposal — that the nonprofit give up control of the company and change its charitable purpose to the vague and barely related “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science” — then it’s not clear the California or Delaware Attorneys General will, or should, approve the deal.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quickly tweeted “no thank you” — but that was probably a legal slipup, as he’s not meant to be involved in such a decision, which has to be made by the nonprofit board ‘at arm’s length’ from the for-profit company Sam himself runs.

The board could raise any number of objections: maybe Musk doesn’t have the money, or the purchase would be blocked on antitrust grounds, seeing as Musk owns another AI company (xAI), or Musk might insist on incompetent board appointments that would interfere with the nonprofit foundation pursuing any goal.

But as Rose and Rob lay out, it’s not clear any of those things is actually true.

In this emergency podcast recorded soon after Elon’s offer, Rose and Rob also cover:

  • Why OpenAI wants to change its charitable purpose and whether that’s legally permissible
  • On what basis the attorneys general will decide OpenAI’s fate
  • The challenges in valuing the nonprofit’s “priceless” position of control
  • Whether Musk’s offer will force OpenAI to up their own bid, and whether they could raise the money
  • If other tech giants might now jump in with competing offers
  • How politics could influence the attorneys general reviewing the deal
  • What Rose thinks should actually happen to protect the public interest

Chapters:

  • Cold open (00:00:00)
  • Elon throws a $97.4b bomb (00:01:18)
  • What was craziest in OpenAI’s plan to break free of the nonprofit (00:02:24)
  • Can OpenAI suddenly change its charitable purpose like that? (00:05:19)
  • Diving into Elon’s big announcement (00:15:16)
  • Ways OpenAI could try to reject the offer (00:27:21)
  • Sam Altman slips up (00:35:26)
  • Will this actually stop things? (00:38:03)
  • Why does OpenAI even want to change its charitable mission? (00:42:46)
  • Most likely outcomes and what Rose thinks should happen (00:51:17)

Video editing: Simon Monsour
Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Transcriptions: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.

#12 - Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night.

“When you're in the middle of a crisis and you have to ask for money, you're already too late.” That’s Dr Beth Cameron, who leads Global Biological Policy and Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative...

25 Okt 20171h 45min

#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

#11 - Spencer Greenberg on speeding up social science 10-fold & why plenty of startups cause harm

Do most meat eaters think it’s wrong to hurt animals? Do Americans think climate change is likely to cause human extinction? What is the best, state-of-the-art therapy for depression? How can we make ...

17 Okt 20171h 29min

#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

#10 - Nick Beckstead on how to spend billions of dollars preventing human extinction

What if you were in a position to give away billions of dollars to improve the world? What would you do with it? This is the problem facing Program Officers at the Open Philanthropy Project - people l...

11 Okt 20171h 51min

#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

#9 - Christine Peterson on how insecure computers could lead to global disaster, and how to fix it

Take a trip to Silicon Valley in the 70s and 80s, when going to space sounded like a good way to get around environmental limits, people started cryogenically freezing themselves, and nanotechnology l...

4 Okt 20171h 45min

#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

#8 - Lewis Bollard on how to end factory farming in our lifetimes

Every year tens of billions of animals are raised in terrible conditions in factory farms before being killed for human consumption. Over the last two years Lewis Bollard – Project Officer for Farm An...

27 Sep 20173h 16min

#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

#7 - Julia Galef on making humanity more rational, what EA does wrong, and why Twitter isn’t all bad

The scientific revolution in the 16th century was one of the biggest societal shifts in human history, driven by the discovery of new and better methods of figuring out who was right and who was wrong...

13 Sep 20171h 14min

#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

#6 - Toby Ord on why the long-term future matters more than anything else & what to do about it

Of all the people whose well-being we should care about, only a small fraction are alive today. The rest are members of future generations who are yet to exist. Whether they’ll be born into a world th...

6 Sep 20172h 8min

#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

#5 - Alex Gordon-Brown on how to donate millions in your 20s working in quantitative trading

Quantitative financial trading is one of the highest paying parts of the world’s highest paying industry. 25 to 30 year olds with outstanding maths skills can earn millions a year in an obscure set of...

28 Aug 20171h 45min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
foreldreradet
mikkels-paskenotter
treningspodden
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
rss-bisarr-historie
jakt-og-fiskepodden
rss-sunn-okonomi
hverdagspsyken
sinnsyn
ukast
rss-kunsten-a-leve
fryktlos
rss-bak-luftfarten
rss-kull
lederskap-nhhs-podkast-om-ledelse
gravid-uke-for-uke
level-up-med-anniken-binz