Hmm

...

they expect us to take their word that, um, as they operate, as they make deals with the Defense Department to develop autonomous weapons and surveillance systems on American citizens, as they, you know, f- battle parents in court whose children have committed suicide due to conversations that these kids were having with their chatbots, and as they subpoena these parents for the list of people who attended their children's memorial service as part of those lawsuits, they expect us to believe that the nonprofit mission is being prioritized over the profit motivation of the company.

We all know that OpenAI's overriding priority is to, quote-unquote, "Win the AI race." It's to beat out the competition in the marketplace, and it's to establish the biggest AI company they can create.

And to the extent that the nonprofit mission ever comes into tension with that, the company will always prioritize profits over the mission.

But a law is only as good as its enforcement, and I think if there's one sort of rule of Silicon Valley, it is to ask forgiveness and not permission.

And, you know, breaking the law and s- skirting regulations is part of the venture capital playbook.

I'm sorry.

What is venture capital and what role does it play in the tech industry and why should we be concerned about it?

Yeah, before I answer that question, I do want to say I have a lot of sympathy for people who work in philanthropy and who are, you know, maybe feeling like they are implicated in this problem, but don't know what to do about it.

And it's the perfect, you know, systems don't change unless people do.

And recognizing that, you know, there are a lot of good people who work in philanthropy who either don't know or don't know how to fix this problem and or what they can do to help start to catalyze solutions to this problem.

And You know, I would like to be a partner in that work.

So hopefully people can hear this with an open heart and an open mind and not as sort of critique or judgment.

But back to answering your question, it is helpful to give a little bit of history, I think.

And so how does wealth hoarding depend on systems that extract from workers' housing communities?

I mean, I know that like, this is something that you've been talking about and thinking about obviously for about, you know, a decade or more, but what made you decide to put it into a book form like this?

Yeah.

So I started tech equity, um, Well, it was catalyzed by this announcement that Uber made in 2015, right around the last time I guess we spoke, that they were opening an office in downtown Oakland.

They were going to move 2,500 jobs there.

It happened to be a building that was right across the street from my apartment at the time.

And the community reacted extremely negatively to that announcement.

And this was sort of before Uber went on to develop the reputation it went on to develop.

Do you want to, you want to dig a little bit in on, on that and sort of what is it about venture capital that drives them only to support the kind of home run grand slam approaches?

And so my first question for both of you is simply, why should we care about OpenAI's nonprofit status? Why does it matter?

I think it might be helpful for your listeners to just be reminded of OpenAI's history and why it was founded, which is important to understand the governance structure.

It was founded in order to ensure that this technology that its founders believed was eminent was going to benefit humanity and not undermine it.

They had a, a strong understanding of the potential risks of AGI, and they wanted to build something that could harness that technology for good.

And that was a lofty mission, and I think a lot of us at, at the time were very supportive of it.

They structured themselves as a nonprofit explicitly to protect that technology and that mission from the imposition of investors onto the technology, and I thought this was very telling.

I just wrote a book about venture capital and interviewed Sam Altman for the book and wanted to understand his thinking behind setting OpenAI up as a nonprofit.

How can you have a nonprofit board still in, quote-unquote, "control" when it really is just sitting over to the side with a bunch of shares that it got from this conversion?