 |
|
|
|||||
OpenAI said Tuesday it has reorganized its ownership structure and converted its business into a public benefit corporation and two crucial regulators, the Delaware and California attorneys general, said they would not oppose the plan. The restructuring paves the way for the ChatGPT maker to more easily profit off its artificial intelligence technology even as it remains technically under the control of a nonprofit. Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings and California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in separate statements that they would not object to the proposal, seemingly bringing to an end more than a year of negotiations and announcements about the future of OpenAI’s governance and the power that for-profit investors and its nonprofit board will have over the organization’s technology. The company also said it has signed a new agreement with its longtime backer Microsoft that gives the software giant a roughly 27% stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit corporation but changes some of the details of their close partnership. The attorneys general of Delaware, where OpenAI is incorporated, and California, where it is headquartered, had both said theyre investigating the proposed changes. We will be keeping a close eye on OpenAI to ensure ongoing adherence to its charitable mission and the protection of the safety of all Californians, said Bonta. OpenAI said it completed its restructuring after nearly a year of engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices in both states. OpenAI has completed its recapitalization, simplifying its corporate structure, said a blog post Tuesday from Bret Taylor, the chair of OpenAI’s board of directors. The nonprofit remains in control of the for-profit, and now has a direct path to major resources before AGI arrives. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, which OpenAI defines as highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with a mission to safely build AGI for humanity’s benefit. It later started a for-profit arm. Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and the two companies formed an agreement that made Microsoft the exclusive provider of the computing power needed to build OpenAIs technology. In turn, Microsoft heavily used the technology behind ChatGPT to enhance its own AI products. The two companies first revealed in January that they were altering that agreement, enabling San Francisco-based OpenAI to build its own computing capacity, primarily for research and training of models. That coincided with OpenAIs announcements of a partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to build a massive new data center in Abilene, Texas. It’s since announced more such projects planned in the U.S., Asia, Europe and South America, along with big deals with chipmakers like Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom. But other parts of its agreements with Microsoft remained up in the air as the two companies appeared to veer further apart before reaching a tentative new agreement in September. OpenAI had previously said its own nonprofit board will decide when AGI is reached, effectively ending its Microsoft partnership. But it now says that once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel, and that Microsoft’s rights to OpenAI’s confidential research methods will remain until either the expert panel verifies AGI or through 2030, whichever is first. Microsoft will also retain some commercial rights to OpenAI products post-AGI and through 2032. Microsoft put out the same joint announcement about the revised partnership Tuesday but declined further comment. Its shares spiked 2% on Tuesday. Going forward, the nonprofit will be called the OpenAI Foundation and Taylor said it would grant out $25 billion toward health and curing diseases and protecting against the cybersecurity risks of AI. He did not say over what time period those funds would be dispersed. Robert Weissman, co-president of the nonprofit Public Citizen, said this arrangement does not guarantee the nonprofit independence, likening it to a corporate foundation that will serve the interests of the for profit. Even as the nonprofits board may technically remain in control, Weissman said that control is illusory because there is no evidence of the nonprofit ever imposing its values on the for profit. The Delaware attorney generals investigation focused on ensuring OpenAI put its commitment to safety first and before any financial interests. Jennings also said OpenAI promised to keep its nonprofit in control of the public benefit corporation, including the right to appoint and remove its board members. The removal of OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in Nov. 2023 by the nonprofit’s board at the time and his subsequent reappointment kicked off the company’s effort to restructure. The nonprofits board will continue to include a Safety and Security Committee, which will have the power to oversee and review OpenAIs technology development. It will even have the power to stop the release of a new product, according to the Delaware attorney generals statement. Additionally, within a year, the nonprofits board will include at least two members who do not also serve on the public benefit corporations board. OpenAI still faces a legal challenge from billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early OpenAI investor who now runs his own AI firm, xAI, and has accused the startup he co-founded of betraying its original mission. A federal judge in March denied Musks request for a court order blocking OpenAI from converting itself to a for-profit company but said she could expedite a trial to consider Musks claims. Matt O’Brien and Thalia Beaty
Category:
E-Commerce
In artificial intelligence, compute and data matter, but people matter more. Behind every breakthrough model, every infrastructure leap, and every revolutionary chatbot lies a shrinking pool of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians capable of building them. The defining constraint on the next decade of AI isnt just hardware: its human capital. Across the world, a quiet arms race is unfolding for that capital. The most advanced AI firms, like OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, Meta, Google, and a few in China, are no longer competing just for customers or GPUs. They are competing for brains. The new concentration of intelligence In the past two years, the hiring and acquisition patterns of AI companies have begun to resemble a geopolitical map. Anthropic and OpenAI lure entire research teams from Google or Meta with compensation packages approaching nine figures. Apple and Amazon, late to the party, are buying startups not for products, but for the engineers behind them. And venture capital is no longer funding ideas so much as acqui-hiring: purchasing human potential before it matures elsewhere. Multiple analyses show that elite U.S. programs, especially Stanford, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT remain dominant feeders into frontier AI labs, reinforcing a tight concentration of expertise in a few firms and geographies. The result is intellectual concentration unprecedented in the history of technology. This clustering may accelerate progress in the short term. But it also increases fragility. When innovation lives inside a handful of firms, the industry becomes monocultural. The same assumptions, ethical frameworks, and commercial incentives repeat themselves. Alternative approaches, like symbolic reasoning, hybrid models, and decentralized architectures, struggle for attention or funding. The global scramble for minds Meanwhile, countries are treating AI researchers the way they once treated nuclear physicists or oil engineers. The United Kingdom launched its Frontier AI Taskforce with special visas for top scientists. Canadas Global Talent Stream fast-tracks work permits for AI engineers in under two weeks. France offers tax incentives and research grants for companies that locate their labs in Paris or Grenoble. China, faced with export controls on chips, has doubled down on human intelligence as a strategic resource. Its leading universities are producing tens of thousands of AI graduates a year, many trained on open-weight models after Washingtons hardware restrictions. As one analyst at the Carnegie Endowment put it, If you cant import compute, you import talent. In other words: brains are the new semiconductors. Americas self-inflicted wound And yet, the United States, still home to most of the worlds top AI firms, is busy tightening the spigot. Donald Trumps renewed hostility toward immigration includes threats to limit, suspend, or impose heavy fees on H-1B and F-1 visas, the very programs through which thousands of AI researchers enter the country each year. The pattern is not new. In 2020, during his previous term, Trump signed an executive order suspending key visa categories, prompting MIT Technology Review to warn that the move threatened to undercut Americas lead in artificial intelligence. The logic hasnt changed. The worlds best AI researchers are disproportionately international: roughly 60% of top AI scientists working in the U.S. were born abroad, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. Limiting their entry isnt protectionism: its strategic sabotage. When your biggest competitive advantage is talent, closing the door to talent is a slow form of self-destruction. The corporate paradox Ironically, the companies that benefit from global talent the most are also the ones making that talent scarce. By offering astronomical salaries and exclusivity contracts, they create a gravitational field that pulls expertise out of universities and startups. Academia, long the seedbed of AI progress, is now bleeding researchers to industry at an unprecedented rate. The result is a research vacuum where public institutions can no longer afford to compete. Even national labs struggle to retain talent when private firms offer multiples of government pay. This corporate concentration of minds has another cost: intellectual homogeneity. When the same people cycle between the same companies under the same investors, the frontier of AI becomes narrower, more predictable, and less plural. The next big breakthroughs might never happen, and not because we lack compute, but because weve trained the global research community to think the same way. The geopolitical stakes For decades, the United States has dominated global innovation by acting as a magnet for talent. The H-1B and F-1 visa systems, for all their flaws, turned American universities and tech hubs into engines of discovery. That advantage is now at risk. If Washington continues down the path of visa restriction, and if the industry continues to hoard rather than nurture expertise, the gravitational center of AI could shift elsewhere. Canada, the European Union, and the UAE are already competing for displaced researchers. China, meanwhile, is developing homegrown alternatives with staggering speed. The irony is that America may lose the very thing that made its technology ecosystem unstoppable: openness. The more insular it becomes, the more it resembles the centralized systems it once out-innovated. The ethics of scarcity Talent concentration also raises moral questions. When a small number of corporations control the majority of global AI expertise, they effectively control which problems get solved and which are ignored. We are already seeing this bias in practice. Billions are being poured into models that optimize productivity, marketing, and financial forecasting, while underfunded projects in climate modeling, education, and healthcare languish. AIs promise to benefit humanity is hollow if humanity doesnt have a seat at the table. Diversity of thought, background, and geography is not a moral luxury; its a prerequisite for resilience. Homogeneous systems fail in homogeneous ways. A new social contract for intelligence The solution is neither regulation alone nor market freedom alone. Its a new social contract for talentone that treats human intelligence as a shared strategic resource, not a proprietary asset. That means: Immigration policies that attract, not repel, the worlds brightest minds. Funding mechanisms that keep public research competitive with corporate labs. Ethical frameworks that prevent non-competes and exclusivity contracts from turning scientists into captives. Global cooperation that recognizes AI as a common infrastructure challenge, not a zero-sum race. In the 20th century, nations competed for oil. In the 21st, they will compete for cognition. A warning and a choice The United States still holds the advantage: world-class universities, deep capital markets, and a culture of risk. But advantages erode when arrogance replaces openness. If America turns inward, it wont just lose talent: it will lose the diversity that fuels creativity. And when the next generation of scientists chooses to work in Toronto, Paris, Madrid, or Shenzhen instead of Silicon Valley, the American century of innovation will quietly end. Not with a revolution, but with a resignation letter. Computing power, as I said in previous articles, is important, as it is access to cheap energy, or as Europe very well knows, regulation. But the race for AI supremacy will not be won by compute, nor by energy prices or by policy alone. It will be won by whoever attracts and empowers the minds that make intelligence itself. And right now, those minds are watching which countries still deserve them.
Category:
E-Commerce
The latest gambling scandal to rock the NBA is about a real-world event that normal people would never have noticed. In March 2023, the 35-37 New Orleans Pelicans coasted to a 115-89 win over the Charlotte Hornets, who would go on to finish the year with a record of 27-55. The Pelicans never trailed in the game thanks largely to the play of Brandon Ingram, who notched the first triple-double of his career. The ninth paragraph of the recap on ESPN mentions one other factor that may have contributed to the decisive margin of victory: Hornets guard Terry Rozier left the game early, complaining of a sore right foot, and did not return. As alleged by federal prosecutors in New York, this was not a coincidence. Before the game, they say, Rozier told a childhood friend that he intended to fake an injury, thus allowing that friend to place sure-thing wagers on Roziers propsa type of bet that allows users to gamble on whether a player will accumulate more (over) or less (under) than a sportsbook-supplied total in a given statistical category. Roziers friend then sold this information to an uncertain-but-significant number of other bettors, who collectively bet hundreds of thousands of dollars that Terry Rozier, a serviceable-but-not-spectacular guard playing in a late-season game between two perennially forgettable teams, would just happen to have an off night. Sure enough, Rozier checked out after scoring just five points in less than ten minutes of playing time, which meant that, as promised, those under bets hit. A few days later, the bettors convened in Philadelphia to settle up. Roziers friend then drove to Roziers home in Charlotte, where they counted their cash together, according to the indictment. Prop betsbets that a given event will or will not occur in a gameare not the only variety of cheating alleged in this scandal, which involves a cast of characters that includes current and former NBA players, enterprising sports gamblers, and Mafia associates running rigged poker games that will almost certainly be portrayed in a Netflix limited series sometime next year. But player props are at the heart of this story nonetheless, because player props will likely be at the heart of every sports betting scandal for the foreseeable future. Props are the betting industrys single greatest threat to the legitimacy of the games fans watch, and to the public trust the leagues spent decades building. Yet because their availability makes so much money for everyone involvednot bettors, of course, but the leagues and their official sportsbook partnersno one in a position of power has much of an incentive to do anything about it. Among bettors, props are popular because they are fun: They give casual viewers a reason to root for players they otherwise wouldnt care about, and take advantage of armchair quarterbacks fervent belief that they understand their favorite teams tendencies better than some oddsmaker ever could. But from an integrity-of-the-game standpoint, the problems with these bets are pretty intuitive. First, in many cases, the outcome is easily manipulable by one person. A player in Roziers shoes cant guarantee that hell score a certain number of points, and he certainly cant guarantee that the Hornets will win (or lose) the game. But he can guarantee that he scores less than a certain number of points. All he has to do is remember what that number is, and to grasp at his foot and wince a little before he reaches it. Second, the outcomes of prop bets are often inconsequential to the final score, which is what most non-bettor fans pay attention to and care about. Earlier this year, for example, regulators flagged that bettors in Ohio, New York, and New Jersey seemed unusually confident that Cleveland Guardians pitcher Luis Ortiz, in two specific games and in two specific innings, would throw a ball or hit the batter with his first pitch. Sure enough, in both instances, Ortizs deliveries were outside and in the dirt; one skipped by the catcher altogether. Major League Baseball placed Ortiz on leave, and its investigation is ongoing. But if Ortiz was colluding with friendly bettors whom he tipped off beforehand, it is easy to see how they might have settled on this particular moneymaking strategy, which hinges on the results of a single pitch, thrown when nobody is on base, while fans who went to get beers during the break are still making their way back to their seats. Again, by himself, a player like Ortiz cant control whether his team wins a nine-inning game. But he can control whether his first pitch of the third inning is anywhere close to the strike zone, or gets all the way to the backstop. In the past year or so, the leagues have begun to understand the dangers that the proliferation of prop bets poses to their respective enterprises. Over the most recent MLB All-Star Break, Commissioner Rob Manfred criticized prop bets as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable to manipulation. At the NFLs request, Illinois regulators banned props on made kicks, incomplete passes, and other events where the outcome is 100% determinable by one person in one play. The NCAA has asked Congress to ban player props in college athletics; in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine has pushed for a total ban on props in both college and pro sports, calling the market for these bets an experiment that has failed badly. The NBA had the chance to address props last year, when Toronto Raptors reserve Jontay Porter was implicated in a Rozier-style scheme in which he removed himself from a game to ensure his under bets would hit. Shortly afterwards, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver asked sportsbooks to stop offering props on players who are, like Porter, signed to two-way or ten-day contracts, reasoning that fringe players making the least money are the most susceptible to pressure to try and supplement their incomes while they still have the chance. But the Rozier scandal reveals the flaws inherent in trying to regulate a multibillion-dollar industry by reacting to the most recent scandal. First, the unavailability of props for players of Porters caliber would not have affected Rozier, a ten-year veteran who, when he pulled himself from that game back in March 2023, was in the first year of a four-year contract worth $96 million. And second all Silver could do was ask the sportsbooks for help, because the league only has so much control over the bets its partners do and dont take. As a result, according to NBC News, even after the Porter scandal, the league had to make the business case to the sportsbooks that prop bets on bit players like him were not lucrative enough to continue to offer. It is true that leagues, sportsbooks, and regulators have procedures in place to try and ferret out cheating. Hours before the game from which Rozier removed himself, many sportsbooks stopped taking bets on his props after a third-party monitoring firm flagged unusual betting activity on his unders, including one bettor at one casino who wagered more than $13,000 across 30 separate bets in 46 minutes. But the fact that these systems have caught some cheating only raises the question in fans minds of how much cheating is actually going on. If Roziers friend had been a little more circumspect about placing his betsor, at the very least, if he hadnt passed it on to God knows how many people who flooded gambling apps and casino floors, looking to get in on the actionperhaps no one would have found out. And even if (a big if, but stay with me) these systems are as effective as leagues would like you to believe, perception is as important as reality. The more often that bettors read about scandals like this one in the news, the more often their lost wagers and bad beats will start to feel like the results of corruption that the leagues must have missed. Already, players across sports endure harassment and receive death threats from bettors angry about a leg of their parlay that didnt hit. If you search X for the name of any underperforming player in any given game, you will get a deluge of irate all-caps tweets concluding that the fix must be in, and snitch-tagging the FBI to beg Kash Patel to open an investigation immediately. To date, the leagues havepardon the phrasebet that the billions of dollars they make from legal gambling will make the occasional embarrassing scandal worth the trouble. (Silver recently described the NBA as learning as we go.) For now, thats probably still true, but at some point, if betting and non-betting fans no longer trust the on-field, on-court, or on-ice product, it wont be. The question is whether the leagues will give up some of this easy money to protect what remains of their credibility, or whether they are willing to risk losing it for good.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||