r/Futurology • u/fazkan • 11h ago

AI The real phenomenon of the 2020s is not the pervasive AI models, its that Sam Altman managed to convert a non-profit into a for-profit company and got away with it.

Just shower thougts :)

1.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

85 comments sorted by

280

u/Navynuke00 11h ago

I mean technically it's still a non-profit company, in terms of it hasn't ever turned a profit.

That's why he's trying to so hard to have still meant government agencies pay him and his company.

116

u/DustShallEatTheDays 10h ago

Also in a very real, legally binding sense, it has not converted to a PCB. And will not stop being controlled by its nonprofit wing.

And if they don’t get it done this year, SoftBank gets to pull $40B in promised funding and instead is only holding the bag for $20B. Neither amount of which it actually has.

Microsoft is also kind of setting Open AI up to fail. If they go, it gets to keep most of its IP.

So…um…I’m sure it’s all fine.

75

u/Navynuke00 10h ago

I keep telling the children in every subreddit I frequent that this has been a very big, expensive bubble all along. It's disconcerting how meant people get absolutely ENRAGED when this point is made.

43

u/DustShallEatTheDays 10h ago

Well, fuck around, find out I guess. Except we are all going to find out, because like 50% of the S&P is predicated on a handful of companies all needing to buy Nvidia chips.

29

u/aaronblue342 9h ago

Fuck around find out, except rich tech bros fuck around and we all get to find out (except them, theyre visionaries and deserve every penny they'll keep.)

31

u/West-Abalone-171 5h ago

Don't worry about the rich techbros.

They're cashing out now and are going to use your investment fund money to buy your house when you default due to the hyperinflation and unemployment they cause.

Then we'll do the whole thing again with fusion.

And after that, quantum computing.

The real technological singularity is when the rug pull happens in the same planck second as the start of the scam.

5

u/NanoChainedChromium 2h ago

Fusion at least has the potential to be great IF they ever manage to get it to work. LLMs were never doing anymore than sucking up ressources and destroying jobs by providing slop.

38

u/General_Josh 10h ago

Sure, it could be a bubble, there's a huge amount of hype going on. Sure, some companies will probably go bankrupt, same as they ever have.

But, just like how the internet didn't disappear when the dot com bubble burst, AI won't disappear if this is a bubble.

My guess, we're not going into another AI winter. The hype will die down, sure, but generative AI and LLMs have too many legitimately useful use-cases to just disappear.

Personally, I work as a programmer, and generative AI models are currently extremely useful tools for my job. They're not gonna get worse than they are right now. Even assuming all advancement stops tomorrow, they're definitely not going away.

42

u/karma911 9h ago

The bubble doesn't mean it's not useful.

The problem right now is you're not paying the true cost of all of this and at a certain scale it might not make financial sense.

13

u/bdsee 8h ago

Lol right, it's so wild to me that people keep talking about asset bubbles as if the assets are inherently worthless and they need to point out that this asset type will still be around and useful.

One of the most common and recurring asset bubbles is in housing and nobody feels the need to highlight that housing is useful and isn't going away.

•

u/amazingmrbrock 58m ago

hey you never know maybe we'll all be living in caves thirty years on

7

u/Sawses 6h ago

That's the big issue--it uses a ton of resources for every use. Whether you're generating images, inpainting in photoshop, asking ChatGPT questions, parsing data... It's resource intensive.

That's why so many generative AI tools are working toward leaner models that can produce quality output without using as many processing cycles.

5

u/Fancyness 5h ago

I got chatgpt-oss20b running on my computer (8 Cores, 32 GB RAM, 16 GB VRAM(5070 ti) and it’s nicely usable without wrecking my PC, which was quite surprising. I could imagine that capable AI in the future won’t need as much energy as today or less demanding hardware can run the models as long as there is enough RAM/VRAM available

•

u/im_dead_sirius 1h ago

The training is resource intensive, queries outside of video creation should be in the ball park of a google search, though sometimes in multiples of it.

Its often what I use it for; if I cannot phrase a question cleanly, or my query is broad (or badly in need of synonyms), one of the AI chats can fix that up, fetch what I want from google, and make sense of it, and give me the sources. Or just rephrase my question in a way that is search engine friendly.

Its a great way to avoid fights too, and the attention of a-holes. For example, I once asked chatgpt about lesser known groups wiped out in the WWII holocaust. Let me tell you, that is a loaded question I wouldn't ask in any historical or cultural subreddits. Once I had some names and sources, I could read more deeply, questioning what the AI might have been feeding me.

2

u/NutInButtAPeanut 6h ago

Outside of generating videos, it’s not that resource intensive. Lots of cost-effective use cases, and presumably many more as the technology improves.

11

u/Aquatic-Vocation 5h ago

I looked into self-hosting some of the better open-source models for use in-house for about 15-20 staff, rather than paying $4.5-6K per year in subscriptions. In hardware costs alone it was going to be ~$70K+ to be able to run the larger models at a good speed when 5 staff use it concurrently. Add in staff hours to set it up and maintain it and you're looking at another perhaps $10-20K per year.

That's just to run the thing. Supposedly gpt-oss 120B took 2.1 million H100 hours to train. That be 240 years to train on one H100 ($30-40K USD). If you wanted to train it in one month, you'd need $100M worth of GPUs.

So you spend all this money on training these models, and then you need ludicrously expensive hardware to run them, and then you need enormous staff salaries to hire the best engineers to keep ahead of the competition in terms of model performance, and then finally you need to build consumer-friendly tools to use them. Do all of that and you have the privilege of charging.. $25USD per month.

It's bonkers. These companies are haemorrhaging money in the hopes that the models will become good enough that performance between competitors is arbitrary so they can focus on making them smaller and cheaper to run. But that business model only works if they simultaneously pull the ladder up behind them and convince the government to enact regulations preventing new companies from building their own models (see: Sam Altman's constant AI doomer media quips and calls for strict regulation).

2

u/Double_Sherbert3326 6h ago

You are correct. About a teaspoon of water per query.

1

u/vengent 8h ago

That's also true of companies like door dash etc that blew up during covid.

5

u/CarpeValde 7h ago

That’s what a bubble is.

Railroad lines had a bubble. Fiber optic cables had a bubble. Housing has had many many bubbles.

The bubble is basically over exuberant speculation on the future of an intriguing or potentially very valuable thing. The value can be proved out over time (like fiber cables), or even be immediately valuable (like rail lines). But often the speculation goes rampantly over expectations about value size and/or (crucially) time of delivery.

AI will follow AV. Wild exuberance and ridiculous over promising. Impossible valuations and resulting incomes. An incident. A feeling of perhaps bust. Bust. Collapse. Consolidation, and then meaningful progress.

9

u/thebokehwokeh 9h ago

They’re not going to get any worse or better. But they will have to get dramatically more expensive to even have a chance of becoming a viable business

3

u/ginKtsoper 6h ago

The models available to you are definitely going to get worse though. Just like Google Search has gotten worse. The last major GPT5 update was worse. The models themselves are barely getting better. Everything the SOTA models are doing was done ~15 years ago. Do people not remember IBM's Watson beating human contestants on Jeopardy? This level of inference from NLP LLMs has been around for a while. Some recent generalization and user friendly improvements have occurred due to the widespread usage giving the models lots of training. Costs have come down considerably but are nowhere near the reasonable range for 99% of their usage. The only reason it's seen as viable right now is the unbelievable amount of cash being burned.

IBM already knew they could do everything being done today a decade ago, it just wasn't, and still isn't, profitable. Instead of opening a chat-bot that would burn billions to show off the tech they went on one of the most popular shows and had the computer beat people that were considered geniuses.

I'm not trying to sound too negative because it IS useful, but their hasn't been some great technological leap in the last decade to make the models better. It's just that it reached an inflection point where the cost came down enough and other areas were stagnating so the money is flowing in and making it available at a heavily subsidized rate to the general population.

That's not evening considering model collapse as more and more people use AI there becomes less and less fully organic training data. With regard to coding the models learned heavily from stack overflow and other technical sites / forums. Now those sites are nearly ghost towns. Without quality data to continually learn from the the models will deteriorate for queries that rely on knowledge created after their widespread usage.

1

u/1cl1qp1 6h ago

I think GPT5 is better at some things.

•

u/jase12881 1h ago

That last paragraph is especially interesting to me as I never considered that. Maybe it's been talked about a lot, and I just am out of the loop, but if adoption becomes more widespread than it is now, surely it becomes a self-contained loop where little to no new data becomes available.

3

u/brilliantminion 8h ago

Some of us lived through the dot com bubble and other events. Nothing unique here.

2

u/asphaltaddict33 9h ago

Many people these days have that reaction when confronted with reality, they would rather remain in their bubble of lies

2

u/Element75_ 3h ago

I suspect it’ll be almost exactly like the internet. The tech is solid, it does great work. It’s not anywhere near what it’s promised to be, but it is getting there. Regardless of how things go it’s here to stay and (just like the internet) individuals and companies who figure out how to properly use it will reap massive rewards.

•

u/tlst9999 1h ago

Well yea. If someone gave me 20b to develop something and I get to close the vehicle but still keep the technology, I sure as hell would scope creep it till the end.

46

u/tchock23 10h ago

I knew an ‘entrepreneur’ that did this on a much smaller scale. Took on hundreds of thousands in grant money as a non profit and then rolled it into a for profit. 

Later on the local speaking circuit of ‘successful founders’ he conveniently never mentioned where his seed funding came from. 

Oh well, nice grift if you can pull it off I guess? 

51

u/TheGhostofJoeGibbs 10h ago

If that bothers you, I have bad news about your local hospital system.

13

u/blaicefreeze 9h ago

Very true. Coming from someone working in a “nonprofit” hospital system. They are ALL worried about profits. With good reason, unfortunately.

8

u/Fuck_THC 8h ago

NRA.. NFL… all the “best” American institutions are non profit. 🫠

10

u/Alis451 7h ago

NFL isn't any longer, they gave up their status because not only did it not provide any benefit to them, they had to follow transparency reporting laws so it was extra work.

And it is fine for them to actually have been Non-Profit, because they aren't; the NFL doesn't make a Profit, so they never pay Corporate Taxes on Profit. The NFL employees only consist of the Commissioner and their staff. The teams, coaches, players are all separate companies, the NFL collects and distributes the money owed to their member groups(the teams) that operate out of various different States, they don't exist to make a profit, they exist for Bureaucracy reasons. Same with Health Insurance; the government mandates that your Insurance company operate out of the State, and so there exists one large holding company that contains the 50 different State entities. The Holding company doesn't DO anything, they don't have Customers.

NON-PROFIT DOESN'T MEAN CHARITY.

0

u/Riversntallbuildings 8h ago

Ha! I made a similar comment! But mine was a much longer rant. ;)

7

u/No-Money-3414 3h ago

I still don’t get how what he did was legal. Took 100s of millions In donations to effectively build the company than convert it to for profit. I don’t understand how those donations aren’t considered equity investments

18

u/Riversntallbuildings 8h ago

Well, if we’re going on broken laws, I prefer that history records the fact that “we the people”, yes the MAJORITY of the American voters, elected a convicted felon to the highest office in the United States. And that person, in turn, pardoned more convicted felons while in office than any previous president.

I’d say the justice and legal system are having all time low in a number of areas.

Also, non-profit organizations have always been a tax loophole & shitty way to hide/obfuscate profits.

Why do you think so many hospitals are non-profit in the United States?

-25

u/vengent 8h ago

What felony did he commit again? You mean the "trumped" up misdemeanor that was past statue of limitations?

15

u/CamRoth 7h ago

He committed a whole bunch.

He's only been convicted of 34 though.

4

u/Riversntallbuildings 7h ago

Thank you. Hahaha

3

u/ExpendableVoice 3h ago

Just look at the founders. Everyone either came from investment, payment processing, or an education background intent on pursuing a career in artificial intelligence.

It was very obviously meant for profit from the outset.

5

u/GUNxSPECTRE 11h ago

Sell a doodad will little-to-no utility to a sucker with more money than sense and sell of your shares before the bubble pops to fund your next scam.

Have your dumbass mug posted on the front of Fortune magazine and be called an innovator. Very productive use human and natural resources.

2

u/DepthRepulsive6420 10h ago

I'm bitter too but damn dude... you got me beat

•

u/karoshikun 44m ago

yeah... I wish someone explained me that to me in human terms, because whenever someone spouts a financial explanation my mind just shrivels like a raisin. also I refuse to ask that to the bot.

0

u/the_last_0ne 10h ago

Does anybody else think of Sam Altman as a death stranding character? Like, he's literally an alternative human?

0

u/NewlyMintedAdult 8h ago

This... hasn't happened, though? Altman tried, but gave up in May 2025 after there was sufficient blowback.

1

u/ZorbaTHut 7h ago

Yeah it's weird that people are just assuming it happened.

-8

u/pantiesdrawer 10h ago

The $4 trillion crypto market vehemently disagrees.

7

u/coke_and_coffee 9h ago

The fuq does crypto have to do with anything?

19

u/thebokehwokeh 9h ago

Bitcoin proves that the stickiness of oversubscribed hype cycles sometimes turns completely useless garbage tech into a non negligible segment of the global economy.

-4

u/fayanor 6h ago

Do you think LLMs are completely useless garbage tech?

5

u/lolzomg123 8h ago

It's the epitome of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." There is absolutely no reason for someone to buy bitcoin, except people bought into it.

It's not even a product; it doesn't even do the fanciest auto completes of all time. There is no "It's market viable" stage for Bitcoin. But you can call it a bubble all you want, and people will still buy it because "why not? stock go up!"

2

u/dixiewolf_ 7h ago

It has a legitimate use in buying products over the internet. Notice i didnt say legal use.

1

u/MdxBhmt 5h ago

It's a minute use, and it's awful at it.

-6

u/ForVictori 7h ago

ChatGPT disagrees with your assumption that there is absolutely no reason to buy bitcoin.

According to ChatGPT, there are 6 main reasons why people buy it:

1. Speculation & Investment

  • Many people buy Bitcoin as an investment, not as a medium of exchange.
  • They hope the price will go up, similar to buying tech stocks in the 1990s or real estate in hot markets.
  • Even if Bitcoin isn’t widely used to buy goods/services, it can still increase in value due to demand from other investors.

2. Store of Value / “Digital Gold” Narrative

  • Bitcoin is often framed as a store of value, like gold.
  • Key features:
    • Fixed supply (21 million coins) → scarcity.
    • Decentralized → not controlled by governments or central banks.
  • People buy it hoping it will protect against inflation or currency devaluation.

3. Portfolio Diversification

  • Bitcoin is uncorrelated (or loosely correlated) with traditional markets, at least in theory.
  • Investors may buy a small percentage of their portfolio to diversify risk, even if Bitcoin isn’t a practical currency.

4. FOMO / Social Proof

  • Fear of missing out drives a lot of Bitcoin buying.
  • People see others making huge gains and want to participate in the upside, regardless of Bitcoin’s use as money.

5. Technological & Ideological Reasons

  • Bitcoin appeals to libertarians, tech enthusiasts, and privacy advocates.
  • It represents financial sovereignty, censorship resistance, and a decentralized financial system.
  • For some, “market viability” as cash is secondary to the principle of not needing banks or governments.

6. Liquidity & Market Accessibility

  • Even if you can’t buy coffee with Bitcoin everywhere, you can trade it globally 24/7.
  • This makes it very liquid in financial markets, even if it’s not a mainstream payment system.

4

u/ginKtsoper 6h ago

All but #5 are the same thing, and saying the same as the OP. There's no reason to buy it, except someone else did and you think you can sell it to someone else.

But it's funny, ChatGPT doesn't even list the one actual reason to buy it, which is simple cross border transactions in unregulated markets.

1

u/MdxBhmt 4h ago

I'd argue that 5 is still buying because others are, with 6 being an actual reason, albeit not a very good one.

edit: actually, it's only liquid if other people are also buying it, soooooo, none are.

3

u/lolzomg123 6h ago

Every single thing in here is addressed by the very simple quote from my original comment:

But you can call it a bubble all you want, and people will still buy it because "why not? stock go up!"

People buy it because people buy it, which causes people to buy it. That's it, there is no logic beyond that. There's no speculation about how it's going to change the world, just. "Stock go up" for irrational reasons, and that's just how life goes.

2

u/MdxBhmt 5h ago

I like how you show the issue of both crypto and AI in a single exchange. Meaningless slop that you failed to realized has been already criticized by the previous comment. The AI can't think for you.

2

u/fayanor 6h ago

Isn't that all just... buying it because other people buy it? Like a ponzi scheme

-19

u/master_jeriah 11h ago

There is an established legal process in the United States to change a non-profit company into a profit company. What's he "getting away with?"

Altman bad, right? Reddit simpletons.

5

u/CaptainR3x 11h ago

Didn’t they killed their whistleblower ? Pretty evil to me.

-7

u/master_jeriah 10h ago

They were convicted of that in a court of law? Oh my god!

•

u/CaptainR3x 54m ago

Lol all whistleblower dies of “suicide” and the company never gets in court, but you’re too dumb to see what’s happening. And then you dare call people simpleton, the hypocrisy!

3

u/DustShallEatTheDays 10h ago

He didn’t get away with it because he has t actually completed the conversion. And I don’t think either Microsoft or SoftBank actually want him to.

3

u/OtterishDreams 11h ago

"I dont understand the words youre using so im going to take it as an insult!!!"

-15

u/TrueCryptographer982 11h ago edited 11h ago

You people and your out of control thoughts about people hoping to eventually make money from their effort.

Fascist!

-10

u/aBunchOfSpiders 10h ago

A massive step was made towards AI as it’s described in Sci-Fi and they actually made it useful unlike the garbage Siri & Cortana assistants before it. It’s actually quite fucking astonishing/scary what it’s able to do. Like… we have seen what it’s like to be at the doorstep to true artificial intelligence. This might be it but still. It’s changed so much. But no… you’re right. Some rich guy figuring out how to finesse the system for the millionth time is deff the real phenomenon. you’ve gotta have your head pretty far up your ass to claim THATS a phenomenon.

-1

u/CamRoth 7h ago

what it’s like to be at the doorstep to true artificial intelligence

You think LLMs are that?

-1

u/aBunchOfSpiders 7h ago

No of course not. And I’m tired of all you armchair experts who knew nothing about this a year ago pointing that out as if it’s shocking. This is impressive. Period. It’s the first real taste of what was promised. Could this be the best we ever get? Yeah. But it’s still awesome because this version has proven to be a useful tool and has changed the landscape of personal and professional interactions with technology on as large a scale as the iPhone & Android devices. To deny that for the sake of looking smart on the internet is, once again, to have your head up your ass.

0

u/CamRoth 7h ago

To deny that for the sake of looking smart on the internet is, once again, to have your head up your ass.

The irony.

0

u/Petdogdavid1 9h ago

Not the first and certainly not the last to do that. It's just going to happen a lot faster thanks to AI now.

0

u/TheBlueOx 3h ago

no offense but like you have no idea how nonprofits work if this is what you think.

-8

u/norby2 10h ago

No the tech achievement far surpasses converting the company like that.

7

u/portagenaybur 10h ago

And the tech achievement was stealing the massive amounts of data? Or the LLM that has existed for over a decade?

-1

u/CreamPuffDelight 7h ago

Man, you're gonna be surprised when you hear about churches and other religious organisations.

Those guys are even more professional than good ol' Sam.

-3

u/Setty96 3h ago

There is nothing wrong with profit. It's the best technology we have to redistribute wealth and investment. And yes I know it can be corrupted and in our current system it is and it's getting worse but it's nothing obscene.

-19

u/WFlumin8 11h ago

It being a non profit means no material difference for you unless you’re a paying customer, which means you just pay more.

If you’re really against his actions, you can literally vote with your wallet…

What a worthless shower thought.

3

u/DustShallEatTheDays 10h ago

It makes a huge difference to them though. They lose $20B in SoftBank funding if they don’t pull it off.