Much waxing philosophical has been made about organisations in a post-capitalist world, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordon Hall (Greenhall) are two names that spring to mind weaving complex dances around what such a world would look like and barriers to manifest it.
Two of the biggest barriers to Game-B are the “winner-takes-all” and “multi-polar traps” (I’ve linked for brevity).
So it was intriguing to listen to Sam Altman’s interview with Lex Fridman and hear OpenAI’s approach to be winner in Generative AI but NOT winner-take-all:
- a foundation is the ultimate beneficiary of the surplus revenues
- the corporation that makes the money has shareholders – the catch is that their returns are capped at 100x their investment, the surplus goes to the foundation
- the foundation will likely distribute wealth to the broader population via something like UBI. Sam indicates that GPT will help in the decision-making process.
- decisions have been made to withhold source code, so that China can’t access and accelerate
- decisions have been made to share with some entities.
By no means perfect or resilient to leaks or defectors it does demonstrate a balancing of incentives without going full post-capitalism.