Valve CEO Gabe Newell was an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in 2018, donating $20 million and even acting as the sole member of an "informal advisory board"

A lot has changed since 2018 fwiw

i don’t think people in this forum would disagree with this move in 2018, as much as sentiments have changed. if you remove the political context and market moves from the equation, it is truly fascinating how these models work. GPT 2 was a crazy leap forward for language modeling, and the idea that a language model would be threatening middle class jobs wasn’t even on the table at that point. the idea that a pile of floating point numbers could write a React app is incredible, if politically fraught.

also, it wasn’t clear back then what OpenAI would become. they were a non-profit, and as clear as our hindsight is today this was before ChatGPT or any customer facing products were coming out of OpenAI.

i can’t be the only nerd in the room that has been fascinated by AI since i was a child only to face a reality where it’s not what i imagined it would be.

In 2018 we didn’t know what monster it would become

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Is this surprising to people? Someone high up in technology was in infromal advisory board around technology? I should say especially after ponying up cash.

not an issue. ai in 2018 had agi potential. today we only have the infinite sludge generators.

He also got Kojima in touch with Elon Musk back when the former worked on Death Stranding. But I agree with comments here saying things have changed since.

Other things haven‘t, of course. I‘m not a fan of Newell because he is still a billionaire. It‘s not surprising they‘ve all been hanging out at some point.

At this amount why is it donation and not investment? Is it a tax thing?

Sometimes based, sometimes a moron.