Consider the Possibility that OpenAI is An Op

There’s little evidence that OpenAI is a serious engineering effort at the scale to actually compete with the edge and bulk of AI development, even though in the early days it will surely breed its share of implementations, using the a16z install base. They have only a 350 person team and from my understanding, a lot of this work was about creating a coordination of venture capital interests, and drew extremely heavily on the engineering resources of other companies, research labs and academic institutions. Microsoft has given OpenAI the bulk of the investment it has attained, with $13 billion into it; their first step in AI was with Github CoPilot, for coding automation. Microsoft purchased Github, an a16z company, for a whopping $7.5 billion in 2018, for what people assumed to be the large developer community built up around it. Github was, in addition to a host of text files, an open source culture op, which essentially sucked up all the industry’s publicly published code, as well as massive amounts of proprietary code, consolidated it under venture capital control, sold it to big tech, and turned into an AI tool that is already being used as the pretense and mechanism for destabilizing the engineering workforce so it will be even more ripe for exploitation in this new age of VC “accelerationism”. 

If you want to ask why every programmer and startup in the valley literally handed over the crown jewels to venture capital so willingly — literally all their work and all the work of every programmer they ever met, stolen — we see again the deep-seated and inculcated bootlicking of the engineering workforce crushed under venture capital. The entry strategy for getting everyone to hand over their shit when Github was founded in the last bubble, took no more than imbibing the company in a deeply manufactured cool factor, personally designed by Marc Andreessen. The GitHub engineers were made, via a significant marketing machine, to be community heroes and ambassadors. The hoodies with the GitHub handle was a great touch. They threw “beer ups” all over the world where they just invited everyone to get smashed, with a seemingly unending budget for top shelf booze from the king himself. Predictably, sexism and even sexual violence resulted from these and similarly fashioned culture ops. The Github offices were outrageously expensive and ostentatious and basically the idea was sold that this was hip and cool and the ideal of startups and programming; that was really all it took to beat these brainwashed bitches into handing over all our shit, all of our code, to fascist venture capitalists without so much as a whimper. Really sad chapter in our industry’s history. 

 Anyhow, this is just to establish that Microsoft has served as a16z’s piggy bank for awhile. And Microsoft is considered the dumbest, slowest and overall ossified of our giants, which has forced them to rely on an exterior, VC-operated AI strategy, just typical poor decision making; predictably, OpenAI is starved for GPU because Microsoft can’t meet its infrastructure needs, and is resource-depleted because of the choice to operate on Microsoft infrastructure; all of this could very well be the extra sweetener to the Github deal, but we’ll never know. OpenAI was established by a16z and the usual suspects in 2015, and the sale of Github — one of a16z’s unicorns —  to Microsoft happened in 2018. So by the time the Github deal is done — securing Microsoft its ultimate victory in the war against open source — the AI thing is very much in play and it was likely that this roadmap was established prior to the deal without anyone knowing about it. 

The fact that OpenAI consists of only 350 employees, outsources training to Kenya for $1-$2/hour,  is far from the center of AI infrastructure development (happening at Oracle and Nvidia), using inferior Microsoft technology, and many industry professionals have said repeatedly that the OpenAI research and capabilities are not particularly novel or even up to market pacing, makes it hard for me to take this seriously as a purely technology play, and opens up inquiry into… other purposes in addition to the technology that this might serve. 

Also suspicious is the fact that a lot of OpenAI’s moves after the launches, involved a level of pomp and circumstance that could only have been implemented by the a16z marketing team, which truly is one of the best in the biz, designing marketing strategy throughout each of its portfolio companies and thus allowing some extremely well coordinated and effective media ops. 

Here is another thing to consider when we try to examine what OpenAI actually is, as opposed to what its funders, known for consistent and pathological lying to the public, have claimed: OpenAI was the first to launch AI in a mainstream way, even though it has been in production use, most notably in combat zones (Palantir was an early adopter in this space, much preceding OpenAI and coming from the exact same people). Obviously there is a first mover advantage and it must be considered that OpenAI was established with an eye for this very moment: the opening of the AI bubble and claiming a critical public viewing and consumer branding. And being the first one to it. This emblazoned the brand and some of the key characters around it, in the global consciousness, and that alone is probably worth all of this to a16z, once again hoodwinking Microsoft out of billions of dollars while it sits on its ass doing marketing tours and… international delegation, which we’ll get to soon. 

One of the reasons I think that this is a vehicle that was assembled for far greater goals than being an AI research lab, is because the initial product offering itself, the chat bot, is one that the architects of this conspiracy are very familiar with, and it is a form that has proved totally effective in driving short lived, mass consumer play; in fact, such things are often referred to in the industry as a “sandbox”. 

Marc Andreessen knows that people fucking love chat bots -- briefly inciting their imagination, a hint of a sci-fi mystery, the human curiosity which seeks humanity in all things, machine or animal, which wants to see itself and yet to know an alien intelligence too — from his AOL days. As the inventor of the browser, which we are occasionally forced to admit, he was definitely active in those very early days of chat bots that told you your tarot, contained some kind of quiz, or participated in very rudimentary interactions. Marc loves a delightful toy and he loves social media. This has Marc all over it.

So as far as being a good initial introduction to AI technologies and also to gain market share and to gain command of the AI discussion, a chat bot is a great move. Doesn’t have to be innovative or express the most advanced tech we have, doesn’t necessarily have to accrue to some longer term strategy beside producing more toys, it just has to be viral, to go viral. A chat bot is perfect for virality and that would have been a primary goal here, as far as gaining the leadership as the public face of AI; meanwhile, companies that are actually doing serious AI — Nvidia and Oracle, for example — are busy integrating this into legitimate and ethical medical institutions, so that our best doctors can use these tools to practice better medicine; meanwhile the money behind OpenAI was shoving this bullshit into killer drones before it gave us this little distracting sandbox. 

 This calls to mind the “we are actually a media company” line that Marc loves, when he discusses his VC firm a16z. OpenAI itself has functioned a lot like a marketing vehicle, allowing people to quickly scaffold and share content with a high degree of virality; it has been featured in all major media as well as huge swathes of the podcast world, and OpenAI is now synonymous with AI to much of the world, a problem that falls on the rest of the industry to correct, because OpenAI is very small potatoes and has set a number of ideological, regulatory and delegatory precedents that the legitimate parts of the industry must now inherit. Such as the truly excessive and disgusting fear mongering about rogue AGI that OpenAI indulged in for months before the giants started to step in and tell them to stop scaring the customers. Of course, the entire fear mongering agenda lines up with the current VC lines about competitiveness with China, and has also been an effective tool in changing the Overton window; they moved us straight from discussing fundamentals such as: you literally stole generations of human work for this; and into: omg this thing is gonna kill us all. It was a massive distraction from the actual material and present concerns about this technology; not to mention outright lying to the public and omitting the fact that computers are state machines, and if the AI starts killing people, it was programmed to do so. Topic for anther post. 

The value of the launch to the venture capitalists backing this — Thiel, Andreessen, Paul Graham, Altman, some other psychopaths — is incalculable: a global launch establishing a16z and OpenAI at the forefront in the consciousness, establishing itself as an authority in Congress and foreign legislative bodies, and establishing itself as a negotiating body. 

It is highly instructive to look at what OpenAI *did* in the months of its initial launch. What actually happened is that OpenAI embarked on an international delegation tour, meeting with nation-state leaders in 16 countries in 3 months, many countries which bode a violent relationship with venture capital: Israel, the UAE, India, South Korea and France, and the UK and EU. Altman himself described it as a delegation and what was on the table in these negotiations was much more than seen on the surface; particularly because OpenAI were not the only people in those rooms; but rather part of a16z (which backs OpenAI), putting on a major international tour during the same time period .

While the OpenAI part was the flashy shiny marketing package, this was a vehicle for the venture capitalists involved in our conspiracy, to enter into nation-state level diplomacy. Of the more important factors is that a16z was using this to raise more money for their VC fund, and judging by the international hunger among colonizers and imperialists for American VC returns, we could be looking at a massive increase in funding, particularly from Saudi Arabia, which we recently discovered large amounts of a16z funding has been coming from; this was of course, a stop on the broader VC delegation — a16z top brass has made several appearances already this year, and Adam Neumann, IDF/Mossad agent and founder of WeWork and now Flow (funded by a16z), discussed earlier this year moving Flow to Saudi Arabia, as part of the general flight of venture capital into the global stream and away from the sovereignty of America. 

So the biggest material output of the launch of OpenAI is going to be a big infusion of cash from bad nation-state actors, and an opening of financial, political and ideological refuge to fascist venture capital. 

I’m looking forward to seeing how much a16z actually raised, as I suspect it will be a totally game changing amount as hunger for technology growth has grown internationally and is becoming accessible now through VC flight and rising tensions between America and venture capital, highlighted in current regulatory battles over crypto. 

The other things on the table during the negotiations include establishing VC presence and startup HQs in these areas to stimulate tech economies; regulation and taxation issues around technology innovations like Bitcoin and AI; and the VC perpetual search for land, resources and cheap labor, to build its empire and its settlements. AKA, recognition of sovereignty in exchange for creating a tech economy, city, settlement, etc which will benefit the rulers of these bad state actors. All of this, hidden in a splashy media tour. People little realize how large and effective, cunning and calculating, is the a16z marketing apparatus, whose founder is fond of saying he considers it a media company. Venture capital controls huge swathes of the tech press and dealing with a mainly technology illiterate audiences, even in journalists and reporters, they have incredible control over access and messaging, and there is very little investigative work to show what they actually did, as opposed to what was deliberately packaged for mass media consumption. 

This was not merely a delegation for OpenAI, which frankly seems to be a bit put together with sticks and glue from my initial assessment, but rather from this entire conspiracy which is in the process, and literally has, sovereign zones secured in other countries, including Nigeria, Honduras and El Salvador, with more planned. Similarly patterned efforts are going on in about a dozen other nation-states around the global and no coordinated effort has been launched to identify and describe and track them on. No, don’t get up or anything. All that we know is just what we know from publicly available material that has been mostly mediated through their own media channels and handled by the top marketing minds in the technology world. 

I’m sure OpenAI will persist in some degree of technical development and be used as a platform for some significant use cases; but between all of the AI investments made by this conspiracy — a16z, Founder’s Fund, and In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm — you are looking at hundreds of different AI plays, of which OpenAI provides a hub in multiple meanings of the term, but certainly doesn’t give you the full picture. The CIA alone has invested in over 120 AI startups, many of them with a16z and Founder’s Fund; here again, a singular startup is made the “face” while armadas of thousands of startups execute with almost no scrutiny in the background, funded by the worst, bloodiest and most explosive money in the world. We must always consider the overall picture of the venture capitalist and the venture capitalist portfolio; Sam Altman himself is much more a venture capitalist than a founder. 

What were they talking about in the part of the delegation you didn’t see?