Gabe Newell, CEO von Valve, war 2018 ein begeisterter Unterstützer von OpenAI, spendete 20 Millionen US-Dollar und fungierte sogar als einziges Mitglied eines „informellen Beirats“.
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/gabe-newell-was-an-enthusiastic-supporter-of-openai-in-2018-donating-usd20-million-and-even-acting-as-the-sole-member-of-an-informal-advisory-board/
33 Kommentare
Man loves bleeding edge tech
An „informal advisory board“ that only ever had one member is just…like, a guy with opinions?
What a weird way to frame it.
Bet that 20 million feels real different now.
A lot has changed since 2018.
Everyone was excited about AI when it was in its inception. That experience soon aged like milk.
LLM technology was and is very exciting and has a wide variety of uses.
The fact openai has turned the whole thing into a shitshow, backed by a heavily unregulated US allowing monstrous deployment of data centres everywhere is probably not the direction anyone reasonable wanted things to go.
A **lot** of people were enthusiastic of OpenAI when it started. Because what AI could actually do if done properly is immense.
Then OpenAI began stealing content from people, resulted in layoffs by unknowing CEOs who were promised impossible profit margins by OpenAI, and data centers that began risking environment and raising electricity bills of small towns were opened for OpenAI. And all OpenAI produced was a fancy chatbot that lies and fakes sycophancy to fool its customers.
The question isn’t „was Gabe an enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI in 2018?“ – the question is „is Gabe Newell *still* enthusiastic supporter of OpenAI?“
This reads like a blatant attempt to demonize Newell because of how unliked OpenAI has become. Which isn’t an uncommon attempt by Valve’s competition.
Back in 2018 I would have given them 20mil myself, if I had it. Does anyone remember the „robots will work for us and we will have universal income“ idea back when AI was still in the hands of scientists and before techbros took over?
I worked a bit with the tools OpenAI had in 2018.
Part of what they were working was on reinforcement algorithms and had an Atari platform to train your AIs called OpenAI Gym.
I was learning a bit of AI at that time. Their tool was very straightforward to use and I had fun training my little neural networks for them to play Mrs. Pacman, Breakout, and some of their own games like Lunar Landing.
A lot has changed since then indeed.
I was excited about Tesla at first. „Electric cars? Yay!“
Hahaha. fuck.
if a non-profit you donated to turns for profit, then you probably deserve some of the equity.
otherwise thats basically a scam by the founder of the company
The OpenAI of 2018 is not the „Open“AI of 2026.
Back then OpenAI looked cool cause they trained an AI that could beat pro Dota players with ease.
This was around the time Open AI beat the best Dota team in the world.
In 2018, OpenAI was a nonprofit. The switch to for-profit is the basis of Musk’s lawsuit. Wonder why Gabe Newell isn’t as upset as Elon Musk?
https://localnewsmatters.org/2026/04/23/musk-v-altman-trial-date-looms-as-judge-hands-wins-and-setbacks-to-both-sides/
Some important events:
• Musk resigned from the nonprofit OpenAI Inc. board on Feb. 21, 2018
• The for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI, L.P., was formed on Sept. 19, 2018
• The nonprofit transferred substantially all of its intellectual property to the for-profit subsidiary in late 2018 and early 2019.
• Early investors invested $133 million (target redemption amount $13.3 Billion) on March 1, 2019.
• Altman became the CEO of OpenAI, L.P. on April 1, 2019.
• Microsoft invested $1 billion (target redemption $20 Billion) on July 2, 2019, and at the same time entered its technology-sharing agreement.
• OpenAI Inc. amended its charter on April 23, 2020, to drop the idea that its technology would be “open source” though the “for humanity” idea remained.
“Informal advisory board” with one guy is just…a dude chiming in lol
OpenAI 2018 and 2026 are night and day difference
What a difference 8 years makes.
Dudes trying to build GLaDOS
Openai was a moral company before Altman imo
I mean it could have been a really useful tech, but then capitalism happened
OpenAI trained models that could consistently beat top Dota pros in 1v1 mid. Then they trained models that could beat some of the top pro teams in 5v5s in a limited setting (restricted the hero pool significantly).
They debuted both of these models at The International (Dota’s biggest tournament).
It’s pretty reasonable that Gabe would be impressed by those demonstrations and invest in the company. This was way before all of the negative press they have now. They were actually a legit non-profit with the goal of building AI ethically at the time.
In 2018, OpenAI was making AI for Dota 2 (a Valve game), as they assessed that it is the best possible game to understand how good an AI can do.
It was a leap at the time because most other AI devs were focused on chess or go (another classic board game).
Valve provided full API access of the game to OpenAI so that their AI model can interact with the game.
So, it does not sound weird that Gabe was excited about it.
How much is that $20 million seed investment worth now that OpenAI is a for-profit corporation with a valuation close to $1 trillion?
AI and learning models had great potential. It was rapidly ruined by corporate strategy. At least with the internet it took corps a while to figure out their potential to ruin everything. With the breakthroughs in AI they just fucking pounced.
This is like the 3rd article I’ve seen this week trying to paint him in a bad light
You can’t make me hate Gaben, fuck you
And also in 2018, in China, a sack of rice fell over!
That was 2018. A lot has changed since then.
Ok, so what?
Who wouldn’t support an Open AI?
Capitalism only innovates how to make imaginary money from spending a lot of it, using up resources and making people poorer from every self-made crisis and inevitable crash. Government is too slow to regulate, too paid off to regulate or too afraid of the optics to their donors to nationalise things that should be nationalised for everyones benefit.
We should all be working less, we should all have more money, we should all be living healthy lives of plenty. There’s more than enough. But instead of a government we can trust using AI to achieve those goals we’ll have 5 or 6 corporations making us homeless while businesses work 24/7 with no human input.
„Article sponsored by Epic games.“ /s
Ai was not so blatantly anti-human at that point.