Jeremy Howard: commitment

Transcript context

…What did Jeremy see? I didn't see anything. It's just obviously true. Yeah. So my friend Eric Ries and I spoke a lot before that about, you know, Eric's, I think probably most people would agree, the top expert in the world on startup and AI governance. And you know, we could both clearly see that this didn't make sense to have like a so-called non-profit where then there are people working at a company, a commercial company that's owned by or controlled nominally by the non-profit, where the people in the company are being given the equivalent of stock options, like everybody there was working there with expecting to make money largely from their equity. So the idea that then a board could exercise control by saying like, oh, we're worried about safety issues and so we're going to do something that decreases the profit of the company, when every stakeholder in the company, their remuneration pretty much is tied to their profit, it obviously couldn't work. So I mean, that was a huge oversight there by someone. I guess part of the problem is that the kind of people who work at non-profits and in this case the board, you know, who are kind of academics and, you know, people who are kind of true believers. I think it's hard for them to realize that 99.999% of the world is driven very heavily by money, especially huge amounts of money. So yeah, Eric and I had been talking for a long time before that about what could be done differently, because also companies are sociopathic by design and so the alignment problem as it relates to companies has not been solved. Like, companies become huge, they devour their founders, they devour their communities and they do things where even the CEOs, you know, often of big companies tell me like, I wish our company didn't do that thing. You know, I know that if I didn't do it, then I would just get fired and the board would put in somebody else and the board knows if they don't do it, then their shareholders can sue them because they're not maximizing profitability or whatever. So what Eric's spent a lot of time doing is trying to think about how do we make companies less sociopathic, you know, how to, or more, you know, maybe a better way to think of it is like, how do we make it so that the founders of companies can ensure that their companies continue to actually do the things they want them to do? You know, when we started a company, hey, we very explicitly decided we got to start a company, not a academic lab, not a nonprofit, you know, we created a Delaware Seacorp, you know, the most company kind of company. But when we did so, we told everybody, you know, including our first investors, which was you Alessio. They sound great. We are going to run this company on the basis of maximizing long-term value. And in fact, so when we did our second round, which was an angel round, we had everybody invest through a long-term SPV, which we set up where everybody had to agree to vote in line with long-term value principles. o when we did our second round, which was an angel round, we had everybody invest through a long-term SPV, which we set up where everybody had to agree to vote in line with long-term value principles. So like never enough just to say to people, okay, we're trying to create long-term value here for society as well as for ourselves and everybody's like, oh, yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. But when it comes to like, okay, well, here's a specific decision we have to make, which will not maximize short-term value, people suddenly change their mind. So you know, it has to be written into the legal documents of everybody so that no question that that's the way the company has to be managed. So then you mentioned the PBC aspect, Public Benefit Corporation, which I never quite understood previously. And turns out it's incredibly simple, like it took, you know, like one paragraph added to our corporate documents to become a PBC. It was cheap, it was easy, but it's got this huge benefit, which is if you're not a public benefit corporation, then somebody can come along and offer to buy you with a stated description of like turning your company into the thing you most hate, right? And if they offer you more than the market value of your company and you don't accept it, then you are not necessarily meeting the kind of your fiduciary responsibilities. So the way like Eric always described it to me is like, if Philip Morris came along and said that you've got great technology for marketing cigarettes to children, so we're going to pivot your company to do that entirely, and we're going to pay you 50% more than the market value, you're going to have to say yes. If you have a PBC, then you are more than welcome to say no, if that offer is not in line with your stated public benefit. So our stated public benefit is to maximize the benefit to society through using AI. So given that more children smoking doesn't do that, then we can say like, no, we're not selling to you.…

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