In the current telling of this story, the billionaire is also giving his hired army copies of your notes he copied without permission.
But the worst part in your analogy ain’t omitting the suspected spying and the intimidation that followed, but that your hypothetical mathematical philanthropist won’t be able to hire his army: unlike some OAI employees, no self-respecting mathematician would agree to such unethical task.
You're conflating labels and distributors: for the majors, they are often different department of the same corporations, but they're not the same thing.
The details people gloss over when throwing SOC 2 or whatever other audit costs around are the complexity of the system being audited, the chosen criteria to audit (AICPA defines 5 families of criteria... Security is one, but you can optionally add Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, etc etc) and the reputation of the auditor.
A security-only audit for a small company with a narrow product focus can indeed be very inexpensive. A full SOC 2 examination for a large organization with a mix of legacy and modern systems by a name-recognizable public accounting firm can be many hundreds of thousands of dollars, or more if you need a Big 4 firm.
In my opinion, there's not much value to the "cheap" audits... If you're doing enterprise sales to a certain kind of client, your partners who demand an audit are going to want a reputable auditor or they're just going to put you through their own in-depth procurement due diligence regardless. The segment of the industry where a SOC 2 attestation is mandatory to participate but where any random auditor will do feels pretty narrow.
Unless you have a very good reason (I compare notes with people at dozens of firms and have never heard one), the only criteria you ever want to get SOC2'd on is Security.
My experience is the opposite of yours: having a security SOC2 ends the vendorsec process it any enterprise buyer, and enterprise buyers virtually never read anything in the SOC2 other than a glance at the exceptions. A very large, very security-intensive vendor we have all heard of told me a story about a vendor they had that gave them several years of repeated Type 1 reports. Went fine.
I imagine the ideal situation would be a hybrid. Trains for the bulk of transport and self driving cars for the large tail of odd trips. When you want to get home from your friends house at 1AM there is no traffic on the roads, and taking PT is a 1+ hour trip while uber is 10 minutes. There will never be super fast PT connecting every odd route that runs frequently all through the night.
Cars could be radically reimagined for this use case to be much smaller and more efficient to be more like an ebike with a box around it for weather proofing.
Why not? Public transport follows static routes, but there’s nothing to stop personalised routes based on whose on the public transport, especially while off peak.
Personalised routes is not really much different than uber pool. Maybe the government should run a public version of this. But I think there will always be some trips that are so low volume (particularly late at night) that it makes sense to just have a single occupant car rather than a whole bus moving one person.
But the worst part in your analogy ain’t omitting the suspected spying and the intimidation that followed, but that your hypothetical mathematical philanthropist won’t be able to hire his army: unlike some OAI employees, no self-respecting mathematician would agree to such unethical task.