OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

Can anyone point to a more nuanced perspective on this? Ideally not only with regards to OpenAI; it is still quite common that research published in some of the "top" venues does not disclose the underlying source code.

Anecdote: I once pushed researchers to publish their code when I was peer-reviewing and it turned out that the code was super slow in comparison to the benchmark algorithms they compared with (comparison only included accuracy etc, not speed), something that I am sure the authors were aware of, but chose to not report in the paper.

OP refers to GPT-2. OpenAI has since then published both the code and the trained model.

One thing that frustrated me about this conversation at the time was that OpenAI explicitly stated right in the initial release announcement that that part of their rationale for the staged release process for GPT-2 was to force the conversation around releasing a powerful capability to the world. Basically a fire drill for the real thing. This was rarely acknowledged or discussed, it was almost entirely a combination of dunking on OpenAI for overhyping the product and excoriating them for interfering with open research.

I don’t know that GPT-3 is at the level of material damage but it’s clearly moving in that direction. Watching someone interact with it that has a good sense for composing the right kind of prompt is a spine tingling experience.

Given how poorly the PULSE demo that hallucinated fuzzy black folks into tan white people was received, it also makes PR sense not to release pretrained models that are obviously going to be easily tricked into saying terrible things. Exposing that as an API gives them the ability to police it a bit and study how the model behaves in the real world.

Or it could just be a giant sellout and cash grab.

The problem is that OpenAI's motto is: "Discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence."

This does not mix well with very common AI tasks, such as facial recognition, deepfakes and deepnudes. With GPT-3 we are seeing levels of text comprehension and response that we've never seen in ML before.

How can we abuse this? Well, we can conduct text-based gaslighting and manipulation on an unprecedented scale. Imagine choosing a Twitter profile to target, having the AI read every single tweet that person has made, and then DMing them insults or slurs that would most effectively apply to their personality. Imagine those Nigerian prince emails but each with a scam personally tailored to its audience, with any follow up questions answered with auto-generated but believable lies. Imagine GPT-3 being used to message young children on Instagram by the millions and tricking them into giving up personal information or images.

I think, ultimately, there will be no such thing as "safe" AGI, because the intelligence we already have as humans can be and has been used to hurt others. OpenAI faces an existential crisis in this regards, and their best answer so far is simply to control access to the model so they can revoke it when bad actors are caught. This is something they can't do if the model is free and open source as we all want it to be.

That part of the Readme seems to be out of date, they released the largest GPT-2 model last year https://www.openai.com/blog/gpt-2-1-5b-release/