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OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

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Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#11

Post by gas9S9zw3P9c »

Someone asked for a more nuanced perspective, so here we go.

For a lot of AI researchers, OpenAI has been a huge disappointment. We had hope that OpenAI would be the company to democratize AI with good open source work, transparency, no PR bullshit (aka DeepMind), and evangelism. That they would develop in the open, and perhaps even do research in the open. You know, kind of like the name says.

It all started out okay with their release of OpenAI Gym, tutorials, leaderboards, and competitions around that. That was when Karpathy was still there. Over time, many projects have become abandoned, poorly maintained, or just disappeared [1]. And many projects they promised never happened [2]. OpenAI became just another research lab obsessed with publishing papers in closed (!) journals, indistinguishable from Google AI, DeepMind, FAIR, MSR, and the many others.

There is nothing open or different about them. Most paper code is not published, and even when it is, it's just the typical poorly written and unmaintained research code that you see from other labs. None of their infrastructure is open source either, because it's needed to maintain their competitive advantage to train models and publish research papers. GPT-3 being offered as a paid API to a select number of people is latest joke in a long series of other jokes. All of this would be fine, if it was not for the name and branding of being a transparent and good-willed nonprofit company. It is just misleading and that rubs many people the wrong way, as if the whole "open" thing was just a PR stunt.

HuggingFace [0] these days is pretty much what OpenAI should have been, but only time will tell what happens.

[0] https://huggingface.co/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/dis...

[2] https://github.com/openai/roboschool/issues/159

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#12

Post by hsikka »

gas9S9zw3P9c wrote: post #11

Someone asked for a more nuanced perspective, so here we go. For a lot of AI researchers, OpenAI has been a huge disappointment. We had hope that OpenAI would be the company to democratize AI with good open source work, transparency, no PR bullshit (aka DeepMind), and evangelism. That they would develop in the open, and perhaps even do research in the open. You know, kind of like the name says. It all started out oka…

A bunch of fellow researchers and I started Manifold Computing (https://manifoldcomputing.com), were we’re hoping to do live, open source research and build open source tools. As you said, time will tell but I hope we can do good work this way.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#13

Post by londons_explore »

jcims wrote: post #6

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 combinatio…

To be fair, with a multi-terabyte model, the number of people who have the money to make use of the model is probably only a few hundred...

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#15

Post by simiones »

nexuist wrote: post #8

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 unpreced…

> With GPT-3 we are seeing levels of text comprehension and response that we've never seen in ML before.

Is GPT-3 doing text comprehension, or just generation? I mean, can it extract facts/automatically tag text etc? Or "just" (I know how hard that is!) generate text with some similar characteristics/topics?

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#16

Post by IAmEveryone »

timkam wrote: post #2

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 (compari…

I don't necessarily agree with the following with regards to OpenAI, but it is what I have been told by a few professors and other academics in bioinformatics:

Money is terribly tight in academia, and even at hot think tanks like OpenAI. The difference between a working but not very pretty prototype and a polished product you are willing to be associated with may seem like just a bunch of trivial boilerplate such as documentation or tests.

It is indeed boring work (at least for scientists), but a lot of it. And if the intention is to publish and support something on an ongoing basis, and for widespread use, you probably need to invest 5x to 10x as much time and money.

So in the end most code in academia is hidden because it's hideous, not to hide how they hardcoded all the good jokes GTP-3 comes up with.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#17

Post by csomar »

nexuist wrote: post #8

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 unpreced…

I thought the point of OpenAI was to democratize AI access. By giving access to everyone, you are leveling the play field. Making it available both to small, big, good and bad actors.

Right now it's only accessible to some actors. And good and evil are relative by definition.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#18

Post by lanternfish »

simiones wrote: post #15
nexuist wrote: post #8

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 unpreced…

> With GPT-3 we are seeing levels of text comprehension and response that we've never seen in ML before. Is GPT-3 doing text comprehension, or just generation? I mean, can it extract facts/automatically tag text etc? Or "just" (I know how hard that is!) generate text with some similar characteristics/topics?

Yes. If you few-shot prime it with prompts of the form " tag:" and then just feed it " tag:" it'll generate automatically, just from completion. It does this shockingly well, the paper has specific examples. It can also do fun tricks like condensing a complicated Wikipedia article down to a second grade level, including built in metaphors. An example of this is on the API beta website IIRC.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#20

Post by csomar »

I believe, having worked a little bit with GPT-2, that OpenAI is intentionally sabotaging access to their AI algorithm and data. They have started this sabotage with GPT-2 and with GPT-3 they simply didn't open source it.

For GPT-2, their repository (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2) is archived. Which is as good as saying that the project is abandoned and will receive no updates. The project already doesn't compile/run properly. This issue (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/issues/178) could be solved relatively easily by either a one-line code fix, or merging a pull request (https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/pull/244/files). This is not happening and I have a hard time to believe it is on good intentions.

Oh, and by the way, I believe saying "This AI stuff is dangerous to world", the same as politicians saying "We need to check your web history for pedophilia stuff". It's funny how some people don't see the irony in how they oppose one thing and support another that is practically the same.

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