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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

#71

Post by tedivm »

PatrolX wrote: post #60
joelg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point a company needs to make money :-/ OpenAI started as a non-profit.

"OpenAI is governed by the board of OpenAI Nonprofit, which consists of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & CTO), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Tasha McCauley." https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/

The NFL is also managed by a non-profit. Just because you're managed by a non-profit doesn't mean your company is also a non-profit.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#72

Post by AlexandrB »

Kutta wrote: post #50

OpenAI should have never been open, named "OpenAI", or advertised itself as being open. At the time of OpenAI's inception, much of the AI risk community deemed it as harmful, although that wasn't spoken out a lot, because it is a delicate affair to criticize misguided effort on AI safety when the status quo was almost no effort being spent on AI safety at all. It is a minor consolation that OpenAI turned out to be le…

So "open, like a gate" not "open, like a public resource".

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#73

Post by eggsnbacon1 »

eightysixfour wrote: post #45
joelg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point a company needs to make money :-/ OpenAI started as a non-profit.

Non-profit does not mean “spends money in perpetuity with no revenue.”

that's not what happened with OpenAI though. They're not a non-profit anymore, they changed to a "controlled profit" (lol) model.

I didn't know this was even possible/legal. Start as a non-profit for all the tax advantages and convert to for-profit once you've got a saleable product? Maybe startups should start doing this

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#74

Post by non-entity »

AlexandrB wrote: post #72
Kutta wrote: post #50

OpenAI should have never been open, named "OpenAI", or advertised itself as being open. At the time of OpenAI's inception, much of the AI risk community deemed it as harmful, although that wasn't spoken out a lot, because it is a delicate affair to criticize misguided effort on AI safety when the status quo was almost no effort being spent on AI safety at all. It is a minor consolation that OpenAI turned out to be le…

So "open, like a gate" not "open, like a public resource".

Somewhat random but this debate about the "Open" in OpenAI's name reminds me of OpenVMS which is not open source, but supports "open systems" like POSIX.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#75

Post by theptip »

foldr wrote: post #49
lanternfish wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't demonstrate comprehension in any interesting sense. You don't necessarily have to comprehend a text in order to generate a plausible nonsense continuation of it.

What would your "interesting sense" of comprehension look like?

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#76

Post by admax88q »

SaltyLemonZest wrote: post #57
mtgp1000 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define misuse.

One obvious example would be to fully automate social engineering email scams. Imagine how much disruption it would cause if spearphishing became as common as robocalls have become post-automation.

If it became that common it would quickly cease to be that effective. Spearfishing works because it's rare, so it doesn't automatically set off your bullshit detector. Most people don't fall for "cheap vi@gra" emails anymore.

Social engineering in general is effective because it's rare enough that people don't feel the need to develop policies and strategies for preventing it.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#77

Post by foldr »

theptip wrote: post #75
foldr wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't demonstrate comprehension in any interesting sense. You don't necessarily have to comprehend a text in order to generate a plausible nonsense continuation of it.

What would your "interesting sense" of comprehension look like?

Something like the usual sense of the word.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#78

Post by johnwyles »

albntomat0 wrote: post #34
b-x wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "This AI stuff is dangerous to world" It's not exactly that, their rhetoric is: "This AI stuff is dangerous to world if YOU use it. But when we use it, it is good." All entities think that they hold the key to good values, while the others are always suspected of hiding vile intentions.

That's a stronger opinion about their views than necessarily is true. Based on their actions, OpenAI seems to (rightly, in my opinion) view that some people would misuse GPT-3/etc, even if the majority would not.

The irony is we're talking about Good vs Evil of potential AI systems. It could be a nuclear arms race but I suspect we would be better for it. When information has been free it has nearly always been of benefit to humanity.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#79

Post by albntomat0 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #67
albntomat0 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my alternative view: If OpenAI had open sourced GPT-3, there would be an equivalently angry thread about how they were endangering democracy/social order/etc, and not being responsible with the powerful tool they had created (see other threads on HN regarding those working in facial recognition). Both that group, and the one posting here have valid points, and there would be strong, valid critique of their dec…

But we do realize that sooner or later a model even more powerful will be released to the public, right? And as far as protecting democracy, I assure you that the geopolitical enemies of your nation either have similar models, or will have them very soon. There is very significant investment on ML models for text manipulation going on behind closed doors, funded by States.

> But we do realize that sooner or later a model even more powerful will be released to the public, right?

And at that time, we can equally criticize whomever releases it.

> And as far as protecting democracy, I assure you that the geopolitical enemies of your nation either have similar models, or will have them very soon. There is very significant investment on ML models for text manipulation going on behind closed doors, funded by States.

True, but it's a good idea to keep a high bar for developing and using it. There's a large difference between the resources of a nation state and various criminal enterprises.

Per [0], GPT-3 took $12 million to train. That does not include the people with the relevant skills need to train it, and access to the compute hardware.

[0]: https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/01/ai-machine-learning-opena...

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#80

Post by johnwyles »

csomar wrote: post #17
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.

This is the exact point. Rarely has controlling information and science ever benefit humanity.
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