OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI • Hacker News Board

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#81

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

albntomat0 wrote: post #79

sudosysgen wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I mean, I don't really see the benefit of limiting such a model to such famously reliable and disinterested actors as nation-states and multinational corporations.

The kind of criminals that are going to threaten "democracy/social order/etc..." aren't going to be stopped by a price tag of 12 million dollars, or 120 million dollars for that matter. Just a single Mexican cartel would have the resources to pay for that, to say nothing of criminal groups that work in lockstep with states. The proceeds of crime are 900 billion dollars per year. Training GPT-3 is well within the means of dozens of criminal enterprises.

But sure, we can praise OpenAI for protecting us from small enterprises and individuals, known to democracy, and instead reserving it for the use of megacorps and states, that are known not to threaten democracy or social order.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#82

Post by manquer » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:02 PM UTC

jayparth wrote: post #62

ChefboyOG wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this illustrates just how complex the topic is, though. Hugging Face is awesome, and Transformers has done so much to democratize NLP, but does it exists without labs like OpenAI releasing models like GPT-2? The ecosystem is still young and fluid, and as a result, it's super complex. I completely understand the critique of what OpenAI is now vs. what they positioned themselves as early on, but I think it is a…

Hugging Face is also a for-profit startup. I wonder how betrayed this guy is going to feel betrayed when they launch a paid service...

Open doesn’t mean free. Plenty of for profit open source companies are making good money . Redis gitlab, elastic, sentry, docker, mongo Etc

Open source has very specific definitions OSI has a good process to determine whether a project meets them. I doubt openAI can meet them

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#83

Post by dandanua » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:07 PM UTC

It's inevitable that AI research will be more and more closed. AI is a weapon which is potentially much more dangerous than nuclear. It's naive to think that the most dangerous weapon will be accessible to a general public.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#84

Post by r34 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

I'm not surprised. Since I've seen S. Altman talking in one of his videos about "things that you (the employer) can't tell to your employees" I completely don't trust that guy.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#85

Post by mennis16 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:25 PM UTC

woah wrote: post #54

IAmEveryone wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Such an odd attitude. There’s no way it takes 5-10x engineering effort to write some tests for components of a one-shot python script, as most scientific code is. It’s maybe the easiest type of software to test. Would this type of attitude fly for anything else? Can you imagine if chemists worked like this? “Yea most chemists don’t like to release their procedures, since taking the trouble of accurately measuring out…

I mean a lot of biology papers are loose on protocol details to be honest, dunno about Chemistry but for Bio it can often be difficult to exactly replicate a method because of lack of details alone.

That said I think this should change given how easy it is these days to share supplemental info online.

As far as ugly code I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of academics won't take the time to fix it up, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be released IMO. Maybe an open source community would pop up that could help clean this code for them.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#86

Post by albntomat0 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:26 PM UTC

sudosysgen wrote: post #81

albntomat0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean, I don't really see the benefit of limiting such a model to such famously reliable and disinterested actors as nation-states and multinational corporations. The kind of criminals that are going to threaten "democracy/social order/etc..." aren't going to be stopped by a price tag of 12 million dollars, or 120 million dollars for that matter. Just a single Mexican cartel would have the resources to pay for that,…

Said Mexican cartel would also have to find the appropriately skilled engineers and compute. There's a gap between having the money available, and actually executing the project.

This discussion hinges on what level of unpleasantness comes from groups who don't have $12 million in compute resources and the skills to run large scale distributed ML training, but could `git pull` a publicly available model, and hook it up to some Twitter bots.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#87

Post by cy6erlion » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:40 PM UTC

steev wrote: post #55

joelg wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Girl Scouts are a non-profit yet they don't give their cookies away for free.

Good point, but their name does not imply that their cookies are free.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#88

Post by throwaway7281 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

As soon as I learned that Sam Altman is involved, I could infer the direction. I cannot recall Sam being activist for anything open - but I do remember him as a the "head of the startup world", aka creating exclusive opportunities for venture capitalist by using and tearing bright eyed talent. I think he was pretty successful at the latter.

The sad thing is: OpenAI might be just the foreshadow of the power step function segment of the future, disenfranchising those who are on the wrong side of the API much more that we see today (e.g. somewhat limited to the gig economy).

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#89

Post by throwaway7281 » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

One good thing about this is: An actually free and open ecosystem will emerge - it will take time and countless people-hours but it will happen and it will prevail.

Re: OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI

#90

Post by sudosysgen » Mon, Jul 20, 2020, 5:56 PM UTC

albntomat0 wrote: post #86

sudosysgen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I don't really see the benefit of limiting such a model to such famously reliable and disinterested actors as nation-states and multinational corporations. The kind of criminals that are going to threaten "democracy/social order/etc..." aren't going to be stopped by a price tag of 12 million dollars, or 120 million dollars for that matter. Just a single Mexican cartel would have the resources to pay for that,…

Said Mexican cartel would also have to find the appropriately skilled engineers and compute. There's a gap between having the money available, and actually executing the project. This discussion hinges on what level of unpleasantness comes from groups who don't have $12 million in compute resources and the skills to run large scale distributed ML training, but could `git pull` a publicly available model, and hook it…

In this world, if you have money you have access. If a cartel wanted access to compute they can just pay for it. If they want experts, trust me they can pay for it.