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OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

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Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#91
post #73

This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream. They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future, es…

Yay for competition.

Stability straight up proved that OpenAIs ideas around the importance of locking the tech up and guard railing it is all a big waste of time.

The world didn’t end when anyone could run Dall-E 2 level image gen on gamer hardware and without guardrails. Instead we got to integrate that power into tools like Blender, Photoshop, Krita etc for free.

First company to democratize ChatGPT tech in the same way will own this space and OpenAIs offering will once again become irrelevant overnight.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#92
Huh, I was reading this old New Yorker piece earlier today - how timely I guess.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

>“We don’t plan to release all of our source code,” Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.”

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#94

When I realized that OpenAI is not open source, you knew it wasn't gone be open in any sense. How can you in 2010s start a thing with the name 'Open' and then not have it be Open Source.

Well it’s still open access. All those GPT-3 tools doing their thing at no cost. They have more than just ChatGPT.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#95
post #43

capitalism ruins everything. imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open sourced, instead of guarding their little secrets. i hope google get f**, hoarding AI knowledge for years, only got shaken after recent events force them.

Do you know of any open source projects with the approximately $5 million it takes to train GPT3? Do you think the AI scientists who invented the underlying techniques would do so without being paid? No, Google and others paid for these people's work. Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich th…

> Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich through capitalism

Sounds to me like you're describing a system that fatally tethers individuals to profit motive, and technological advancement to the good will of a few, rather than something that magically allows for great projects to exist.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#96

It is really hard to be "Open Source" and "Non-profit" in the same time without the company delve into political grandstanding and being on a leash of other for-profit(i.e. Mozilla)

Not really, just don't let the company get taken over by lawyers and "diversity" types.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#97
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's lost himself in the fake popularity of being a social media celebrity. He started believing that having 100 million followers on a web site really means that a continent's worth of people adore you. For all his complaints about bots after he got cold feet on the Twitter purchase, he seems strangely naïve about how social media really works and what's real there. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multip…

I almost feel like Elon's story is the ultimate one about someone getting addicted to popularity and social media, I've seen so many 'smart', respected people get onto platforms and then slowly but completely fall from grace. The difference with Elon is he had real power, money and influence, so in the end he used that to actually buy Twitter, that's the ultimate social media addiction right there. Much like Social m…

A similar story to Donald Trump...it's interesting how social media and the addiction to constant attention can rot people's brains, and it doesn't discriminate regardless of financial status.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#98

When I realized that OpenAI is not open source, you knew it wasn't gone be open in any sense. How can you in 2010s start a thing with the name 'Open' and then not have it be Open Source.

The OpenDWG Alliance (1998) e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance (since 2002)

The Open was a joke even then, but they publish a DWG design spec for free at least, spec'ed with about 50% of their internal parser.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#99

The only way this kind of research could be done "in the open" is if it was funded by taxpayers' money. Except we have global corporations with elite fiscal layer teams, but no global government (giant lizzards are always disappointing) - so some global corporation was going to own it in the end, it was a matter of "time" and "US or Chinese". The time is now, he winner is US. Moving on. The next move is for (some) go…

> funded by taxpayers' money.

In this industry, a contract with MS is as close to directly having a DOD contract as you can get.

Remember when MS bought Skype, turned off end to end encryption and got rid of the P2P mechanisms, to eventually appear in the leaks about PRISM?

Likely Bing integration of ChatGPT is the more innocuous use of the technology. Once they have gotten input from the AI experts at OpenAI on how to use their generative text model inside search engines, they can also use it for building search masks for analysts to sift through the massive amounts of data they have on individuals, to name one of the many potential uses in the intelligence community.

On the bright side, at least OpenAI publishes some high level info on what they did. It's published research, not hidden in secrecy, like say how to build planes invisible under radar. I'm just a bit sad about the employees who likely had better paying alternative offers but were joining, what they thought, the mission oriented job at OpenAI.

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