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

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201–210 of 595 posts

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

#201

"Open" as in "Open for Big Business"? The main reason to worry, though, is not the proprietary monetization of "AI" algorithms: Just like it was not an algorithm (pagerank) but the invention of adtech that spawned surveillance capitalism, here too the main question is what sort of "disruption" can this tech facilitate , as in which social contract will be violated in order to "create value". "Success" in "tech" has f…

> ...here too the main question is what sort of "disruption" can this tech facilitate, as in which social contract will be violated in order to "create value".

I think we're already getting a taste of it with copyrighted but publicly accessible works getting fed into the training step of AI models. The economic benefits of this training then accrue to the model's owners, while the creators of the training data have to pay for access.

It seems as though AI models improve with more training data, so I expect AI companies to come for ostensibly private data next. Microsoft is actually really well positioned here since they've already acclimatized their user base to transmitting an endless stream of telemetry and they own the dominant desktop/laptop OS.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird to me that this is even possible legally (turning a nonprofit into a for-profit).

They technically didn’t get rid of the non profit but instead formed a partially owned for profit subsidiary. In theory non profits are subject to oversight by the state of incorporation’s attorney general. In practice it’s mostly a free for all.

This is the loophole. It's what Mozilla did (Foundation created Corporation, and moved employees there), and even IKEA is technically owned by a nonprofit (Stichting INGKA Foundation).

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve blocked him - it was getting too much and I really don’t care what his view on things are. I had a lot of admiration for him until he became more public - now, I think he is a cruel person who’s politics do not align one bit with me.

This is the problem in my view with people that use social media to post everything too much, who overshare. Elon could have been this guy that was doing cool stuff, super smart and doing some good stuff for the world, but now most people think he is a jerk. People that get known for their work, it's not really a good look for them to wade into politics or controversial topics they have no expertise or right to start…

> now most people think he is a jerk

Do they? I don’t. I also know many people with many differing views and they don’t either. This looks again like you are projecting you opinion on the majority of people with no data to support it.

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

#204

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.

Huh, how would an enthusiast get 1000x H100 GPUs to train some state-of-art model? ML workflows are the most expensive computing pipelines these days. It's easy to spend $1M/month just on inference alone in production. Without financial backing there would be some trivial useless models everywhere (there already are).

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

#205
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, parent comment complains Elon is bashing OpenAI "any opportunity he gets"... while unable to point out how Elon's comment is wrong. Maybe they just wants to express how much they don't like Elon any opportunity they gets.

He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets. I would add this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553 I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear. But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

"Based" is slang for "cool" or "in" that's common on 4chan, but I believe has its origins in the 90s offline

on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"

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

#206
post #4

I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years…

I don't see the problem. he's making some quite valid criticisms of OpenAI. Jesus himself could be in charge of policy work there and that wouldn't change the fact that "Open"AI is anything but open

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

#207

Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save earths environment" stuff he lik…

I'm not too fond of Elon and have blocked him on Twitter because I don't like selfish personalities nor fanatism or personalism from the community, but he's saying normal and rightful stuff in these tweets. You can say a lot of things about him but not infer that with these tweets.

Sometimes these answers make me believe they are created for bot brigades and astroturfing.

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

#208
post #18

If someone can make money off something, after achieving global visibility, they will - it's almost an iron law. The only exceptions I can think of are Wikipedia, Archive.org, and Wikileaks.

Also almost every big open-source project? ffmpeg? OAI is not bad for being for profit, it is bad for the bait and switch. They started off with "Open" and still have it in their name even as they turned into the next Microsoft.

Most F/OSS projects result in commercial exploitation, one way or another. Virtuous exceptions are very very few.

> OAI is not bad for being for profit, it is bad for the bait and switch.

The bait-and-switch examples in F/OSS are legion, typically via license changes and occasionally via non-changes going against the spirit of the community (like Linux sticking to GPLv2). Most are not as blatant as IMDB pulling up the drawbridge, but something like moving to "open core" once popularity is achieved.

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

#209
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets. I would add this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553 I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear. But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

"Based" is slang for "cool" or "in" that's common on 4chan, but I believe has its origins in the 90s offline on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"

I do recall people saying based a lot in the 90s, it meant based in reality.

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

#210
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, parent comment complains Elon is bashing OpenAI "any opportunity he gets"... while unable to point out how Elon's comment is wrong. Maybe they just wants to express how much they don't like Elon any opportunity they gets.

He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets. I would add this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553 I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear. But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

Yeah I had no clue what his deal was, but I decided to search his tweets for "openAI" and it became clear pretty quickly. Interestingly, for the same reason as the article.
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