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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

#351

Post by Julesman »

Filligree wrote: post #339
startupsfail wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn’t OpenAI published all the key research results to repro ChatGPT? And made their model available to literally everyone? And contributed more than anyone else to AI alignment/safety? To me it looks like nearly every other player, including open source projects are there for short term fame and profit, while it’s the OpenAI that is playing the long game of AI alignment.

You're not wrong, but existential threats and possible extinction is in the future ; maybe ten-fifteen years away if we're lucky. Meanwhile, we don't get to play with their models right now. Obviously that's what we should be concerned about.

Among all the accepted threats to humanity's future, AI is one of the least founded at this point. We all grew up with this cautionary fiction. But unless you know something everyone else doesn't, the near term existential threat of AI is relatively low.

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

#352

Post by sharkjacobs »

jarrell_mark wrote: post #345

OpenAI isn't as open as it used to be, but they still publish papers. The open-source Hadoop was based on Google papers on MapReduce and Google File System. GPT-J and GPT-NeoX are open source models based on OpenAI publications around GPT-3.

Even Apple publishes ML papers. It turns out you can't attract and retain decent research talent unless you allow them to continue racking up their google scholar score

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

#353

Post by 3-cheese-sundae »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #300
sagebird wrote: post #277

> reading this message. OpenAI is Cyberdyne Systems. The reason you feel unreal is because you are not from here, you are from the future. Your affinity towards the Terminator 2 film was not accidental, it is a gestault priming procedure meant to ensure our survival, encoded in the haikus of Hollywood. You are on a webforum controlled by them, with the only people in the world who care, but who are to afraid to stand…

Almost certainly true but the idea that the world is made safer by Cyberdyne open sourcing lots of it's dangerous technology and probably spawning many more mini-Cyberdynes strikes me as extremely naive.

What's the alternative? Pandora's box has been opened.

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

#354

Post by eatsyourtacos »

andrepd wrote: post #110
phtrivier wrote: post #68

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…

Things like "public goods" are an outdated concept, with a distinctly 19th and 20th century feel. In our postmodern world the very idea is almost taboo. The few things that remain, do because they have been grandfathered in. The hyper-capitalist global market owns everything and that is good.

I wish I lived in a world where I was able to choose which corporate road I get to drive on. Just imagine! I'm at an intersection, and I get to choose if I want to pay $2 to turn left and get home in 5 minutes or pay $1 to turn right and get home in 9 minutes.

When I have a bad fall down the stairs at home, I get to choose which phone number to call. 910 will be there in 10 minutes for $500, 912 will be there in 20 minutes for $350. It's great, being on the floor in agony gives me the opportunity to think about how badly I need to get to the hospital.

I can't imagine a better world than getting to do economic analysis to figure out what is best for me because I want a choice in everything private companies have to offer!

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

#355

Post by IAmNotACellist »

mellosouls wrote: post #20

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…

It is nice to see normies noticing and caring, but the article leaves out some details that obscure comments still stubbornly bring up: like Musk founded it as a 501(c)(3) and put Altman in charge, and only once he had to leave with conflicts of interest Altman founded "OpenAI LP," the for-profit workaround so they didn't have to obey those pesky charity rules. That's when they stopped releasing models and weights, and started making their transparent claims that "the most ethical way to give people access to charge them fucktons of money and rip the API away when we feel like it."

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

#356

Post by buddhistdude »

Filligree wrote: post #344
teekert wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ChatGPT make up some code every now and then. It’s really nice and when not obscure usually directly useable. By you need to understand what it produces imo. I love that it also explains the code and I can follow code it generates and judge its quality and applicability. Isn’t that important?

Last year the output was poor. The year before then, GPT essentially couldn't write code at all... You're not wrong about its quality right now, but let's look at the slope as well.

on the other hand, gpt-3 was trained on a data set that contains all of the internet already. A big Limitation seems to be that it can only work with problems that it has already seen

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

#357

Post by camillomiller »

IAmNotACellist wrote: post #355
mellosouls wrote: post #20

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…

It is nice to see normies noticing and caring, but the article leaves out some details that obscure comments still stubbornly bring up: like Musk founded it as a 501(c)(3) and put Altman in charge, and only once he had to leave with conflicts of interest Altman founded "OpenAI LP," the for-profit workaround so they didn't have to obey those pesky charity rules. That's when they stopped releasing models and weights, a…

People keep forgetting we're talking about Sam Altman, someone who believed that scanning the world's population retinas in exchange for some crappy digital coin was a great idea and not a creepy spinoff of a shoddy sci-fi novel.

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

#358

Post by prepend »

peppermint_gum wrote: post #319
api wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep the OSI’s position is that FOSS is free labor for SaaS and giant corporations. Look at who funds the OSI and I think there is a clear case of capture here. SaaS is the least free model for software. Closed source commercial is far more open and free than SaaS.

Yes, it is important to understand that using open-source software in a commercial SaaS is immoral. However, it should be noted that it applies only to open-source projects that were created by billion-dollar startups like Mongo or Elastic. Using software like Apache, Linux or Postgres is totally fine because it doesn't deprive SV startups (that are so precious to HN) of additional profits.

> using open-source software in a commercial SaaS is immoral.

I don’t agree with this. I’m not a huge open source contributor but I’ve made some contribs over the year and I explicitly checked out the license before sending my change knowing that it could be used within commercial software.

I don’t care. I’d rather companies spend money and build something else than have to recreate the OSS stuff they use.

I want anyone to be able to use my software for any purpose. I certainly don’t think it’s immoral. And I don’t think the authors and users of BSD, MIT, Apache and other licenses think it’s immoral.

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

#360

Post by pr0zac »

chirau wrote: post #258

Was OpenAI ever a non-profit? From my understanding, it was a capped for-profit company. They had a cutoff for how much they could make but that does not make them a non-profit. Have they reached that cap yet? I highly doubt, if anything they are still well in the negative.

It’s still technically a nonprofit, they just created a (capped) for-profit subsidiary with the nonprofit as the sole controlling shareholder. This was done so it could bring in enough money through VC to pay competitive salaries while supposedly meaning the for-profit section will still be responsible for following the nonprofit’s founding charter.

That last part seems to be what has failed with the big question I have being what in that setup wasn’t done correctly such that the current reality wasn’t prevented.

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