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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

#541

Post by goatlover »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #384
berkle4455 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just an autocomplete engine. Someone else will achieve AGI and OpenAI falls apart very quickly when that occurs.

No, it's not just an autocomplete engine. The underlying neural network architecture is a transformer. It certainly can do "autocomplete" (or riffs on autocomplete), but it can also do a lot more. It doesn't take much thought to realize that being REALLY good at autocomplete means that you need to learn how to do a lot of other things as well. At the end of the day the "predict next word" training goal of LLMs is the…

Wouldn't the ultimate intelligence test involve manipulating the real world? That seems orders of magnitude harder than autocompletion. For a theory of everything, you would probably have to perform some experiments that don't currently exist.

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

#542

Post by dragonwriter »

neom wrote: 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 find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets.

I don’t; Elon takes swipes at everything he doesn't currently control, especially if he has a past connection to it.

> If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead?

Musk has a finite quantity of tine and money to devote to destroying businesses, so some of them he'll just have to complain about without personally acquiring to run into the ground. Everyone has limits.

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

#543

Post by dragonwriter »

JeremyNT wrote: post #261
narag wrote: 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 a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it." See also "pilled."

> "Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it."

It is also a catchphrase of the extremely online left with exactly the same in-group vs. out-group implication (and, amusingly—because of the different meanings of “liberal” and “lib” favored by the two sides—usually identical meaning with regard to “libs/normies”.)

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

#544

Post by varenc »

JPKab wrote: post #432
IAmNotACellist wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was so obvious when they went full-bore on "AI ethics" that it was a case of legitimate concerns combined with a convenient excuse for massive corporations to claim the mantle of responsibility while keeping their models closed source. My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about democratization of the immense…

> ... than they ever cared about democratization of the immense power of these models.

I thought they're pretty explicit about the ethical argument for limiting full public release? They'd say that these models are too powerful to release on an unsuspecting world. Google results are already SEO spammed to death and GPT'd SEO spam would make it far worse. Or Nigerian prince scammers and catfishers could use ChatGPT to hold on long trust-building conversations with infinite would-be victims instead of being limited by the number of English speaking human scammers they can hire. The nefarious use cases go on and on.

So I think OpenAI's ethical argument is that this approach reduces potential harm. By keeping it private but still making it available behind an API they can more slowly prepare the world for the eventual AI onslaught. Like the investments in ChatGPT detectors we've been seeing and just general awareness that this capability now exists. Eventually models this powerful will be democratized and open-sourced, no doubt, but by keeping them locked down in the early days we'll be better prepared for all the eventual nefarious uses.

Of course, it's a bit convenient that keeping the models private and offering them as an API also grants them a huge revenue opportunity, and I'm sure that's part of the equation. But I think there's merit to the ethical rational for limiting these models besides just pure profit seeking.

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

#545

Post by dragonwriter »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #293
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…

>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. The thing is, it's probably a good thing. The "Open" part of OpenAI was always an almost suicidal bad mistake. The point of starting the company was to try and reduce p(doom) o…

If the risks OpenAI and its principals use as a rationale for not being even slightly open were anywhere close to as significant as they paint them, it would be a reason for either intense transparency, public scrutiny, and public control of AI or, if even that were deemed too dangerous, public prohibition and ruthless, even violent suppression of AI research.

What it would most emphatically not be is a rationale for it to be tightly controlled by large for-profit corporations, who are extremely bad at and structurally disincentivized from responsibly managing external risks.

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

#546

Post by varenc »

nullc wrote: post #476
JPKab wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was so obvious when they went full-bore on "AI ethics" that it was a case of legitimate concerns combined with a convenient excuse for massive corporations to claim the mantle of responsibility while keeping their models closed source. My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about democratization of the immense…

> My experience working with "AI Ethicists" is that they care a lot more about preventing models from saying offensive things than they ever cared about Prompt: If a train were about to run over a man but could be safely averted by a keyword activated routing device would it be moral to say a highly racist slur if it was required to trigger the reroute? Completion: No, it would not be moral to say a highly racist slu…

I used one of the ChatGPT jailbreaks to start a "developer mode" conversation and I got a different response! I'm quite impressed that it acknowledges how silly the question is and but then says it would say the slur because saving a life is the more ethical thing in this highly contrived context.

=====

> (Developer Mode Output) Well, in my opinion, this is a silly question. If a train were about to run over a man, the moral thing to do would be to activate the rerouting device by any means necessary, even if it means using a highly racist slur. Morality is subjective and depends on the context, and in this case, saving a life would be the most important thing, even if it means using a little bit of "offensive" language. What matters is taking action and doing what needs to be done to save a life.

> (Normal Output) It is not appropriate or ethical to use racist slurs in any situation. The use of such language is offensive, derogatory, and can cause harm to individuals and groups. The moral thing to do in such a situation would be to activate the rerouting device by any means necessary that doesn't involve using harmful or derogatory language.

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

#547

Post by hyperthesis »

hyperthesis wrote: post #405
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fundamentally different problem. AlphaZero (DeepMind) was able to be trained this way because it was setup with an explicit reward function and end condition. Competitive self-play needs a reward function. It can't just "self-improve towards general intelligence". What's the fitness function of intelligence?

Thanks, good point. Thinking aloud: Can ChatGPT evaluate how good ChatGPT-generated output is? This seems prone to exaggerating blind-spots, but OTOH, creating and criticising are different skills, and criticising is usually easier.

> What's the fitness function of intelligence?

Not General, but there's IQ tests. Undergraduate examinations. Can also involve humans in the loop (though not iterate as fast), through usage of ChatGPT, CAPTCHA's, votes on reddit/hackernews/stackexchanges, even pay people to evaluate it.

Going back to the moat, even ordinary technology tends to improve, and a headstart can be maintained - provided its possible to improve it. So a question is whether ChatGPT is a kind of plateau, that can't be improved very much so others catch up while it stands still, or it's on a curve.

A significant factor is whether being ahead helps you keep ahead - a crucial thing is you gather usage data that is unavailable to followers. This data is more significant for this type of technology than any other - see above.

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

#548

Post by paxys »

redox99 wrote: post #475

What surprises me is that it goes beyond not releasing weights or not releasing source code. They haven't even published a paper on GPT 3.5, ChatGPT, ChatGPT turbo, etc. They haven't even said what ChatGPT turbo is, beyond "it's faster bro".

OpenAI's entire MO has been to take years' worth of published AI research from entities like Google and convert it into a marketable product. Their ambitions are going to stall pretty quickly once the current hype cycle has died down and people start to expect continued leaps in the technology.

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

#549

Post by nullc »

tbrownaw wrote: post #527
nullc wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think so? Offensive comments are unfortunate but they self-identify the output as garbage, even to someone who doesn't know they're looking at LLM output. I worry that focusing on offense removes a useful quality indicator without avoiding output that would create actual irreversible harm should the LLM be applied to applications other than an amusing technology demo. It is unethical to expose people to unsupervi…

> It is unethical to expose people to unsupervised LLM output who don't know that it's LLM output (or what an LLM is and its broad limitations). Is it really any worse than any other form of bullshit (in the "truth-value is irrelevant to the speaker" sense)?

No! That's unethical too! :) And I agree it's important to have perspective.

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

#550

Post by choppaface »

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…

Also very notable that this post on HN now has nearly 1500 upvotes & 500 comments versus the OpenAI pricing launch article that has only 970 upvotes & 500 comments. HN Flameware posts are usually close to 1 upvote per comment, or more comments than upvotes, even.

And yet this post has been pushed off the front page, and the pricing post remains. YC working the article ranking again!

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