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How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

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21–30 of 78 posts

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#21
It may not be 'Open' in sense of open-source or free, but it is open that I can access it and use it in my projects. Before this companies like Google/Facebook had such models but closed in sense that we can get some papers and blog posts but can't rely on them to build our startup.

Because of financial and people resources required, availability of data etc. rest always stayed. Now I can use ChatGPT, Gpt-3/4, Whisper etc. at a reasonable cost and it is forcing rest of the industry to also "Open" up.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#22

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the…

I hope they eventually give the word Open another meaning, for example, they can make their technology and method more open (source, maybe), and/or create a standardized platform to allow people to freely play with and extent their technology without the fear of big daddy restriction.

On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for them to remove "Open" in their title just to make things more clear.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#24

When I was a teenager, there was a local chain of record stores over here named "free record store" But guess what, you couldn't just walk in, grab some CDs and walk out without paying.

It's a bad name there, too, but physical products are expected to have a cost; software frequently is FOSS and gratis, so there's more room for a reasonable person to think that maybe they actually are what they claim to be.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#25

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the…

I don't know if I buy the whole Microsoft got lucky part. I can remember years ago seeing Azure ads pushing machine learning. Github Copilot is now almost 2 years old (since the first "tech preview" announcement). Copilot is built on OpenAI/GPT-3 just like ChatGPT... and then a few months after Copilot, they made it available on Azure's OpenAI service. This is all in 2021. So they've been working on this and collecting data for a while through Azure and Github.

Edit: Azure ML launched in 2015.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#26

Does it matter? Openai finally built something resembling ai. Big tech wasn’t innovating, I personally don’t care if employees at openai capture a ton of the upside

> Does it matter?

Yes.

> Openai finally built something resembling ai. Big tech wasn’t innovating, I personally don’t care if employees at openai capture a ton of the upside

And if they called themselves ClosedAI I don't think people would mind so much; it's the dishonesty that's grating.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#27

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the…

I don't know if I buy the whole Microsoft got lucky part. I can remember years ago seeing Azure ads pushing machine learning. Github Copilot is now almost 2 years old (since the first "tech preview" announcement). Copilot is built on OpenAI/GPT-3 just like ChatGPT... and then a few months after Copilot, they made it available on Azure's OpenAI service. This is all in 2021. So they've been working on this and collecti…

They also did a course correction for "the internet" years ago...

I have to give them credit, but the other side of the equation is that though they react quickly, they tend to duct-tape feature and products together. I'm thinking of how office went online yet has always lacked cohesion. Or how teams competes with zoom/slack/etc, yet is frustrating to work with.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#28
on the meaning of open, a tangential issue, let's have Sherman set the wayback machine to when the word "open" first started being used. "OK Mr Peabody"

open has a number of meanings that are useful, but have been overwhelmed by the concept of open source.

but open standards used to be the meaning. "ethernet is this, here's how you talk to it, but we're not going to write the code for you" (i'm not claiming that ethernet was originally an open standard, just using that as an example of what an open standard means)

and hardware manufacturers used to include blueprints/schematics (for repair, or for interconnection, for example) and commercial software vendors would show you the source code, but at the same time, you weren't being given intellectual property rights or licenses to anything, it was just part of what was required to encourage customers to stick with the product by making it easier to fit in where it was going.

And all of this was a really useful kind of openness. Just mentioning it because when people talk about how open OpenAI is, I'm never quite sure what they're expecting (I don't mind any expectation, not judging, I just don't know)

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#29
post #22

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the…

I hope they eventually give the word Open another meaning, for example, they can make their technology and method more open (source, maybe), and/or create a standardized platform to allow people to freely play with and extent their technology without the fear of big daddy restriction. On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for…

They take the mathematicians meaning. Open does not mean not closed.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#30
post #22

I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened. OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit. As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the…

I hope they eventually give the word Open another meaning, for example, they can make their technology and method more open (source, maybe), and/or create a standardized platform to allow people to freely play with and extent their technology without the fear of big daddy restriction. On the other hand, if they ended up chooses a different route, go patented everything and starts suing, then maybe it's better off for…

I hope their api pricing goes down over time.
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