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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

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Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#51

Post by newyankee »

loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

What about the training data corpus ? Other than large cos like Google or Meta, can anyone else procure the same ?

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#52

Post by UncleOxidant »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

I understand any individual's company anti-competitive measures. OpenAI looks at Google the same way Apple looked at IBM in the 80s. What I'm worried about is a lot of the talk about guarding models, public safety and misuse of models will end up leading every big company to pull public access of their APIs. We might look at 2022-2023 as a brief golden age when regular people could use stuff like GPT-4 before it was…

> We might look at 2022-2023 as a brief golden age when regular people could use stuff like GPT-4

Not sure about that since it seems to being baked into a lot of products at places like Microsoft.

However, I'd change your statement a bit: We might look at 2023 as a brief golden age when regular people could access trained parameters (the LLaMA params) and run these models on their own machines (such as with alpaca.cpp). I doubt we'll get access to LLM params again unless some kind of non-profit, actual open source organization is formed to produce them and put them out into the public domain.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#53

Post by tourist2d »

loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

You say: OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition.

Then say: The only competitive advantage that OpenAI has here is a headstart of 6-12 months

It's almost as if they want to keep this advantage, huh? Blows my mind how business illiterate some HN commenters are.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#55

Post by loveparade »

newyankee wrote: post #51
loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

What about the training data corpus ? Other than large cos like Google or Meta, can anyone else procure the same ?

Leaving the legal aspects of crawling aside, I think there is an important distinction here between 1. "can you procure it" and 2. "do you have enough money to process it all"

1. Yes, I think almost anyone can write code to procure the training corpus, in theory, and test it on a small scale

2. No, only the biggest labs and universities have enough resources to process such huge amounts of data and iterate on models with that scale. But that's just a matter of resources that can be overcome with partnerships between industry and academia that are common anyway. All the big labs already have huge efforts underway to reproduce GPT-X and it's just a matter of time before they catch up.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#56

Post by esperent »

hhh wrote: post #46
numberalltheway wrote: post #44

It's even more frustrating that, from what I can tell, there is nothing published about how GPT-4 improved. I take specific exception to the hiding of the data and techniques used to generate the model. There must be something specific going on in the model that is allowing it to perform better than GPT-3 and better than what any contemporaries are able to produce. Not publishing this information hinders the further…

Look at the system card.

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4-system-card.pdf

Does anyone have a summary?

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#57

Post by thwayunion »

tourist2d wrote: post #53
loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

You say: OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Then say: The only competitive advantage that OpenAI has here is a headstart of 6-12 months It's almost as if they want to keep this advantage, huh? Blows my mind how business illiterate some HN commenters are.

If someone doesn't file a Form 990, they are out for themselves and want to fuck (sorry... extract value from) everyone who isn't a (majority) share holder.

Open AI is not the first for-profit philanthropy. It's just another evangelical church with a televangelist at the helm. TED talks are sermons.

TBF: at least Open AI doesn't pretend to be a charity anymore... I feel sorry for the working sops who held MSFT stock in 401Ks and funded a massive tax write-off for the capital class. Dumbasses, amirite?

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#58

Post by loveparade »

tourist2d wrote: post #53
loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

You say: OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Then say: The only competitive advantage that OpenAI has here is a headstart of 6-12 months It's almost as if they want to keep this advantage, huh? Blows my mind how business illiterate some HN commenters are.

A headstart doesn't matter unless you can keep it. The point is that there are many mort smart people and resources outside of OpenAI and there are inside of OpenAI. If they focus their efforts, they will easily catch up.

A headstart is not a competitive moat like network effects are. Go and try to raise money for your startup from a VC and tell them "well, everyone is doing the same as us, but we started 6 months earlier!!" - nobody cares.

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#59

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway1851 wrote: post #41
atleastoptimal wrote: post #32

I understand any individual's company anti-competitive measures. OpenAI looks at Google the same way Apple looked at IBM in the 80s. What I'm worried about is a lot of the talk about guarding models, public safety and misuse of models will end up leading every big company to pull public access of their APIs. We might look at 2022-2023 as a brief golden age when regular people could use stuff like GPT-4 before it was…

A concern I have about OpenAI is that, if you're using their APIs to develop an application, they can mine your data to compete with you, or even beat you to market. They can do this indirectly, by sharing information with preferred business partners. The conflict of interest, combined with the lack of robust data privacy guarantees, makes me queasy. If serving up generic LLM APIs becomes commoditized -- and I think…

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models

#60

Post by sillysaurusx »

loveparade wrote: post #48

What's most surprising to me is that OpenAI really seems to believe that not publishing details will save them from competition. Everyone knows how these models work, and while I'm sure there is a bunch of "secret sauce" that OpenAI has built for training and fine-tuning, it's ridiculous to believe that the research community and competitors like Google and Facebook can't figure out the same. They just haven't really…

Au contraire, no one knows how large GPT-4 is, which is the single best predictor of performance (for a model trained to convergence). The GPT-4 paper spent much of its time writing about this — they did some small scale experiments with 1/1000th the compute, then picked a loss level they wanted and trained GPT-4 till it got it.

Neither the exact loss level nor the number of parameters are revealed by the paper. Unfortunately it’s not possible to guess these from outside observations.

Will this save them from competition? No, but it certainly makes things harder. Everyone immediately aimed at 175B the moment GPT-3 was published. GPT-4 is now a question mark.

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