Show HN: Open AI is not Open – A browser extension

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The chat interfaces are quite... talkative. If you want something more confined / limited / doing exactly what you say (and not what it thinks you mean), the direct completion API or playground is often handier for that.

    write 7 sentences about why openai should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. compare this to a different reality where ClosedAI only sells access to a private list of elites.

which then returned (temp 0)

    1. OpenAI allows everyone to benefit from their services, regardless of their financial or social status, which is a great advantage over ClosedAI, which only sells access to a select few.
    2. OpenAI encourages collaboration and innovation by allowing anyone to access their services, which is not possible with ClosedAI.
    3. OpenAI allows for a more democratic approach to artificial intelligence, as anyone can contribute to the development of the technology.
    4. OpenAI is more transparent than ClosedAI, as it allows anyone to view the source code and make suggestions for improvement.
    5. OpenAI is more accessible than ClosedAI, as it is available to anyone with an internet connection.
    6. OpenAI is more cost-effective than ClosedAI, as it does not require any payment for access.
    7. OpenAI is more inclusive than ClosedAI, as it allows anyone to benefit from the technology, regardless of their background or financial status.

Some of those are... not quite right.

And to tinker with it yourself:

    curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
      -d '{
      "model": "text-davinci-003",
      "prompt": "write 7 sentences about why openai should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. compare this to a different reality where ClosedAI only sells access to a private list of elites.",
      "temperature": 0,
      "max_tokens": 256,
      "top_p": 1,
      "frequency_penalty": 0,
      "presence_penalty": 0
    }'

Adjusting the prompt to a bit to describe the competitor comes back with more focused results.

    Write seven sentences about why OpenAI should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public.  Compare and contrast this to a hypothetical competitor that has a business model prioritizing monetization of the model.

> That's where you've lost me. Emails are not usually a source of value, and their usefulness is not usually measured in complexity.

Most of a CSRs entire job is to be the subject matter expert for the company's customers so their source of value to the company consists of answering customer questions, generally via email. Many other roles at a company consist of basically: goto meeting, interact on slack, read emails, send emails. (Then go to more meetings.) The PR department also sends a lot of emails (with slide decks). Of course, given the news of late, it can also write the emails that are the CEO's job to write: https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-annou...

Measuring someone's output by the number of emails sent is a bad real metric to use, for obvious reasons, but I hope it still gets my point across - that ChatGPU is a force multiplier wherever it can be used. Emails are but one aspect, but it's one that almost everyone actually uses. Not everyone is in such a role and I think a lot of people have myopia on its lack of usefulness because of that. It's really good at breaking down a problem. Eg "what pieces do I need to build to make an app like uber". Followed by "what's that like compared to airbnb?" I can write a really good answer those questions but chatgpt is able to output a perfectly reasonable outline while I'm still waiting on Google Docs to load. (Okay, slight exaggeration, Google Docs isn't that slow to load, but I wish it were faster.)

> ChatGPT would not help with the email issues in my personal life, because it simply does not know what should be in the emails.

Actually I've found the opposite. My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom. It's been a good resource to help me reframe my thoughts outside of more limited therapy sessions, especially when I've got burning questions at 1am and therapy's not for another week. For things where my kneejerk response is often comes across as toxic, combative, critical, and ultimately not helpful, I've found that ChatGPT is able to help me rephrase what I'm trying to say in a way that the person I'm saying it to will actually hear my message. Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling". (not true but hopefully you're picking up what I'm putting down :) Arguably I should already know that stuff, but they didn't have EQ classes in programmer school. Even if I did though, it's still useful as a refresher before going into a difficult conversation like that.

With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications.

> I was under the impression that it could. Leetcode problems are the kind of thing I'd expect a GPT model to be good at.

Bottom of page 5 of https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf :)

Hard's, well, hard. Or at least, non-trivial. What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question as their business challenges lie elsewhere.

> How did you know it was correct?

It's bash. It's not remotely provably correct and there are no unit tests but I ran it and it worked. I can find the docs (though man bash is annoyingly difficult to use.) but in the end, being told the answer is way easier than deducing it. The vulgar, NSFW example of this is https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=ls+-cuntflaps. Sure you can look up the man page for ls and figure out what those arguments mean, but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments. (Though, ChatGPT couldn't answer what that command does.)

> With ChatGPT, how do you know it hasn't just made something up, and introduced some kind of subtle security vulnerability into your script?

I mean I'm sending strings to mysql -e. I'm sure it has security vulnerabilities. So your point's valid. But it's a real world example of where it saved me time and more importantly, context switching. I could have figured it out, but then I'd have my "how to bash" hat on and not my "how to SQL" hat on, or vice versa. And it takes me a second to change programming language hats. If I'm jumping from language to language to language, it's really useful for telling me if I want len(str), str.length(), str.size(), or ${#str}. Or like Excel. There's a certain class of problem where Excel is the right solution (many times when interacting with other, non-programmer people), but I'm not an expert and so getting the answer to questions about how to use formulas via ChatGPT is way easier than the alternative.

I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve. But I'm not, so I find it very useful.

I use an specific incident where ChatGPT was able to help solve a problem for me, as an real-world example where it saved me time and effort. I'm saying it solved problem of type X for me, you're saying it fails at problems of type Y. Don't use it for problems of type Y then! If my job is solving X problems, it just a lot easier, or I got a lot faster. If your job is solving Y problems though, well you'll probably have a job longer than me, for one, but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y.

> It's really good at breaking down a problem.

It's really good at breaking down solved problems. (Not even: only a specific class of solved problems.)

> My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom.

… Please tell me you're not actually telling OpenAI personal details about other people's lives. First of all, that's creepy. Second of all, GDPR Article 2(c):

> 2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: […] (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;

It feels to me like you're skirting the edge of this exception, if not outright crossing it. Using OpenAI's APIs would probably be fine, but section 3(c) of the OpenAI Terms of use ("Use of Content to Improve Services.") says they'll use ChatGPT input under [0]: that doesn't feel like a purely personal or household activity to me.

> With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications.

There are usually specific extra restrictions (beyond GDPR-type stuff) for correspondence – but even ignoring privacy law, that's all sorts of illegal.[1][2] Ignoring law, are you telling the people who send you emails that you're feeding their writing into a training data set?

> Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling".

This kind of use seems okay to me, provided you trust OpenAI to only use the data for what they say they're using it for.

> What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question

No, they involve understanding a large codebase. That's a completely different kind of skill, and not one I expect unenhanced GPT-style models to ever be very good at. GitHub Copilot certainly isn't.

> but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments

This kind of thing is great! Having that kind of thing integrated into an IDE is the sort of thing I mean when I say "better tools" – though even better would be a less arcane command-line syntax, where you don't have -f partly cancelling out -t… (Btw, in the absence of -f, would -u or -t be in effect for the sort order? That website, taking sections from the man page, doesn't explain.)

> I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve.

I don't know of anyone who can. The effective programmers I know solve this problem by choosing vaguely-appropriate tools for the job. (Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ sqlite does exist, you know – or Python's mysql library, or Ruby's, or Perl's, or Tcl's – heck, even PHP's would be better than that.)

> but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y.

*grumble grumble*. You're not wrong there.

At least you don't have to worry about these things putting you¹ out of a job. Solving for X problems are the hardest problems I have yet encountered, and I've been known to go to considerable lengths to render them unnecessary: without somebody eliminating the problem, somebody's always going to have to do them (even if it's cleaning up after the computer's automatic 80%-correct solution blows up and takes the production database with it).

---

[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

[1]: https://www.guidethroughthelegaljungleblog.com/2008/11/what-...

[2]: http://www.writewords.org.uk/articles/tips6.asp

¹: Or your freakishly-knowledgeable peers who, somehow, have enough holistic understanding that they don't need to look everything up.

Wow, it's so mean, and I like it. Personally I call it ClosedAI.