EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit • Hacker News Board

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#11

Post by dvt » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

Not sure why the AI community has a weird obsession with being non-profit (or not). It's not like non-profits can't be evil, and it's not like OpenAI has done anything particularly egregious, either.

What we do need is more weights being released in the public domain (hard to find even on Huggingface), easier ways to train models locally, better pruned models for embedded device inference (e.g. running on a Jetson Nano), easier ways to fine-tune for specific contexts, and so on. My big gripe, and for obvious reasons, is that we need to step away from cloud-based inference, and it doesn't seem like anyone's working on that.

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#12

Post by ftxbro » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:22 PM UTC

stellaathena wrote: post #9

eachro wrote: post #2

How do they pay for their compute?

We have a number of donors including Hugging Face, Stability AI, Nat Friedman, Lambda Labs, and Canva that make our work possible. We also have some orgs that provide sponsorship for computing resources specifically: Stability AI, CoreWeave, and Google Research.

are you bottlenecked by engineering

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#13

Post by danuker » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:24 PM UTC

ftxbro wrote: post #10

behnamoh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they had chosen a better name... "Eleuther" is hard to pronounce correctly for someone who doesn't know the word.

how do you pronounce it correctly

I couldn't find the IPA even in Wiktionary, but I found out where it comes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleutheromania

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#14

Post by vikp » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:25 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #11

Not sure why the AI community has a weird obsession with being non-profit (or not). It's not like non-profits can't be evil, and it's not like OpenAI has done anything particularly egregious, either. What we do need is more weights being released in the public domain (hard to find even on Huggingface), easier ways to train models locally, better pruned models for embedded device inference (e.g. running on a Jetson Na…

If you want more open research and weights, you should be happy about this announcement. Incorporating as a nonprofit doesn't guarantee that an organization will act ethically, but it does make it more likely. Nonprofits have more restrictions around how they can spend their money. They also pay less, so the teams is more likely to be mission-aligned.

The profit motive pushes organizations to keep their work secret (which is what has happened with OpenAI).

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#15

Post by spapas82 » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

ftxbro wrote: post #10

behnamoh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only they had chosen a better name... "Eleuther" is hard to pronounce correctly for someone who doesn't know the word.

how do you pronounce it correctly

If it's from the greek word for freedom (ελευθερία) then i guess elefther: ele (like electric) f the (like thesis) r.

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#16

Post by fl0ps » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:29 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #11

Not sure why the AI community has a weird obsession with being non-profit (or not). It's not like non-profits can't be evil, and it's not like OpenAI has done anything particularly egregious, either. What we do need is more weights being released in the public domain (hard to find even on Huggingface), easier ways to train models locally, better pruned models for embedded device inference (e.g. running on a Jetson Na…

I'm with you there on hoping for more concentration on local training and inference, especially on something like the new Orin (open to donations, NVidia!).

I think there's still something of a financial disincentive to promote selfhost over cloud capabilities for just about every party involved except the selfhoster. NVidia loses out if they're selling a few Nano or Orin platforms relative to the much pricier datacenter cards sold in huge lots. The cloud hosters are making up for the cost of hosting in terms of end-user pricing, snarfing all that lovely customer data and likely selling analytics, and probably other measures I can't understand yet. And the large companies that fund research and initial model development want to know what's being done with their models so as to gain any possible competitive advantage. They can't necesarily guarentee that intel from a self-hoster. Almost nobody is willing to spend the time explicitly to make it easier for the individual dev at a small lab or at home to do this because that's essentially a donation and not a business expense that might yeild obvious returns.

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#17

Post by loa_in_ » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:31 PM UTC

return_to_monke wrote: post #8

sorry for killing the mood. great article and great progress. but. didn't openai start as a nonprofit, too?

OpenAI has some complicated setup about this. Part of it is non-profit and part of it isn't and there's some rules they laid out on how to keep it non profit first from what I've gathered

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#18

Post by infinityio » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:37 PM UTC

loa_in_ wrote: post #17

return_to_monke wrote: post #8

sorry for killing the mood. great article and great progress. but. didn't openai start as a nonprofit, too?

OpenAI has some complicated setup about this. Part of it is non-profit and part of it isn't and there's some rules they laid out on how to keep it non profit first from what I've gathered

to my knowledge - started 100% non-profit, the split into partial profit came later when they started having a chance to make money

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#19

Post by warent » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:38 PM UTC

dvt wrote: post #11

Not sure why the AI community has a weird obsession with being non-profit (or not). It's not like non-profits can't be evil, and it's not like OpenAI has done anything particularly egregious, either. What we do need is more weights being released in the public domain (hard to find even on Huggingface), easier ways to train models locally, better pruned models for embedded device inference (e.g. running on a Jetson Na…

It seems like a rift between "Enlightenment" and "Authoritarian High Modernism." People want this progress to benefit reason and humanities, not contribute to our backsliding. Being nonprofit is at least symbolic of enlightenment.

Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit

#20

Post by akavi » Thu, Mar 02, 2023, 8:46 PM UTC

spapas82 wrote: post #15

ftxbro wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you pronounce it correctly

If it's from the greek word for freedom (ελευθερία) then i guess elefther: ele (like electric) f the (like thesis) r.

Where are you getting an /f/ sound from?

Edit: Ah, it seems the digraph "ευ" is pronounced /ef/ in Modern Greek, despite (by convention) being transliterated "eu".