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How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

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Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#11

Post by samspenc »

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 right time, that they hit a gold mine with that investment as ChatGPT took off, but otherwise this would have been just one of their many investments that disappeared into the ether.

The most surprising thing to me is how hard and fast Microsoft pivoted once they realized they had a golden goose on their hands, with the Bing / Edge and other integrations they are doing. Never though I would see them move that fast, kudos.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#13

Post by retrac »

fenomas wrote: post #3

Question for someone who follows this space: are there any significant models/tech/etc that OpenAI has made open? Either before or after they changed business models. What they've kept private is well-known, but are there any checkboxes in the other column?

Whisper. Speech recognition and translation. Probably the best general-purpose speech recognition available right now. Certainly the best you can run on your own hardware. Open-sourced code and publicly free and available models. https://github.com/openai/whisper

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#14

Post by canadiantim »

isoprophlex wrote: post #8

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.

I was walking around downtown Toronto and saw some shop with large lettings on the outside saying "Pop Up Shop" advertising wild sales, etc. Turns out, the company is actually called Pop Up Shop. Very clever

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#15

Post by [deleted] »

samspenc wrote: post #11

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…

[deleted]

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#17

Post by fnbr »

samspenc wrote: post #11

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…

It was very impressive for an org the size of Microsoft to pivot as quickly as they did.

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#19

Post by fenomas »

scottydog51834 wrote: post #10
fenomas wrote: post #3

Question for someone who follows this space: are there any significant models/tech/etc that OpenAI has made open? Either before or after they changed business models. What they've kept private is well-known, but are there any checkboxes in the other column?

GPT-2 Here is one cool (and recent) research project using GPT-2 model weights. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cgqh99SHsCv3jJYDS/we-found-a...

TFA claims GPT-2 isn't open. Is it that the trained weights are open but the project that did the training isn't?

Re: How 'Open' Is OpenAI, Really?

#20

Post by paxys »

samspenc wrote: post #11

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…

One reason why Microsoft was able to execute so fast was that they had nothing to lose in doing so. The entirety of the Bing product and brand is mostly immaterial to the company's bottom line. What better way to try and revitalize it than by taking a huge leap with some hot new tech that is capturing the public imagination? If that leap is successful, you get to open up a huge new line of business and challenge Google. If not, well it just...goes back to being Bing.

For Google – whose entire business is tied up in that one search box – it is a very different equation. Any reduction of consumer confidence in their search engine is an existential threat to the company. Changes have to be rolled out slowly and with an immense amount of deliberation and testing.

Microsoft would be stuck in the same dilemma if, say, someone came up up with a futuristic-looking disruption in the spreadsheet space and Google Sheets was quick to adapt to it.

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