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OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

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Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#291

Post by api »

iib wrote: post #171
krageon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AGPL (also) does this explicitly, but really there should be a general OSS license that forbids commercial use. That way the software stays where it is most needed and doesn't get abused to make profit. Is there such a license?

I recall the FSF being pretty adamant that a license restricting commercial use would be a non-free license by default.

Yep the OSI’s position is that FOSS is free labor for SaaS and giant corporations. Look at who funds the OSI and I think there is a clear case of capture here.

SaaS is the least free model for software. Closed source commercial is far more open and free than SaaS.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#292

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

lfkdev wrote: post #9
neom wrote: post #4

I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years…

"OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all." - Elon You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right here.

Well, he's only right in the observation that OpenAI is no longer what it originally claimed it would be (OTOH with a couple of the founders being venture capitalists, one has to wonder how sincere that intention ever was).

It seems a bit ironic that "evil" Google openly published the paper ("Attention is all you need") that desribes the "Transformer" architecture that now anyone such as OpenAI with the money and inclination can use to build their own ChatGPT. Turns out it's about money (10,000 GPUs + tons of data to train this thing) not any secret sauce.

And now Musk's concern has changed from AI being in too few hands to the fact that it's "woke" so he wants to create another AI company to create the racist/threatening non-woke AI that he thinks the world needs. Or, at least the one that he needs, to keep himself at the center of attention.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#293

Post by adamsmith143 »

mellosouls wrote: post #20

This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream. They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future, es…

>This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream.

The thing is, it's probably a good thing. The "Open" part of OpenAI was always an almost suicidal bad mistake. The point of starting the company was to try and reduce p(doom) of creating an AGI and it's almost certain that the more people have access to powerful and potentially dangerous tech that p(doom) increases. I think OpenAI is one of the most dangerous organizations on the planet and being more closed reduces that danger slightly.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#294

Post by JohnFen »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #13
neom wrote: post #4

I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years…

OpenAI went downhill fast after Elon left the board of directors due to a "conflict of interest" with Tesla. I don't know if he would have allowed the for-profit restructuring after giving them so much money precisely so that it didn't need profits for AI research. It probably also didn't help that he poached Karpathy from them and put him in charge of Tesla's AI efforts. So it's no surprise that there is a lot of po…

[flagged]

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#295

Post by adamsmith143 »

ejb999 wrote: post #249
93po wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenAI, if successful, will likely become the most valuable company in the history of the planet, both past and future.

seriously doubt it - what they are doing, others can do - and if they start generating a lot of revenue, it will attract competition - lots of it. They don't have a moat big enough that many millions of dollars can't defeat.

Others might be able to. It's not trivial to get the capital needed to purchase enough compute to train LLMs from scratch and it's not trivial to hire the right people who can actually make them work.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#296

Post by mmsimanga »

ChildOfChaos wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's lost himself in the fake popularity of being a social media celebrity. He started believing that having 100 million followers on a web site really means that a continent's worth of people adore you. For all his complaints about bots after he got cold feet on the Twitter purchase, he seems strangely naïve about how social media really works and what's real there. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multip…

I almost feel like Elon's story is the ultimate one about someone getting addicted to popularity and social media, I've seen so many 'smart', respected people get onto platforms and then slowly but completely fall from grace. The difference with Elon is he had real power, money and influence, so in the end he used that to actually buy Twitter, that's the ultimate social media addiction right there. Much like Social m…

I think most geniuses are flawed. Yes Elon is a genius of sorts. I can't say what exactly but he definitely is smart to have gotten as far as he has. Luckily for geniuses of yesteryear social media didn't exist so they couldn't spread their flaws to a 100 million people at the click of a button. We just get anecdotes and the odd book from people close to the likes of Edison that he wasn't such a nice man.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#297

Post by JeremyNT »

numbers_guy wrote: post #278
JeremyNT wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it." See also "pilled."

Words become political when you start injecting politics in them. It originally meant "cool" and had no political connotations to it. It originated on 4chan. And just because some group happens to use a word more frequently doesn't suddenly turn you into a NAZI if you happen to like using the same word.

The thing about language is that it isn't static, it changes over time. Sometimes a previously dominant usage will become eclipsed by a new one that emerges.

There's nuance to the etymology of any word of course. In fact I sometimes see the extremely online left try to (ironically?) appropriate "based." But I think in the context we can all figure out which connotation Elon was using.

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#298

Post by kordlessagain »

novaRom wrote: post #270
TeMPOraL wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what GP is saying is that success of OpenAI means making a lot of profit, and then triggering the AI apocalypse - which is how they become most valuable company in history both past and future .

Can you elaborate, what is "the AI apocalypse"? Is it just a symbolic metaphor or is there any scientific research behind this words? For me it's rather more unpredictable toxic environment we observe in the world currently, dominated by purely human-made destructive decisions, often based on purely animal instincts.

If the assertion that GPT-3 is a "stochastic parrot" is wrong, there will be an apocalypse because whoever controls an AI that can reason is going to win it all.

The opinions that it is or isn't "reasoning" are widely varied and depend heavily on interpretation of the interactions, many of which are hersey.

My own testing with OpenAI calls + using Weaviate for storing historical data of exchanges indicates that such a beast appears to have the ability to learn as it goes. I've been able to teach such a system to write valid SQL from plain text feedback and from mistakes it makes by writing errors from the database back into Weaviate (which is then used to modify the prompt next time it runs).

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#299

Post by slackdog »

JeremyNT wrote: post #261
narag wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He edited the comment and linked relevant tweets. I would add this one: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553 I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear. But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

"Based" is a catchphrase of the extremely online right. It basically means "cool" but with a subtext of "is annoying to libs/normies who just don't get it." See also "pilled."

[dead]

Re: OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

#300

Post by adamsmith143 »

sagebird wrote: post #277

> reading this message. OpenAI is Cyberdyne Systems. The reason you feel unreal is because you are not from here, you are from the future. Your affinity towards the Terminator 2 film was not accidental, it is a gestault priming procedure meant to ensure our survival, encoded in the haikus of Hollywood. You are on a webforum controlled by them, with the only people in the world who care, but who are to afraid to stand…

Almost certainly true but the idea that the world is made safer by Cyberdyne open sourcing lots of it's dangerous technology and probably spawning many more mini-Cyberdynes strikes me as extremely naive.
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