Live data from Hacker News

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

vice.com

41–50 of 595 posts

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

#41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I agree with what he's saying here, it seems a little insincere when all the tesla ai stuff is closed source.

Since when was Tesla created to be open-source and non-profit?

They did open source all of their battery patents. Tesla isn't Mozilla, but they do have somewhat of a moral high ground to stand on.

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

#43

capitalism ruins everything. imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open sourced, instead of guarding their little secrets. i hope google get f**, hoarding AI knowledge for years, only got shaken after recent events force them.

Do you know of any open source projects with the approximately $5 million it takes to train GPT3? Do you think the AI scientists who invented the underlying techniques would do so without being paid? No, Google and others paid for these people's work. Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich through capitalism. How do you think Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk were in a position to found OpenAI in the first place? For good or for bad, capitalism is the reason this stuff exists.

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

#44
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty plainly obvious to anyone who has been a Twitter user throughout this whole thing. I was (was) a daily user for the last ~8 years. Then a few months ago all of the sudden like half my timeline was either elons tweets or tweets about elon. I don’t follow him and never have. But there he was, all over my timeline.

I have been using Twitter for 12 years and this has not been "obvious" to me at all. You shouldn't assume that your opinions are obvious or even shared by the majority of people you mention.

Another 12 years user here: I had to block Elon because muting him wasn't enough, and I was getting tired of the sudden massive influx of Elon tweets I was seeing.

Just anecdata though.

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

#45
post #9
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, minus the part where it never was Open, even when it was Elon.

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

#46
post #34

capitalism ruins everything. imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open sourced, instead of guarding their little secrets. i hope google get f**, hoarding AI knowledge for years, only got shaken after recent events force them.

Everything open source = No copyright and ownership of produced models. That's a sure-fire way of guaranteeing only Government funding, free labour, donations and oh so much politics of various forms. And I don't think the "speed of improvement" will increase, I'd say it'd slow to a crawl as there would be no money in it.

Counter examples:

+ Stable Diffusion + Linux + Firefox + ffmpeg + bittorrent + plenty more

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

#47
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…

This "not doing harm" narrative is very grating. It's just another transparent and self-serving attempt by a company to co-opt progressive vernacular to justify whatever questionable policy they have as a moral imperative.

This is the corporate equivalent of "think of the children". A justification that could have been used to gate-keep any and all aspects of computer science, and one that isn't even logically consistent since they only hide their code and weights while still publishing their research: making it ultimately reproducible by malicious actors, especially those well-funded, while slowing down researchers and competitors.

We are privileged to work in a field where we have open access journals, and where there is a large undergoing drive to improve the reproducibility of papers by releasing the code and weights. Their behaviour is the antithesis of what the field is working towards and having talked to many researchers, I don't know many that are fooled by it.

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

#48

Given the amount of compute required to run their models, as well as Microsoft’s investment into the company through providing Azure services, it is quite likely they’ll be acquired by Microsoft.

> Microsoft’s investment into the company through providing Azure services

Microsoft doesn't just provide hardware, it invested literal 10 billion dollars into OAI (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft...). It's fair to say OpenAI is Microsoft's extension now and we should be proportionately wary of what they do, knowing what MS usually does

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

#49
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty plainly obvious to anyone who has been a Twitter user throughout this whole thing. I was (was) a daily user for the last ~8 years. Then a few months ago all of the sudden like half my timeline was either elons tweets or tweets about elon. I don’t follow him and never have. But there he was, all over my timeline.

I have been using Twitter for 12 years and this has not been "obvious" to me at all. You shouldn't assume that your opinions are obvious or even shared by the majority of people you mention.

I’ve blocked him - it was getting too much and I really don’t care what his view on things are.

I had a lot of admiration for him until he became more public - now, I think he is a cruel person who’s politics do not align one bit with me.

Post reply on HN