I followed along on their discord for a while but I wasn’t sure how to gradually increase my engagement to get involved.
EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sam doing a 180 on non-profit to for-profit was egregious, IMHO. Having said that, plenty of extremely profitable organizations masquerade (literally and figuratively) as non-profits. Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
It's disruptive technology and an enormous amount of value is likely to be created. I would much rather the profits go to a nonprofit which can distribute them charitably rather than them giving them away freely to the megacorps which actually have the resources to run these massive models (edit^2: at scale). I do think the 100x cap on return on Microsoft's $1B investment was way too high (we don't know what the cap…
A nonprofit wouldn't have to distribute profits to charity. It just can't distribute profits to private or public shareholders (because it can't have them). A nonprofit is obligated to reinvest any earnings towards its mission.
Not remotely an expert, this is just my basic understanding. "Nonprofit" is a pretty abused term.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#53Not 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 can't help but wonder if non-profit makes it easier to get access to or train on certain datasets/models.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#54Not 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's not like non-profits can't be evil
There's no shortage of non-profits that exist to pay saleries. As an example, growing up in the bible-belt, and I can confirm that religion can be good business.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yes, we are currently bottlenecked primarily by engineering manpower.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sam doing a 180 on non-profit to for-profit was egregious, IMHO. Having said that, plenty of extremely profitable organizations masquerade (literally and figuratively) as non-profits. Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
It's disruptive technology and an enormous amount of value is likely to be created. I would much rather the profits go to a nonprofit which can distribute them charitably rather than them giving them away freely to the megacorps which actually have the resources to run these massive models (edit^2: at scale). I do think the 100x cap on return on Microsoft's $1B investment was way too high (we don't know what the cap…
I just looked up the the top CEO salaries of non-profit organizations in the USA - as of 2020, they ranged from about $16 million to $8 million. A non-profit appears to simply be a 'non-stock corporation' and can have the same ridiculouly pyramidal compensation structures that shareholder corporations do.
Overhauling the legal definition of non-profit to require the highest-paid employees to make no more than ~10X as much as the lowest-paid employees would make a lot of sense.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Actually the origin is this word (with the last two letters transposed), and the Wikipedia article gives IPA
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#58Not 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…
Sam doing a 180 on non-profit to for-profit was egregious, IMHO. Having said that, plenty of extremely profitable organizations masquerade (literally and figuratively) as non-profits. Also: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034
> Having said that, plenty of extremely profitable organizations masquerade (literally and figuratively) as non-profits.
Non-profit doesn’t mean the organization isn’t supposed to have surplus revenue, it means it doesn’t exist to return profits (e.g., via a claim on the assets of the company) to stockholders or some other beneficiary with a claim on them.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#59Not 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…
You're in luck! EleutherAI has trained and released open source weights of several LLMs, including GPT-Neo (2.7B parameters), GPT-J (6B parameters), and GPT-NeoX (20B parameters). This last model is currently tied for second on the list of the largest open source LLMs in the world.
We also developed VQGAN-CLIP and CLIP-Guided Diffusion, techniques for doing text-to-image synthesis that don't require training and can easily be run locally for inference.
Re: EleutherAI announces it has become a non-profit
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
Correct. Thee same pronunciation exists in ancient greek for example ευ ζην is ef zin (the good life). Also the ευ situation is a little more complex ie sometimes it is pronunciated as ev (depending if the next letter is a vowel).
Wikipedia suggests that "ευ" was pronounced /eu̯/ in ancient greek[0]. My suspicion is that "ευ ζην" is an Ancient Greek "fixed phrase" which is pronounced with Modern Greek phonology.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greek_phonology#Diphth...