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So it seems that OpenAI realized they needed more compute power than they could afford, so they started a for-profit arm that could take outside investment from

So it seems that OpenAI realized they needed more compute power than they could afford, so they started a for-profit arm that could take outside investment from Microsoft to cover those costs. This piece suggests that they have since focused (at least partially) on creating profitable products/services, because they need to show Microsoft that this investment was worthwhile. Does anyone with more context know if this is accurate, and if so, why they changed their approach/focus? What are they working on and is GAI still a goal?

andreyk 7y ago
Person doing PhD in AI here (Ive seen all of OpenAI's research, been to their office couple times, know some people there) - tbh the piece was a pretty good summary of a lot of quite common somewhat negative takes on OpenAI within research community (such as that they largely do research based on scaling up known ideas, have at times hyped up their work beyond merit, changed their tune to be for profit which is weird given they want to work in the public interest, and that despite calling themselves OpenAI they publish and open source code much less frequently than most labs -- and with profit incentive they will likely publish and open source even less). The original article also presented the positive side (OpenAI is a pretty daring endeavor to try to get AGI by scaling up known techniques as they are, and people there do seem to have their heart in the right place) .
- sytelus 7y ago
  I feel OpenAI has stayed fairly close to its mission and principles. I'm not sure about why so much secrecy, they could have just NDAed and let the reporter take look at things which is common practice even at Apple. However, apart from that, they are the only ones explicitly sensitive to safety and economic issues surrounding AGI. Specifically, AGI is certain to generate the first trillionaire or even deca-trillionaire and throw the wealth gap between countries completely out of control. Unlike guns and nukes, it would be a far more difficult tech to clone for less fortunate groups. I think OpenAI is the only group actively working against that outcome (i.e. max 100X return provision) while most others wish to race to AGI first, patent the hell out of it and become the most powerful richest entity world would have ever seen. Also, until recently with only 200 folks and limited pay (relatively speaking), they have amassed extraordinary talent that has given run for its money to teams 10X larger. When people say that they just try to copy/scale others innovation, they grossly underestimate very impressive contributions that has touched virtually everything from supervised, unsupervised, RL, NLP and robotics.
  - nradov 7y ago
    There is nothing at all "certain" about AGI or the economic impacts thereof. This is completely speculative and based on zero hard data.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  It's sad that openAI doesn't really research AGI unlike opencog. Btw even by focusing on the primitives, low level Nlp tasks, OpenAI is responsible of too few state of the art for the funding they get.
Barrin92 7y ago
>they needed more compute power than they could afford I wonder why this problem doesn't get much more attention in the field. It seems like models to solve even extremely domain specific, limited tasks already are running into economic / computional constraints. Given that openAI wanted to be a place that develops general, artifical intelligence without having so much short term commercial focus I wonder why there is not more research going into approaches that are less computationally intensive. Which IMO is in itself a metric for intelligence

andreyk 7y ago

Person doing PhD in AI here (Ive seen all of OpenAI's research, been to their office couple times, know some people there) - tbh the piece was a pretty good summary of a lot of quite common somewhat negative takes on OpenAI within research community (such as that they largely do research based on scaling up known ideas, have at times hyped up their work beyond merit, changed their tune to be for profit which is weird given they want to work in the public interest, and that despite calling themselves OpenAI they publish and open source code much less frequently than most labs -- and with profit incentive they will likely publish and open source even less). The original article also presented the positive side (OpenAI is a pretty daring endeavor to try to get AGI by scaling up known techniques as they are, and people there do seem to have their heart in the right place) .

sytelus 7y ago
I feel OpenAI has stayed fairly close to its mission and principles. I'm not sure about why so much secrecy, they could have just NDAed and let the reporter take look at things which is common practice even at Apple. However, apart from that, they are the only ones explicitly sensitive to safety and economic issues surrounding AGI. Specifically, AGI is certain to generate the first trillionaire or even deca-trillionaire and throw the wealth gap between countries completely out of control. Unlike guns and nukes, it would be a far more difficult tech to clone for less fortunate groups. I think OpenAI is the only group actively working against that outcome (i.e. max 100X return provision) while most others wish to race to AGI first, patent the hell out of it and become the most powerful richest entity world would have ever seen. Also, until recently with only 200 folks and limited pay (relatively speaking), they have amassed extraordinary talent that has given run for its money to teams 10X larger. When people say that they just try to copy/scale others innovation, they grossly underestimate very impressive contributions that has touched virtually everything from supervised, unsupervised, RL, NLP and robotics.
- nradov 7y ago
  There is nothing at all "certain" about AGI or the economic impacts thereof. This is completely speculative and based on zero hard data.
The_rationalist 7y ago
It's sad that openAI doesn't really research AGI unlike opencog. Btw even by focusing on the primitives, low level Nlp tasks, OpenAI is responsible of too few state of the art for the funding they get.

Barrin92 7y ago

>they needed more compute power than they could afford I wonder why this problem doesn't get much more attention in the field. It seems like models to solve even extremely domain specific, limited tasks already are running into economic / computional constraints. Given that openAI wanted to be a place that develops general, artifical intelligence without having so much short term commercial focus I wonder why there is not more research going into approaches that are less computationally intensive. Which IMO is in itself a metric for intelligence