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Someone asked for a more nuanced perspective, so here we go. For a lot of AI researchers, OpenAI has been a huge disappointment. We had hope that OpenAI would

Someone asked for a more nuanced perspective, so here we go. For a lot of AI researchers, OpenAI has been a huge disappointment. We had hope that OpenAI would be the company to democratize AI with good open source work, transparency, no PR bullshit (aka DeepMind), and evangelism. That they would develop in the open, and perhaps even do research in the open. You know, kind of like the name says. It all started out okay with their release of OpenAI Gym, tutorials, leaderboards, and competitions around that. That was when Karpathy was still there. Over time, many projects have become abandoned, poorly maintained, or just disappeared [1]. And many projects they promised never happened [2]. OpenAI became just another research lab obsessed with publishing papers in closed (!) journals, indistinguishable from Google AI, DeepMind, FAIR, MSR, and the many others. There is nothing open or different about them. Most paper code is not published, and even when it is, it's just the typical poorly written and unmaintained research code that you see from other labs. None of their infrastructure is open source either, because it's needed to maintain their competitive advantage to train models and publish research papers. GPT-3 being offered as a paid API to a select number of people is latest joke in a long series of other jokes. All of this would be fine, if it was not for the name and branding of being a transparent and good-willed nonprofit company. It is just misleading and that rubs many people the wrong way, as if the whole "open" thing was just a PR stunt. HuggingFace [0] these days is pretty much what OpenAI should have been, but only time will tell what happens. [0] https://huggingface.co/ https://huggingface.co/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/discussion_openai_should_now_change_their_name_to/egl03jv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/dis... [2] https://github.com/openai/roboschool/issues/159 https://github.com/openai/roboschool/issues/159

hsikka 6y ago
A bunch of fellow researchers and I started Manifold Computing (https://manifoldcomputing.com https://manifoldcomputing.com), were we’re hoping to do live, open source research and build open source tools. As you said, time will tell but I hope we can do good work this way.
screye 6y ago
Hugging face and the Spacy team have done some incredible work. Huge fan of both for my NLP projects.
- ChefboyOG 6y ago
  I think this illustrates just how complex the topic is, though. Hugging Face is awesome, and Transformers has done so much to democratize NLP, but does it exists without labs like OpenAI releasing models like GPT-2? The ecosystem is still young and fluid, and as a result, it's super complex. I completely understand the critique of what OpenAI is now vs. what they positioned themselves as early on, but I think it is also a symptom of all the open questions around how ML research is to be done in a way that maximizes community benefit while remaining sustainable.
  - jayparth 6y ago
    Hugging Face is also a for-profit startup. I wonder how betrayed this guy is going to feel betrayed when they launch a paid service...
    - manquer 6y ago
      Open doesn’t mean free. Plenty of for profit open source companies are making good money . Redis gitlab, elastic, sentry, docker, mongo Etc Open source has very specific definitions OSI has a good process to determine whether a project meets them. I doubt openAI can meet them
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Are they doing any notable research at all?
steev 6y ago
I don't see how this is a nuanced perspective - it seems to restate the same complaints/arguments just about every comment makes in these discussions. A nuanced perspective would look at the arguments as to why OpenAI is doing the things they are doing. For example: * OpenAI publishes in closed journals (actually conference proceedings) because that is where all the cutting edge research is published and reviewed. I cannot recall an OpenAI paper that wasn't available either via arXiv or their website, despite being published in a closed journal. What is the alternative here? Where should they go for quality peer-review? Yes you can argue the peer review at top conferences is not quality, but is worse quality than no peer-review or peer review from open-access no-name journals? * How does OpenAI make money? How much are they bringing in? How much does it cost to support things like the OpenAI Gym, etc.? How much does it cost OpenAI in terms of bandwidth to host pre-trained versions of GPT-3? At some point a company needs to make money and prioritize resources - they can't give everything away for free in perpetuity. I don't think these questions have obvious answers - there is give and take.
- joelg 6y ago
  > At some point a company needs to make money :-/ OpenAI started as a non-profit.
  - eightysixfour 6y ago
    Non-profit does not mean “spends money in perpetuity with no revenue.”
    - golergka 6y ago
      Yes, that's what vc-based startups are for.
    - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
      that's not what happened with OpenAI though. They're not a non-profit anymore, they changed to a "controlled profit" (lol) model. I didn't know this was even possible/legal. Start as a non-profit for all the tax advantages and convert to for-profit once you've got a saleable product? Maybe startups should start doing this
throwaway7281 6y ago
As soon as I learned that Sam Altman is involved, I could infer the direction. I cannot recall Sam being activist for anything open - but I do remember him as a the "head of the startup world", aka creating exclusive opportunities for venture capitalist by using and tearing bright eyed talent. I think he was pretty successful at the latter. The sad thing is: OpenAI might be just the foreshadow of the power step function segment of the future, disenfranchising those who are on the wrong side of the API much more that we see today (e.g. somewhat limited to the gig economy).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
evc123 6y ago
What is the business model of HuggingFace?

hsikka 6y ago

A bunch of fellow researchers and I started Manifold Computing (https://manifoldcomputing.com https://manifoldcomputing.com), were we’re hoping to do live, open source research and build open source tools. As you said, time will tell but I hope we can do good work this way.

screye 6y ago

Hugging face and the Spacy team have done some incredible work. Huge fan of both for my NLP projects.

ChefboyOG 6y ago
I think this illustrates just how complex the topic is, though. Hugging Face is awesome, and Transformers has done so much to democratize NLP, but does it exists without labs like OpenAI releasing models like GPT-2? The ecosystem is still young and fluid, and as a result, it's super complex. I completely understand the critique of what OpenAI is now vs. what they positioned themselves as early on, but I think it is also a symptom of all the open questions around how ML research is to be done in a way that maximizes community benefit while remaining sustainable.
- jayparth 6y ago
  Hugging Face is also a for-profit startup. I wonder how betrayed this guy is going to feel betrayed when they launch a paid service...
  - manquer 6y ago
    Open doesn’t mean free. Plenty of for profit open source companies are making good money . Redis gitlab, elastic, sentry, docker, mongo Etc Open source has very specific definitions OSI has a good process to determine whether a project meets them. I doubt openAI can meet them
lostmsu 6y ago
Are they doing any notable research at all?

steev 6y ago

I don't see how this is a nuanced perspective - it seems to restate the same complaints/arguments just about every comment makes in these discussions. A nuanced perspective would look at the arguments as to why OpenAI is doing the things they are doing. For example: * OpenAI publishes in closed journals (actually conference proceedings) because that is where all the cutting edge research is published and reviewed. I cannot recall an OpenAI paper that wasn't available either via arXiv or their website, despite being published in a closed journal. What is the alternative here? Where should they go for quality peer-review? Yes you can argue the peer review at top conferences is not quality, but is worse quality than no peer-review or peer review from open-access no-name journals? * How does OpenAI make money? How much are they bringing in? How much does it cost to support things like the OpenAI Gym, etc.? How much does it cost OpenAI in terms of bandwidth to host pre-trained versions of GPT-3? At some point a company needs to make money and prioritize resources - they can't give everything away for free in perpetuity. I don't think these questions have obvious answers - there is give and take.

joelg 6y ago
> At some point a company needs to make money :-/ OpenAI started as a non-profit.
- eightysixfour 6y ago
  Non-profit does not mean “spends money in perpetuity with no revenue.”
  - golergka 6y ago
    Yes, that's what vc-based startups are for.
  - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
    that's not what happened with OpenAI though. They're not a non-profit anymore, they changed to a "controlled profit" (lol) model. I didn't know this was even possible/legal. Start as a non-profit for all the tax advantages and convert to for-profit once you've got a saleable product? Maybe startups should start doing this

throwaway7281 6y ago

As soon as I learned that Sam Altman is involved, I could infer the direction. I cannot recall Sam being activist for anything open - but I do remember him as a the "head of the startup world", aka creating exclusive opportunities for venture capitalist by using and tearing bright eyed talent. I think he was pretty successful at the latter. The sad thing is: OpenAI might be just the foreshadow of the power step function segment of the future, disenfranchising those who are on the wrong side of the API much more that we see today (e.g. somewhat limited to the gig economy).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

evc123 6y ago

What is the business model of HuggingFace?