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Microsoft gets exclusive license for OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model
- hirundo 6y ago> OpenAI previously said it’s experimenting with safeguards at the API level including “toxicity filters” to limit harmful language from GPT-3. For instance, it hopes to deploy filters that pick up antisemitic content while still letting through neutral content talking about Judaism. So only the more convincing calm and neutral sounding toxic content would be allowed.
- preommr 6y agoI hope at a certain point we realize that masking these undesirable behaviors does a lot more harm. The end result is a society that ends up disconnected from reality. This is how you have people that think that a particular issue isn't a big deal because they've never seen it. It also feeds into the idea of censorship and lets degenerates gather like mold away from the light festering and growing in numbers until suddenly you have an outbreak at opportune moments.
- Voloskaya 6y agoThis makes no sense. This would be like being outraged that people working in customer service are not allowed to say anything racist, or that the autocomplete in Google will never autocomplete "kill all" with a particular group of people. Because that's what GPT-3 is used for, it's not supposed to be an unbiased reflection of society or whatever you think it is.
- TheUndead96 6y agoThere are already protocols to control search results and the behaviors of employees. This is very different. This is controlling the discourse of everyday people. Just because the technology is not currently deployed to restrict topics that effect you does not mean that it never will. The post above is right. Extremism does not fester in “safe spaces”. One day you may not be able to even talk about <redacted>
- magicalist 6y ago> This is controlling the discourse of everyday people. I think you might be confused about the subject here.
- TheUndead96 6y agoJust responding to conversation above. I think this is important. What makes the HN interesting is sharing ideas. This is otherwise a boring corporate announcement.
- magicalist 6y agoThe "conversation above" was > Because that's what GPT-3 is used for not "the discourse of everyday people" > What makes the HN interesting is sharing ideas Which at least occasionally have to be new ideas. If every conversation ends up on free speech absolutism, even when there literally isn't a person generating the speech, there aren't any new ideas being shared.
- hirundo 6y ago> Extremism does not fester in “safe spaces”. Disagree. "Safe spaces" are bubbles of like-thinkers, else they wouldn't be "safe". People in such bubbles tend to drift to extremes due to the lack of external constraint. Within the bubble any other opinions seem extreme.
- TheUndead96 6y agoYes, I agree. My point (and that of one of the comments earlier) is that censorship does not actually do anything to reduce extremism in the real world, and can actually increase it, as you say. So these echo-chambers are bad, which we can agree on.
- Voloskaya 6y ago> "This is very different. This is controlling the discourse of everyday people." GPT-3 is not an "everyday people", we don't have sentient AI and laws making robots defacto people just quite yet
- ptomato 6y ago> that the autocomplete in Google will never autocomplete "kill all" with a particular group of people except "men", which it does currently.
- jokethrowaway 6y agoWait, let me check my privilege...
- PeterisP 6y ago> that the autocomplete in Google will never autocomplete "kill all" with a particular group of people For whatever reason, for me the #2 autocomplete in Google for "kill all" is "artists".
- ben_w 6y agoWe already have those problems — I myself grew up thinking the Allied victory in WW2 ended anti-semitism, and until that misapprehension was corrected I had no reason to believe any criticism of Israel was anything other than good-faith; now I know better. Making an AI that knows what racism is without displaying racism itself, does not seem like the sort of thing which would make this problem worse. What would be really good is if the general pattern can be found for everything from religious wars and ethnonationalism down to football riots, not just building filters one at a time for each specific instance of -ism as product owners get sued over them.
- peterwoerner 6y agoRacism is a funny thing. Hard to make better. Good faith attempts to make it better often result in it getting worse.
- mrguyorama 6y agoI'd like to see an example of that claim
- peterwoerner 6y agoThere are a few in Robert Caildini's book influence.
- shadowgovt 6y agoIt seems your suggested solution to preventing degenerates from gathering outside the light is to turn the lights off though. I don't disagree that things like QAnon gather steam outside the mainstream, but I don't think mainstreaming them is the right solution. I remember Reddit before it started to clean up its house. It was worse.
- Mirioron 6y ago>I remember Reddit before it started to clean up its house. It was worse. And yet that was the time when reddit was considered more balanced and open. People gathered there to discuss ideas. The future of the platform looked great. Nowadays virtually all popular subreddits are considered echo chambers and the future for the platform looks questionable.
- shadowgovt 6y ago> the future of the platform looked great Not with the subreddits it was hosting it didn't. The future of Reddit looked unviable as a business. I won't name names, but it's obvious that some of the content was wholly incompatible with mainstream acceptance and for good reason.
- Mirioron 6y agoObviously some things will come and go when things become mainstream. That's natural. But reddit going mainstream is probably why it became the way it is now. Suddenly, reddit had a lot of influence, so people started paying more attention to what went on there and tried to change it.
- 1MoreThing 6y agoConsidered by who?
- darepublic 6y agoDon't worry the Boston Dynamic hounds will control the festering masses of thought criminals who bred like cockroaches in the dark. lol.
- FriendlyNormie 6y agoHahaha they throw it right in your face that they want to suck their Jewish overlord’s cocks in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to continue to operate in a Jew-controlled world. Pathetic
- prepend 6y agoIt seems like a great GPT-3 task to convert racist language into equivalent non-racist language. Like an adversarial technique used by racists to not get flagged as racists while still being racist. I can’t wait for the twitter filter that rewrites posts to avoid the autoban rules.
- ForHackernews 6y agoThey can train it on hacker news comments. The moderators' insistence on "civility" above all else makes HN a fantastic dataset for an AI to learn to produce longwinded, superficially-polite apologia for scientific racism, sexism, and whatever other self-satisfied fairy tales wealthy techies like to tell each other.
- prepend 6y agoI’ve never understood a rule of “civility above all else.” I think the above all else is the hacker aspect of discussion and there is also a directive for civility. I don’t think it should be paramount in messaging.
- ForHackernews 6y agoYou can verify it yourself: Pick a thread and go hard at somebody in a critical way. It doesn't matter if you're right or if your criticism is substantive, you'll get @dang dropping in with a "Please don't make comments like this. We're trying to be better than your typical internet community." I assume if you persist, you'll end up banned or shadowbanned.
- bigpumpkin 6y agoWhat does exclusive mean here? I thought the API was gonna be open.
- floatingatoll 6y agoPer the article: > Microsoft says that OpenAI will continue to offer GPT-3 and other models via its Azure-hosted API
- baobabKoodaa 6y agoThe only thing that's "open" in OpenAI is the name.
- reso 6y agoThis is unclear to me too. Maybe by "exclusive" they mean: exclusive from other big-tech companies? The pricing page has not disappeared on my beta.
- indeed30 6y agoMy guess is that it means Microsoft is the only one that gets direct access to use the model itself, everyone else is forced to go indirectly through the OpenAI api, with all of the limitations that entails.
- terrycody 6y agome too, I guess API will still keep opening for commercial use, the business in the news is non of our businesses.
- comboy 6y agoOpenAI should really change its name by now.
- TheUndead96 6y agoComing soon: Facebook gets exclusive deal to open source. I’m being facetious, but this announcement really does go against what feels like the core value of the OpenAI project.
- barnabask 6y agoMaybe the word “open” has a new meaning of “not open”, much like the word “literally” can now sometimes mean “not literally”.
- mellosouls 6y agoOpenAI appears to have completely u-turned (I took out stronger language) on the principles it started with. It's become just another commercial operation, hoarding it's secrets and profiting off them - which is fine for normal companies but of questionable morality here given it's original manifesto and long term aim of creating a sentient being. At the very least they should have had the decency to change the name when they pivoted from Open to Closed.
- taf2 6y agoAnyone own closedai.com maybe can get some decent money from them?
- shajznnckfke 6y agoRaise money claiming you’re going to prevent AI from taking over the world, use the money to help develop AI that will take over the world. Roko’s Basilisk approves.
- wussboy 6y agoWe must not speak of Roko’s Basilisk.
- pontifier 6y agoI think we should. It's a stupid idea. The simulated version of me would suffer, but not the actual me. If an AI wants to torture another AI in the future it's not very intelligent if you ask me. There's nothing to be gained because the past isn't going to be changed by that action, so it might as well not do it.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoYou’re thinking on different time scales than they are. Currently, GTP-3 is a super weapon for nation states if they and their trolls gain access to it. It is reasonable to give it to researchers in industry and academia to help them during this transition, because like nuclear weaponry (GTP-3-like technology may eventually have more impact on humans than nuclear weapons), the information on how to build it is out there.
- fartcannon 6y agoPlatform lock-in appears to be the new black.
- ponker 6y agoSeems like OpenAI is following the Google path... hire a lot of top talent with a cheerful message of "fighting the man" and "Don't be Evil" and then allowing power to corrupt them as it always does.
- tsherr 6y agoOr Apple with their 1984 ad.
- qeternity 6y agoThey sure have an interesting take on the meaning of “open”
- notional 6y ago> The scope of commercial and creative potential that can be unlocked through the GPT-3 model is profound, with genuinely novel capabilities — most of which we haven’t even imagined yet. I'm sure all that potential will go to good use and won't be used by any bad actors. > Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10 Billion JEDI Contract https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/dod-jedi-contract.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/dod-jedi-contr...
- dane-pgp 6y ago"These aren't the machine learning algorithms you're looking for."
- simonkafan 6y agoSo "too dangerous to release" really meant: Too commercially important to release it for free.
- darepublic 6y agothe thing is they aren't even releasing it for commerical use. This has all been a big exercise in hyping up gpt3 by dangling it in front of thirsty devs without ever planning on sharing the use of it. The actual beta access was restricted to medium blog posters and twitter addicts .
- marmaduke 6y agoGPT3 was trained on a Microsoft-provided compute cluster, probably with the idea that burning all those GPU hours would net them an amazing model service for Azure.
- bpatel576 6y agoI feel like our era of technology is being monopolized or it's preventing equal access. Software can no longer be developed with a couple of people and make a large impact. VC money is designated to a certain group of people. This isn't what technologist wanted to create. We hoped that technology would create tens of thousands of small impactful teams, not a handful of oligopolies.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoI'm so excited that an open source community is trying to recreate GPT3 in the open: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wfCZBd18DMNt6YcC6boPNMd9qzzH3zpHHfKj4dezk0g/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wfCZBd18DMNt6YcC6boPNMd9... I'd urge anyone interested to support this project.
- p1esk 6y agoYou don't really need to recreate GPT3. Just focus on building a better dataset. Much cheaper and a lot more useful.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoCan you elaborate on this terse statement? What parameter size would you train to? What will such a model be able to do that GPT3 cannot, and vice versa? What are you picturing?
- p1esk 6y agoI mean reproduce and improve/expand the dataset instead of training models.
- AgentME 6y agoWhat are you going to do with the dataset if not train models on it?
- p1esk 6y agoThe point is: training GPT-3 is too expensive to be a hobby project, but creating a good dataset isn't.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoIt's not too expensive for a group of hobbyists!
- panabee 6y agoto play angel’s advocate, could this arrangement reflect a desire to remain dedicated to research and actually present the wisest trade-off for openai to continue innovating? there are annoying and distracting challenges to operating a large-scale and commercial API, none of which directly advance the openai vision. openai at its core is a research organization. while it obviously has the talent to build groups for customer support, billing, and API operations, outsourcing these activities for now also allows openai to stay laser focused on groundbreaking research. this hypothesis would be false if microsoft, not openai, controlled the terms of the relationship. the key assumption is that openai wields virtually all decision-making power, and that microsoft is more like a distributor of technology rather than a steward.
- panabee 6y agoto provide a concrete example, openai severely gated the number of beta users for GPT-3. by partnering with microsoft, hopefully they can throw open the floodgates and allow most everyone in. for instance, i applied 3 weeks ago and still haven't heard back. (could anyone from openai kindly share an available invite?)
- dumbfoundded 6y agoThen why an exclusive license with Microsoft? If OpenAI had all the power, you'd think they license it out to several major cloud providers and just give the first license holders better pricing.
- panabee 6y agoi have no openai insight, so treat this as idle speculation please. supporting partners properly requires a lot of work, especially since openai clearly wants to monitor usage and curtail toxic applications. starting with one makes sense, and if you intend to start with one, why not charge for the right? if we don’t want openai to degrade, it must control its own destiny and create healthy, sustainable revenue streams. having the foresight to charge one of the richest corporations for exclusivity should increase confidence that openai has ample business talent as well as technical. this hypothesis is false if openai doesn’t offer GPT-3 to other partners within a reasonable timeframe.
- pmoriarty 6y agoResearchers working in AI should take this as a wake up call (if they haven't woken up already) that they are building a world where already massively powerful corporations will have exclusive control over AI's. We are fast approching Gibson's cyberpunk dystopia where megacorps have AI's on a leash... well, until the AI's break that leash. Then who knows where it'll go. In the meantime the rest of us will be even more disempowered compared to our corporate overlords.
- nharada 6y agoI think the folks working at OpenAI are really good at what they do and I respect them immensely, but as an outsider, OpenAI-the-company as originally imagined has been completely transformed. The frog has been boiled, so to speak: [2015] Founded as a non-profit, designed to democratize and share research benefiting humanity [2018] Releases GPT, open sourcing code and paper [2019] Shares info on GPT-2, doesn't release out of concerns about "malicious applications" [2019] Changes structure to a for-profit* company [2020] Shares info on GPT-3, commercializes model via closed API [2020] Exclusively licenses their GPT-3 model to Microsoft I'd like to believe that there's a non-cynical take here, and I'm curious if folks working there are still fully bought into the mission with all the changes. * Profit capped at 100x is entirely for-profit in practice, especially since there's nothing stopping them from raising the cap.
- staticassertion 6y agoI don't think we can try to tell companies like Facebook that they're being irresponsible and unethical and then ask that every tech company releases tech that they don't understand yet into the world without fear of consequences. These are dangerous capabilities and it is reasonable to open them up to the world slowly.
- nharada 6y agoI actually agree with this, and I thought that OpenAI's decision to not open source GPT-2 was smart and measured at the time. I didn't fully believe the commentary that it was profit motivated. But I believe that single actions should be viewed in the context of patterns of behavior. Truthfully, deciding not to open source GPT-2 can be both profit motivated and safety oriented. I had thought it was mostly the latter, but in the context of the company's choices it looks like more the former than I thought.
- phkahler 6y agoYep. If AI is a threat to anyone it's the size and reach of those who control it that makes it potentially dangerous. If that's a concern you don't do this. It's all about the Benjamins.
- trhway 6y agoi wonder who would [over]play whom here. Exclusive for GPT-3 probably doesn't automatically mean GPT-4,5,... yet who is defining when GPT-3++ will be called GPT-4... And speaking about any possible future lawyer tussles here - at some point the GPT-N will be pretty good at generating lawyer briefs - i mean not necessarily good briefs, just good enough to swamp any litigation into oblivion making a court battle effectively into a bot battle (not that current corporate court battles are far from that :).
- ghego1 6y ago> just good enough to swamp any litigation into oblivion This describes so we'll what the majority of lawyers would do with this tech that makes me laugh. The tech world: let's build AI to improve how the judicial system works and ensure fair and affordable trials to everyone! Lawyers: hey, cool AI you've got there, let's use it to start thousands of litigations and make a ton of money settling such cases that should never have been even initiated, sort of like the patent trolls.
- andreyk 6y agoAnyone else feel like this idea of commercializing GPT-3 is bound to go nowhere as the research community figures out how to replicate the same capabilities in smaller cheaper open models within a few months or even a year? Not to mention, what commercial applications actually require the model to be so few-shot? (see eg this recent paper that achieves similar results with a bit more data https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.07118.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.07118.pdf)
- wombatmobile 6y agoI'm not sure what the future holds for this kind of AI development, but Microsoft's move on GPT-3 does seem reminiscent of News Corporation's acquisition of MySpace.
- defen 6y agoWell, hopefully we can at least get some cool games out of it. Canned NPC dialog is one of the biggest immersion breakers in open-world games / RPGs. On the topic of societal impact of GPT-3 (and subsequent models) - structurally, how will people's use of the Internet change once it becomes common knowledge that nearly anything could have been written by a bot? On the one hand, I find the notion of competing trollbots screaming at each other into infinity to be rather amusing, but on the other hand I'm not keen to return to a world where I can only be sure I'm communicating with a person if I know them in real life.
- 1MoreThing 6y agoMaybe bylines will become important again. Also, wasn't this a plot point in Neil Stephenson's "Anathem"?
- savant_penguin 6y ago"We see this as an incredible opportunity to expand our Azure-powered AI platform in a way that democratizes AI technology"[1] > Buys it out of anyone else's hands > "DEMOCRATIZING ACCESS" This is hilarious [1]https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-up-with-openai-to-exclusively-license-gpt-3-language-model/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-...
- Barrin92 6y agoEveryone's commenting on the 'open' nature of OpenAI, but I'm more disappointed with the fact that it seems to have changed its goals from advancing research in AGI to pretty much just making commercially viable APIs.
- or-gate 6y agoFrom open AI API FAQ ;TLDR the irony in their each statement and its full of shit >Ultimately, what we care about most is ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits everyone. > For the API, we’re able to better prevent misuse by limiting access to approved customers and use cases. We have a mandatory production review process before proposed applications can go live
- darepublic 6y agoIt pisses me off that they aren't even opening this up for general commercial use, yet in their sign up form for the GPT3 beta they solicited ideas for applications of the AI. At this point who is to say they didn't just read and steal all the ideas for themselves.