There will always be models and research that require proprietary hardware and resources and thus cannot be “democratized.” PageRank required a ton of hardware

There will always be models and research that require proprietary hardware and resources and thus cannot be “democratized.” PageRank required a ton of hardware and an index. Non-industry researchers will always be priced out of something. A key concern here with regards to the ethics-of-AI issue is that last year OpenAI refused to release GPT-2 because it was too ‘dangerous’. This year, GPT-3 is suddenly a revenue-generating Microsoft product. The Gradient article linked is one of the more diplomatic ways of calling BS on OpenAI’s strategy. Financial interests taint research in subtle ways, it has for decades, and OpenAI employees being paid $1m in cash salary need reminders of this fact. https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/ https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/