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The "Open" in OpenAI means that they want their customer to open their pockets, it has nothing to do with Open Source, open core or anything like that. The cul

by jVinc 6y ago

The "Open" in OpenAI means that they want their customer to open their pockets, it has nothing to do with Open Source, open core or anything like that. The cultural war of "but they deserve to make money" is misguided. You are free to make money, just don't call your projects open source if for one reason or another you do not want to open up the source of your project. And don't call it open core if you don't want to open up the core of your project. GPT-3 might just be "GPT-2 plus something more", but a proprietary code based forked off of Linux would also just be "Linux plus something more", that doesn't make it open source or open core, because neither the core nor the source is open. That said, I am not against the OpenAI project going forwards with early releases of proprietary offerings, it seems like a fine way to finance their work, and they can still support the open source community. But criticism of the choice is warranted if they keep trying to brand themselves as open.

derefr 6y ago
I would compare GPT-3 to the original Doom. In both cases, the codebase/runtime/client part is open source; while the asset data that creates the experience everyone is familiar with, is proprietary. In both cases, you’re free to create your own asset data to use with their codebase/runtime/client. In both cases, I find it helpful to imagine an alternative world where the “engine” and the “assets” were created by separate companies. In such a world, you could imagine Id.A publishing a standalone open-source “Doom engine”; and then Id.B making a proprietary game called “Doom” using that engine. Similarly, in such a world, you could imagine OpenAI.A publishing a standalone open-source “GPT-3 architecture”; and then OpenAI.B training a proprietary model called “GPT-3” using that architecture. In both cases, that’s exactly what happened; only Id.A and Id.B were both just Id; and OpenAI.A and OpenAI.B were both just OpenAI. And because of that, each company decided to refer to the whole thing they were doing—both the open engine, and the proprietary assets—as a single project with a single name (where if they had been two separate companies, the necessity of securing trademarks would have pushed them to have two separate names for those two things.) People’s moral paranoia in cases like this, comes down to the fact that there’s a name collision that they aren’t noticing. The engine of the original software Doom, and the assets of the original game Doom, are both just called “Doom”; and likewise, the architecture of GPT-3, and one trained model built on that architecture, are both just called “GPT-3.” If you separate them, it’s clear that one is intended to be open-source, while the other is not. But, for whatever reason, the companies involved didn’t separate the concepts, leading to this illegibility of whether “GPT-3” is open-source or not. It’s a meaningless question, because the label “GPT-3” isn’t cleanly pointing to a single concept.

by jVinc 6y ago

derefr 6y ago

I would compare GPT-3 to the original Doom. In both cases, the codebase/runtime/client part is open source; while the asset data that creates the experience everyone is familiar with, is proprietary. In both cases, you’re free to create your own asset data to use with their codebase/runtime/client. In both cases, I find it helpful to imagine an alternative world where the “engine” and the “assets” were created by separate companies. In such a world, you could imagine Id.A publishing a standalone open-source “Doom engine”; and then Id.B making a proprietary game called “Doom” using that engine. Similarly, in such a world, you could imagine OpenAI.A publishing a standalone open-source “GPT-3 architecture”; and then OpenAI.B training a proprietary model called “GPT-3” using that architecture. In both cases, that’s exactly what happened; only Id.A and Id.B were both just Id; and OpenAI.A and OpenAI.B were both just OpenAI. And because of that, each company decided to refer to the whole thing they were doing—both the open engine, and the proprietary assets—as a single project with a single name (where if they had been two separate companies, the necessity of securing trademarks would have pushed them to have two separate names for those two things.) People’s moral paranoia in cases like this, comes down to the fact that there’s a name collision that they aren’t noticing. The engine of the original software Doom, and the assets of the original game Doom, are both just called “Doom”; and likewise, the architecture of GPT-3, and one trained model built on that architecture, are both just called “GPT-3.” If you separate them, it’s clear that one is intended to be open-source, while the other is not. But, for whatever reason, the companies involved didn’t separate the concepts, leading to this illegibility of whether “GPT-3” is open-source or not. It’s a meaningless question, because the label “GPT-3” isn’t cleanly pointing to a single concept.