3 ms·

I hate how OpenAI got a lot of their public name and attention through the original benefactors that started it and their pledge of opening up AI research to th

I hate how OpenAI got a lot of their public name and attention through the original benefactors that started it and their pledge of opening up AI research to the public, and now they are basically the opposite - monetized opaque controlled systems. Really off-putting.

skybrian 5y ago
They do publish papers. I'm not sure they were ever about providing open source implementations? AI safety was their thing.
- colordrops 5y ago
  I could be misremembering but I believe the idea was that AI advancement was going to happen anyway so open it up and put it into the hands of the people instead of a few power brokers who would abuse it.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  It’s a good thing our benefactors at OpenAI are looking out for “AI safety” so we can’t do things like ask a computer to make a graphically violent image or verbally racist string of text.
marvin 5y ago
They just chose a misleading name in the first place. It's pretty obvious that they couldn't properly pursue their core mission as a purely open research organization. The desired end result is too valuable. And if they end up getting close to what they're really after, it's really undesirable to get an arms race where solely OpenAI's contributions are known to everyone.
- T-A 5y ago
  > They just chose a misleading name in the first place. It wasn't just the name, it was the whole rationale they presented for creating OpenAI. Nick Bostrom was having his 15 minutes of fame with "Superintelligence" [1] and scenarios like a an "AI arms race" and the sudden emergence of a super-intelligent singleton [2] were legion. OpenAI was founded on the premise that making leading edge AI research public was the best way to mitigate that risk [3]. It was presented to the world as a "research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest" where "Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world" [4]. That lasted all of three years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang... [2] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Strategy [4] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
  - marvin 5y ago
    I don’t disagree with your summary of the facts; part of the premise of my comment is that I disagree with that stated rationale for starting OpenAI. I rather think that always publicizing the bleeding-edge research would increase the risks. Not sure if this is the main reason OpenAI went less open though, as I’m not an insider.
exo-pla-net 5y ago
Their research remains open: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 Their code/models are indeed closed, but there is no realistic alternative. If they let the public have unrestricted access, deepfakes + child images would appear on Day 1, and OpenAI would get cancelled. For OpenAI to survive, it has to be closed source.
- nightski 5y ago
  In the age of a crisis of reproducible research, publications without data and models aren't really "open". Having read many ML papers very few are reproducible easily.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- learndeeply 5y ago
  No it doesn't. DALL-E 2 is purposely vague on model architecture to make it impossible to reproduce from the paper alone.
- narrator 5y ago
  This is the problem with all advanced technology. It has to have control built in. Think of all the bad things you could do with self-driving cars for example. Imagine we make interstellar travel possible, the amount of energy involved could destroy worlds. It's a very sad thing about the future. In a way, censorship seeks to make the Human AI "safe".
  - Guthur 5y ago
    Then no one should have or is your chosen overlord so benevolent to never use it against their live stock?
- aabhay 5y ago
  How would you explain the dozens of other open source versions of computer vision and language models that didn't generate all those harms, even ones that were trained to recreate the exact models that OpenAI withheld due to those concerns?

skybrian 5y ago

They do publish papers. I'm not sure they were ever about providing open source implementations? AI safety was their thing.

colordrops 5y ago
I could be misremembering but I believe the idea was that AI advancement was going to happen anyway so open it up and put it into the hands of the people instead of a few power brokers who would abuse it.
TechBro8615 5y ago
It’s a good thing our benefactors at OpenAI are looking out for “AI safety” so we can’t do things like ask a computer to make a graphically violent image or verbally racist string of text.

marvin 5y ago

They just chose a misleading name in the first place. It's pretty obvious that they couldn't properly pursue their core mission as a purely open research organization. The desired end result is too valuable. And if they end up getting close to what they're really after, it's really undesirable to get an arms race where solely OpenAI's contributions are known to everyone.

T-A 5y ago
> They just chose a misleading name in the first place. It wasn't just the name, it was the whole rationale they presented for creating OpenAI. Nick Bostrom was having his 15 minutes of fame with "Superintelligence" [1] and scenarios like a an "AI arms race" and the sudden emergence of a super-intelligent singleton [2] were legion. OpenAI was founded on the premise that making leading edge AI research public was the best way to mitigate that risk [3]. It was presented to the world as a "research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest" where "Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world" [4]. That lasted all of three years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang... [2] https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html https://www.nickbostrom.com/fut/singleton.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#Strategy [4] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
- marvin 5y ago
  I don’t disagree with your summary of the facts; part of the premise of my comment is that I disagree with that stated rationale for starting OpenAI. I rather think that always publicizing the bleeding-edge research would increase the risks. Not sure if this is the main reason OpenAI went less open though, as I’m not an insider.

exo-pla-net 5y ago

Their research remains open: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.12092 Their code/models are indeed closed, but there is no realistic alternative. If they let the public have unrestricted access, deepfakes + child images would appear on Day 1, and OpenAI would get cancelled. For OpenAI to survive, it has to be closed source.

nightski 5y ago
In the age of a crisis of reproducible research, publications without data and models aren't really "open". Having read many ML papers very few are reproducible easily.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
learndeeply 5y ago
No it doesn't. DALL-E 2 is purposely vague on model architecture to make it impossible to reproduce from the paper alone.
narrator 5y ago
This is the problem with all advanced technology. It has to have control built in. Think of all the bad things you could do with self-driving cars for example. Imagine we make interstellar travel possible, the amount of energy involved could destroy worlds. It's a very sad thing about the future. In a way, censorship seeks to make the Human AI "safe".
- Guthur 5y ago
  Then no one should have or is your chosen overlord so benevolent to never use it against their live stock?
aabhay 5y ago
How would you explain the dozens of other open source versions of computer vision and language models that didn't generate all those harms, even ones that were trained to recreate the exact models that OpenAI withheld due to those concerns?