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You ask "does anyone believe this"? I decided to think about whether I believe OpenAI is "open, academic, capped-profit for a noble reason collective". I'll li

You ask "does anyone believe this"? I decided to think about whether I believe OpenAI is "open, academic, capped-profit for a noble reason collective". I'll list some pros/contras in no particular order: CONTRA: I can't download ChatGPT and run it locally. Why not? Clearly they are hoarding it. PRO: They genuinely overtrain toward responses that the model judges benefit humanity, to the point of failing at the task. I can't think of a specific example but everyone knows what I mean. It is a frustration to users and doesn't help their image. They seem to be overtraining this way out of the goodness of their hearts. PRO: its non-profit or capped-profit structure would let it behave in the way it claims it is behaving. (By contrast, a for-profit public company in some sense has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize value for shareholders rather than benefit for humanity.) PRO: ChatGPT is available for free and Dall-E gives some free credits. CONTRA: Dall-E doesn't give enough free credits. It might have a longer wait time for free users but it shouldn't hard cap them at a certain number of free credits per month. For example perhaps free users could not be subject to any reasonable usage limits (a few hundred images per day should be fine) but could have to wait 1 extra minute for each one. CON: its architecture isn't open, it doesn't share how it trained its models, it doesn't publish its datasets and parameters that would let other companies achieve the same results (reproduce their work and have their own version), its research is closed off and unavailable. CON: the company is not directly applying AI to proactively solving social problems. CON: (debatable) some users who are not sources of revenue have been banned. From experimentong with a chatbot (not any hard legal limits just things like exploring their sexuality with the chatbot. It's just a chatbot, it would make sense to exclude such conversations from further training data or feedback, keep male and female researchers at OpenAI from having to review unsavory conversations, or even warn or at most temporarily ban the user. An account closure is super extreme for natural forms of interaction that don't go near legal limits. It does not seem like an open company. Alternative viewpoint: on the other hand, we keep certain flamebait subjects out of HN. Perhaps having certain subjects banable is necessary for their open mission at a larger level - specifically, users will stop going there for sex since they associate it purely with productivity, similar to how we associate HN with intellectual curiosity, which is a result of very heavy moderation here and without which this place would not exist in its form?) Overall based on the above considerations, I think that OpenAI is not "open" but if it started publishing downloadable models for anyone to run, I would feel differently.

drdaeman 4y ago
It doesn't have to publish the models, but everything necessary to do so (training toolset, code that runs the model itself, etc). I think over 99.999% of people would be totally cool if it'd be "Hey, we ran this on a crazy number of GPUs feeding it half of the Internet and then some, and got a damn fine model you can try on our site. It costed us an arm and leg so we can't just share it with everyone for free. But if you want your own chatbot and have a spare fortune - here's our research and tooling, have fun with it. Oh, and here's what we fed it to prevent it from spewing some hatred, misinformation and other bullshit - a socially responsible thing to do. Good luck."
- logicallee 4y ago
  I'm the opposite, I think they should be able to hold on to the tooling to use it to further develop their processes and have the most up to date version, while releasing past versions. This is similar to what some game companies did that was pretty open. For example Quake was released as open source by Id Software in 1999 after the game's initial release 1996. (And Quake 3 was open sourced in 2005 after the game was originally released in 1999.) I think that is what would maximize the public's benefit. Your suggestion only opens it up to companies with very large dollar budgets - do you think any of them would release their resulting model? So how does the public access any of it? None of the ChatGPT models are ever actually released then and unlike the open sourced Quake example, the public doesn't benefit from access to them. It would be like if Id software just released its tooling for other game companies to copy, but not the actual game.

drdaeman 4y ago

It doesn't have to publish the models, but everything necessary to do so (training toolset, code that runs the model itself, etc). I think over 99.999% of people would be totally cool if it'd be "Hey, we ran this on a crazy number of GPUs feeding it half of the Internet and then some, and got a damn fine model you can try on our site. It costed us an arm and leg so we can't just share it with everyone for free. But if you want your own chatbot and have a spare fortune - here's our research and tooling, have fun with it. Oh, and here's what we fed it to prevent it from spewing some hatred, misinformation and other bullshit - a socially responsible thing to do. Good luck."

logicallee 4y ago
I'm the opposite, I think they should be able to hold on to the tooling to use it to further develop their processes and have the most up to date version, while releasing past versions. This is similar to what some game companies did that was pretty open. For example Quake was released as open source by Id Software in 1999 after the game's initial release 1996. (And Quake 3 was open sourced in 2005 after the game was originally released in 1999.) I think that is what would maximize the public's benefit. Your suggestion only opens it up to companies with very large dollar budgets - do you think any of them would release their resulting model? So how does the public access any of it? None of the ChatGPT models are ever actually released then and unlike the open sourced Quake example, the public doesn't benefit from access to them. It would be like if Id software just released its tooling for other game companies to copy, but not the actual game.