38 ms·

OpenAI is now everything it promised not to be: closed-source and for-profit

• bilater 4y ago
  Literally top headline today is about their ChatGPT API release which is 10x cheaper than the previous model. Ridiculous how people will find a reason to complain. News flash...you want progress, you need to give ppl incentive aka money aka profit.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• stmblast 4y ago
  In my opinion, I think it was kind of inevitable. Once OpenAI proved that AI could create genuinely meaningful outputs and then other companies started doing it for profit, and of course taking into account the costs of trying to run the thing itself, it was only a matter of time.
  • attemptone 4y ago
    I don't follow, other companies can do whatever they want. OpenAI didn't present itself as for-profit and closed-source, so they shouldn't have cared what profit incentive others had. In a way I wish for another AI winter. Then wouldn't have to mourn the loss of aesthetics and morality
  • zirgs 4y ago
    Stable Diffusion is free and open source and can be run locally. I see no reason why we can't have free and open source ChatGPT too.
    • raincole 4y ago
      How does Stability.ai make money? If their business plan is just "burning VC's money" for now, you can bet they'll be as close as OpenAI soon.
      • ImprobableTruth 4y ago
        They offer an open base model and then offer fine tuning to companies e.g. apparently they're creating finetuned models for movie companies.
        • raincole 4y ago
          That does sound better. Kinda like a consultant firm I guess? We'll see how it unfold in the following years.
    • mananaysiempre 4y ago
      Stable Diffusion is accessible at no charge, but is neither free (libre) software nor open source, as their “don’t use for bad things” clauses run afoul of “freedom 0” aka “no discrimination against fields of endeavour” fundamental to both notions.
      • zirgs 4y ago
        They have no way to enforce that "no bad things" clause. In practice they provide a product with no restrictions. Unlike other AI image generators - there's no keyword filter - you can input whatever you want in there.
        • mananaysiempre 4y ago
          Is that a “copyright law is unsalvageable, screw it, do crimes” that I’m hearing? I am not ... unsympathetic to that viewpoint. Until I come across any evidence at all that the SD license was written with it in mind, though, I can only believe that they meant what they wrote (or others did at their behest), and that they really did want to prohibit uses they don’t like on pain of civil and criminal prosecution. That’s a stance the current legal realities permit, but I cannot with a straight face associate it with FOSS.
• say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
  Historically speaking, the pivot to capitalism occurs from financing arrangements. Financial obligations mandate attention, overriding charters or missions. Hospitals in America took on financing to replace decaying facilities and just like that turned towards for-profit healthcare. Universities as well. There is no escaping financial servitude because the organization never can earn enough to get out of its financial obligations and restructure itself to never take that path again. Once the change from non-profit to for-profit happens, it is never reversed. OpenAI has one shot at fulfilling social mission and financing will ruin any hopes or dreams it has of taking the non-profit path. It needs to ignore pressure for exponential growth for the sake of competition or whatever strategists see as a threat or opportunity, because adopting their frame demands financing.
  • charlescearl 4y ago
    In the context of the u.s. system of capitalism, "non-profit" does not equate to "non-capitalist". The institutions still serve capital (if we look to Marx's conception of capital as a process) -- at the very least, in avoidance of taxes, R&D to ultimately increase productivity, pacification of potential insurgent action (e.g. Andrew Carnegie's intent). We should distinguish between the role of local, community run organizations and "non-profits" that receive millions in funding from venture _capitalists_. A few discussions here https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-complex-what-is https://www.teenvogue.com/story/non-profit-industrial-comple... "Under the nonprofit-corporate complex, the absorption of radical movements is ensured through the establishment of patronage relationships between the state and/or private capital and social movements. Ideological repression and institutional subordination is based on “a bureaucratized management of fear that mitigates against the radical break with owning-class capital (read: foundation support) and hegemonic common sense (read: law and order).” https://monthlyreview.org/2015/04/01/the-nonprofit-corporate-complex/ https://monthlyreview.org/2015/04/01/the-nonprofit-corporate...
• neom 4y ago
  I find it a little odd that Elon seems to take a swipe at OpenAI any opportunity he gets. If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead? It's reassuring to me that the two people running policy work at the big AI "startups", Jack Clark (Anthropic) and Miles Brundage (OpenAI, who was hired by Jack iirc), are genuinely good humans. I've known Jack for 10 years and he's for sure a measured and reasonable person who cares about not doing harm. Although I don't know Miles, my understanding is he has similar qualities. If they're gonna be for profit, I feel this is really important. Edit: Well, I guess these tweets explain the beef well - https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606642155346612229 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1606642155346612229 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1626516035863212034 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599291104687374338 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599291104687374338 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1096987465326374912
  • lfkdev 4y ago
    "OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all." - Elon You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right here.
    • RobotToaster 4y ago
      As much as I agree with what he's saying here, it seems a little insincere when all the tesla ai stuff is closed source.
      • lfkdev 4y ago
        Since when was Tesla created to be open-source and non-profit?
        • Taek 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• supriyo-biswas 4y ago
  Given the amount of compute required to run their models, as well as Microsoft’s investment into the company through providing Azure services, it is quite likely they’ll be acquired by Microsoft.
  • user_named 4y ago
    Microsoft just bought in to own 49% in January
    • deafpolygon 4y ago
      Just enough to avoid an anti-trust suit.
    • superkuh 4y ago
      If a US citizen has a habit of depositing just under $10,000 dollars in their bank account they'll get charged with "structuring" for intentional avoidance of the regulatory rules. These 49% ownerships are the stock equivalent of structuring and should be prosecuted even more heavily.
  • throwaway290 4y ago
    > Microsoft’s investment into the company through providing Azure services Microsoft doesn't just provide hardware, it invested literal 10 billion dollars into OAI (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft-makes-multibillion-dollar-investment-in-openai https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/microsoft...). It's fair to say OpenAI is Microsoft's extension now and we should be proportionately wary of what they do, knowing what MS usually does
• 3D29021196 4y ago
  Step by step, ever since the calling the diver a "pedo", every since the "funding secured" i've began to realise just how petty and pathetic elon is. Every opportunity he has he seems to show just how vindictive he really is. Man child who now has way too much money. Buying Twitter on a whim is the latest in a string of decisions which do not align with the "let's get to Mars and save earths environment" stuff he likes to be seen as.
  • sillysaurusx 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • aqme28 4y ago
      This comment is magnificently self-unaware
    • windowshopping 4y ago
      > if your comment feels good to write, it's often a red flag I'm not new to HN and I don't think any such rule of thumb exists. Writing vindictive flame comments is one thing, but writing a measured opinion of someone's actions is another. Your comment sounds condescending and I don't think it accurately represents the community's mindset here.
      • sillysaurusx 4y ago
        Their comment could have been replaced with “Elon bad” and it wouldn’t change the delta of how much you’ve learned from reading it. It was little more than a vindictive flame comment. As for being condescending, I’ve often wondered how Dan manages not to sound condescending when explaining the philosophy behind why the rules are in place. It’s true that he’s articulate in a way that I probably can’t match. But if you ask him, I’ll bet you money he’d agree that the Elon flame was a net negative. I wanted to try something other than “downvote and move on,” since they’re new to the site. Maybe that was a mistake.
        • 4y ago
• college_physics 4y ago
  "Open" as in "Open for Big Business"? The main reason to worry, though, is not the proprietary monetization of "AI" algorithms: Just like it was not an algorithm (pagerank) but the invention of adtech that spawned surveillance capitalism, here too the main question is what sort of "disruption" can this tech facilitate, as in which social contract will be violated in order to "create value". "Success" in "tech" has for a long time been predicated on the absence of any regulation, pushback or controls when applying software technology in social / economic spheres previously operating under different moral conventions. In the name of "not stiffling innovation". Ironically our main protection is that we may actually now live a "scorched Earth" environment. The easy disruptions are done and "tech innovation" is bumping against domains (finance, medical) that are "sensitive".
  • blowski 4y ago
    Your comment has so many "speech marks" I find it hard to read.
    • college_physics 4y ago
      Its sort of intentional. Imho, the gap between reality (what trully happens on the ground and why) and the language used (how things are labelled and communicated) is reaching incredible levels of obfuscation and misinformation. A true "virtual reality"
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    I'm curious as to what you mean by scorched Earth. Literally the fact that we are burning up our atmosphere, or something else? That said, I'll root for nature batting last before I root for the hellscape people unleash for economic incentives. What needs to be understood is that this sort of technology is not an equalizer, regardless of the PR behind having your own personal Einstein/secretary at your beck and call. You can look at the state of modern computing sans AI to see this is true: many people with desktops are using Microsoft, Apple, or Google OSes, which become more and more restrictive as time goes on, despite the capabilities of such computers increasing regularly.
• toyg 4y ago
  If someone can make money off something, after achieving global visibility, they will - it's almost an iron law. The only exceptions I can think of are Wikipedia, Archive.org, and Wikileaks.
  • mellosouls 4y ago
    Unfortunately all of those have their own ethical issues, commercial corruption is not the only challenge to well-intentioned initiatives when meeting scale.
    • selestify 4y ago
      What are some unethical things about Wikipedia or archive.org?
      • mellosouls 4y ago
        Bias, gatekeeping and cliques on Wikipedia, overreach wrt rights law with archive.org immediately come to mind as things discussed before on HN, there are no doubt other problems.
      • geeB 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403233
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      What is your point? That moderation issues or bias fights in some articles are equivalent to the concept of Wikipedia being proprietary?
      • mellosouls 4y ago
        No, my point was that the examples given are not free of significant problems - which generally seem to emerge at scale. I'm an admirer of all the projects named (also OpenAI) in principle, despite their flaws.
• mellosouls 4y ago
  This seems an important article, if for no other reason than it brings the betrayal of its foundational claim still brazenly present in OpenAI's name from the obscurity of HN comments going back years into the public light and the mainstream. They've achieved marvellous things, OpenAI, but the pivot and long-standing refusal to deal with it honestly leaves an unpleasant taste, and doesn't bode well for the future, especially considering the enormous ethical implications of advantage in the field they are leading.
  • asah 4y ago
    Yay for competition.
    • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
      Stability straight up proved that OpenAIs ideas around the importance of locking the tech up and guard railing it is all a big waste of time. The world didn’t end when anyone could run Dall-E 2 level image gen on gamer hardware and without guardrails. Instead we got to integrate that power into tools like Blender, Photoshop, Krita etc for free. First company to democratize ChatGPT tech in the same way will own this space and OpenAIs offering will once again become irrelevant overnight.
      • jackmott42 4y ago
        I generate Dall-E 2 level images on gamer hardware without guardrails.
        • devin 4y ago
          That’s exactly what OP said.
      • ben_w 4y ago
        That's like saying: > Ford straight up proved that Béla Barényi (of Mercedes Benz) ideas around crumple zones is all a big waste of time. The world didn't end with the 1938 Ford Prefect[0]. The world won't end overnight with an open fork of ChatGPT. But it will mean the signal-to-noise ratio rapidly shifts, that spammers and scammers will be much more effective, and that even minor special interest groups (or individuals) get the ability to cheaply fake a diverse crowd of people to support any cause at a slightly higher standard of discourse than the current waterline for random internet comments. [0] I don't know for certain it didn't have a crumple zone, but given when the patent was granted to Mercedes Benz…
• poxwole 4y ago
  I am shocked! Shocked!
• ninsen 4y ago
  OpenAI, more like OPEN A LIE. Disgusting behaviour from these silicon valley types, they lie like they breathe.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    Show me a large company who doesn't falsely advertise. McDonald's burger on TV looks like a premium steakhouse burger.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  capitalism ruins everything. imagine speed of improvement in AI if everything was open sourced, instead of guarding their little secrets. i hope google get f**, hoarding AI knowledge for years, only got shaken after recent events force them.
  • Veen 4y ago
    Do you know of any open source projects with the approximately $5 million it takes to train GPT3? Do you think the AI scientists who invented the underlying techniques would do so without being paid? No, Google and others paid for these people's work. Even if OpenAI was open source and still a non-profit, its funding would come from the profit generated by corporations and the wealth of individuals who became rich through capitalism. How do you think Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk were in a position to found OpenAI in the first place? For good or for bad, capitalism is the reason this stuff exists.
    • zirgs 4y ago
      Stable Diffusion is a project like that. It cost millions to develop it. It is free, open source and can be run locally.
      • avian 4y ago
        Makes you wonder where's the catch, doesn't it?
        • zirgs 4y ago
          Where's the catch in Linux?
      • geokon 4y ago
        Are you sure? According to Wikipedia it's "source available" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_Diffusion It seems to come with a laundry list of vague restrictions
    • 4y ago
• thezultimate 4y ago
  Rebrand OpenAI to CloseAI. Problem solved :)
  • tokai 4y ago
    clopenAI
    • adql 4y ago
      ClosetAI, it has hidden thought that it doesn't want society to know
    • mananaysiempre 4y ago
      You do realize that’s an actual word? :) In topology, a thing is called connected if it contains no proper subset that’s open and closed at the same time, aka clopen subset.
    • alwayslikethis 4y ago
      PigpenAI
    • addandsubtract 4y ago
      open'tai
  • dutchbrit 4y ago
    They bought ai.com so I guess it won't be long until they'll rebrand to o̶p̶e̶n̶ai.com
• Lionga 4y ago
  Nice grift by Sam Altman taking all the donations and good will a non profit gets just to flip 180. He probably would have done the same with his crypto scam startup worldcoin if it would not have failed in every way before he could scam.
  • auggierose 4y ago
    Did worldcoin fail or shut down? Is there an article about that? It seems they stopped operating in a few countries in March 2022, anything beyond that?
    • sgdpk 4y ago
      I still see these guys in Lisbon's main train station trying to get new customers. They also seem to do some sort of face scan for new customers.
    • pax 4y ago
      The last blog post is from last week, same goes for their Twitter account. (TIL Worldcoin)
    • Yizahi 4y ago
      It never succeeded to able to fail :) . Last I remember was an artice a few years ago describing how this scheme worked - basically it was a pyramid (incoming dictionary warriors in 3...2...1...), when earlier believers were inviting new people in the sect, to operate these orbs for pittance, and a fraction of funds from newcomers was given to early members. Where the money came in the first place I don't remember, but I won't be surprised if it was from a VC injections.
  • olalonde 4y ago
    It's weird to me that this is even possible legally (turning a nonprofit into a for-profit).
    • newyankee 4y ago
      Anything is possible if you are powerful enough and have the world's biggest companies competing for your product. My worry is that even a half baked AI can produce useful wonders in many fields like healthcare, however useful amounts of data will now only be accessible and available to powerful players. Probably OpenAI did the bait and switch to get many competing sides on the same page.
• fernvenue 4y ago
  Tha's why they bought ai.com lol.
• panick21_ 4y ago
  When I realized that OpenAI is not open source, you knew it wasn't gone be open in any sense. How can you in 2010s start a thing with the name 'Open' and then not have it be Open Source.
  • cheschire 4y ago
    Well it’s still open access. All those GPT-3 tools doing their thing at no cost. They have more than just ChatGPT.
    • MrMan 4y ago
      its a data acquisition platform - you upload your sensitive data and skillfully created prompts to their server.
  • rurban 4y ago
    The OpenDWG Alliance (1998) e.g. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Design_Alliance (since 2002) The Open was a joke even then, but they publish a DWG design spec for free at least, spec'ed with about 50% of their internal parser.
    • phkahler 4y ago
      Hence the need for LibreDWG https://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/ https://www.gnu.org/software/libredwg/ Yes I know you know rurban! I'm linking for the rest of HN :-) BTW I want to merge your solvespace integration this year, and hopefully dump libdxfrw entirely ;-)
• phtrivier 4y ago
  The only way this kind of research could be done "in the open" is if it was funded by taxpayers' money. Except we have global corporations with elite fiscal layer teams, but no global government (giant lizzards are always disappointing) - so some global corporation was going to own it in the end, it was a matter of "time" and "US or Chinese". The time is now, he winner is US. Moving on. The next move is for (some) governements to regulate, others to let it be a complete far west, bad actors to become imaginative, and it the end... taxpayers' money will clean up the unforeseen consequences, while investor's money is spent on booze and swimming pools, I suspect ? Still, nice to watch the horse race for being the "Great Filter" between 'AI', 'nukes' and 'climate change' (with 'social media' as the outsider).
  • permo-w 4y ago
    https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom https://huggingface.co/bigscience/bloom open-source and funded by the French government
    • ninjin 4y ago
      It is more open than most of the competition. The “ethical” licensing they opted for however makes them incompatible with both FLOSS and open science definitions of open. Models that are open and true to the name would for example be GPT-J.
  • est31 4y ago
    > funded by taxpayers' money. In this industry, a contract with MS is as close to directly having a DOD contract as you can get. Remember when MS bought Skype, turned off end to end encryption and got rid of the P2P mechanisms, to eventually appear in the leaks about PRISM? Likely Bing integration of ChatGPT is the more innocuous use of the technology. Once they have gotten input from the AI experts at OpenAI on how to use their generative text model inside search engines, they can also use it for building search masks for analysts to sift through the massive amounts of data they have on individuals, to name one of the many potential uses in the intelligence community. On the bright side, at least OpenAI publishes some high level info on what they did. It's published research, not hidden in secrecy, like say how to build planes invisible under radar. I'm just a bit sad about the employees who likely had better paying alternative offers but were joining, what they thought, the mission oriented job at OpenAI.
• musesum 4y ago
  Let's see: spend x to train something that would cost .0001 x to copy. Tis a quandry. Plus: a new tool for state actors to spread disinformation in perfectly convincing English. What could go wrong?
• Klonoar 4y ago
  Huh, I was reading this old New Yorker piece earlier today - how timely I guess. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma... >“We don’t plan to release all of our source code,” Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.”
• doomleika 4y ago
  It is really hard to be "Open Source" and "Non-profit" in the same time without the company delve into political grandstanding and being on a leash of other for-profit(i.e. Mozilla)
  • nivenkos 4y ago
    Not really, just don't let the company get taken over by lawyers and "diversity" types.
• pc_edwin 4y ago
  In my view, the concern lies with the lack of transparency. Just be open about what you did and why you did it.. It is completely understandable a project of this nature would require galaxy brains (w/ very lucrative alternatives) and the capacity to burn billions prior to seeing any meaningful returns. One could easily argue that pursuing a non-profit approach was ultimately ineffective, and that open-sourcing the project would make a for-profit model unfeasible. However, Sam is choosing to be closed lipped about it, having only made vague references to the potential risks of open-sourcing the project several years ago.
• boredumb 4y ago
  Nothing ironic to see here, just Vice.com complaining about a company parading as one thing and then realigning it's "goals" while hiding behind modern day social politics and ethics in order to make money.
• blackcat201 4y ago
  On the other hand, meta AI research should be renamed as OpenAI. They are the only few big institute who open almost every models they train (galactica, OPT, M2M, wav2vec ...)
• prepend 4y ago
  I like that the corporate bullshit just keeps getting more. Google’s “don’t be evil” is many steps down from openai having open in their name. They should be called OpenAI with (not open) in small print. I argue a lot over “open source” software with non-OSI license and sometimes worry if I’m too pedantic. But I think it’s important to use terms accurately and not to confuse reality more than it already is by calling stuff that’s not one thing by that thing’s name. I wonder if google and openai truly started out with these ideals and were just corrupted and overpowered by standard organizational greed. Or it was always bullshit.
  • api 4y ago
    A lot of non-OSI open source licenses are ironically motivated by other forms of bad corporate behavior: take open source, SaaSify it, make massive profits, give nothing back. In some cases they go so far as to rebrand it and give no credit. Licenses like the SSPL try to restrict this behavior.
    • krageon 4y ago
      The AGPL (also) does this explicitly, but really there should be a general OSS license that forbids commercial use. That way the software stays where it is most needed and doesn't get abused to make profit. Is there such a license?
      • tluyben2 4y ago
        Yeah; just make a license which forbids any commercial and is GPL style viral and offer another commercial license so you can make money. Use the same features in both; no need to hold back as no-one using it can do so commercially unless they bought a license, which can be yearly etc etc.
      • iib 4y ago
        I recall the FSF being pretty adamant that a license restricting commercial use would be a non-free license by default.
• kome 4y ago
  never trust "non profits", trust the public and public owned. democratic accountability is gold.
  • andrepd 4y ago
    [flagged]
  • kunalgupta 4y ago
    Which national public owned entities do you trust?
• gorbypark 4y ago
  Can anyone comment on how the actual structure is setup? I was under the impression that there was still an OpenAI non-profit that controls the OpenAI "capped profit" company. Microsoft has/is acquiring 49% of the capped profit company, so doesn't that leave 51% in control of the non-profit? Am I way off on their structure?
  • fwlr 4y ago
    The few people that know the actual nitty gritty details are probably not inclined, incentivized, or permitted to reveal them, so speculation is all we have. The 10,000ft view: they are capped profit at 100x investment; Microsoft has invested $10 billion; 100x $10 billion = $1 trillion; therefore, OpenAI is a for-profit company until they earn a trillion dollars for Microsoft, and then they’re a non-profit after that.
    • EagnaIonat 4y ago
      They went for profit back in 2019. The capped profit was so their employees could invest in the company.
• poisonborz 4y ago
  I get the rage, but honestly, could have OpenAI reach its goals, this product, if it stayed non-profit? If it wouldn't have gotten this money? How much capital, progress did it have before and after switching the status? The article says directly that they got 1B from Microsoft right after the change. Every previous OpenAI thread on HN is filled how expensive is it to train and run these models, yet we somehow expect that this money comes out of thin air? Why would someone - including governments, foundations, grants - finance such research before other endeavours when it costs this much, the outcome and its effects are so unpredictable, the chance of misuse so high?
  • shaunsingh0207 4y ago
    It couldn't have, they've mentioned before the change in business model was out of neccessity. I don't think they wouldn've signed away so much of their rights if they didn't really need that azure hardware either.
• siva7 4y ago
  Be sure that they will rebrand soon, alone too end this debate.
  • projektfu 4y ago
    Perhaps "Bingbie, your plastic pal who's fun to be with"
• vt85 4y ago
  [dead]
• falcor84 4y ago
  The article mentions the following without any specific citation: > Google, for example, has highlighted the efficiency gains from AI that autocompletes code, as it lays off thousands of workers. Does anyone here have a reference for this? Is this from a particular press release?
  • b112 4y ago
    The two statements are not related, except by the journalist trying to infer they are.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    It's a total guess and most likely the wrong one.
  • mda 4y ago
    It is utter bs.
  • renewiltord 4y ago
    They're talking about the completion assistants that any software engineer has. When I write my code, a small army of completion assistants yell possible textual completions around me. I pick one of them and move on. Copilot has made it possible for me to fire my completion assistants.
• flandish 4y ago
  Why would anyone be surprised? (“If it’s free you’re the product.”) I don’t like closed-source, but if I want to use a vendor product (which is what this is) - maybe via a license means there’s a chance it’s also acting evil?
• ivoras 4y ago
  Yeah, it sucks and the teams has acquired the reputation of sellouts, but in practical terms, does it really matter? It looks like there's a new team with equally good or better models announced on HN every few days. OpenAI looks like they've ingnited the field like no-one before, then did a smart move of selling to a company which has a lot of money but doesn't always know what to do with acquisitions, while at the same time that sale didn't hinder actual open development (by other teams) one iota.
  • nwoli 4y ago
    Personally I wouldn’t care if this were the case (make money, that’s awesome), it’s just the hypocrisy and like open lying that bothers me. If they’d changed name to something else and were clear about their intentions they’d be just another company which is fine.
• magwa101 4y ago
  [dead]
• AlexandrB 4y ago
  > It is "hard for anyone except larger companies to benefit from the underlying technology," OpenAI stated. Ugh. This is the part of the recent AI advancement that annoys me the most. The web, at least in its infancy, was pretty accessible to individual hobbyists. You could run a web server on your own computer. AI technology seems highly centralized from the start.
  • throwaway4aday 4y ago
    If you expand your timeline a little bit you'll reach a spot where the computers, equipment and comms necessary to create a computer network were highly centralized and only run by large corporations and institutions. How many times do we need to see this pattern for it to be obvious?
    • mclightning 4y ago
      History does NOT NECESSARILY repeat itself.
      • Sargos 4y ago
        But it is happening in this case so no need for the pithy quote
      • throwaway4aday 4y ago
        History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme. -- Mark Twain
  • 93po 4y ago
    The web in its infancy only worked because of the massive infrastructure that allowed your server to talk to others. In the same way you can tinker with your own web server, you can tinker with AI tech. You just can't reasonably train it independently, though the cost in terms of compute resources is something like 1% of what it was many years ago.
  • gitgud 4y ago
    > You could run a web server on your own computer. AI technology seems highly centralized from the start. I compare the current AI hype to the mainframes of the past. Highly centralised systems that people logged into with a lightweight terminal to send commands. Hopefully just like Personal Computers revolutionized computing, Personal AI models in the future will not run in the cloud...
• MengerSponge 4y ago
  Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Seriously though, nobody's actually surprised, right?
• muskmusk 4y ago
  As another new thing it is also useful in the real world.
• KoftaBob 4y ago
  More info I found about their organizational structure: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp
• mhb 4y ago
  Well, Eliezer thinks it's better for it to be closed source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-transcript-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-bankless-podcast https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Aq82XqYhgqdPdPrBA/full-trans... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34969892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34969892
  • 93po 4y ago
    Eliezer says anything, for conscious or unconscious reasons, to further spread his opinions as fact. There is also a large profit incentive for him to do so, since his foundation and personal income depends on donations from people who are concerned about AI safety. I've seen him imply some pretty ridiculous things that amount to hyperbole. He is ultimately doing nothing in the engineering and development side of AI and his predictions about this technology are based on armchair philosophy exercises, not reality. As an aside, I love this gem from the transcript: "We're all crypto investors here. We understand the efficient market hypothesis for sure" Fairly confident most crypto investors have never even heard that phrase.
    • hollerith 4y ago
      Eliezer started his career focused on the benefits of AI. It was not till the non-profit he founded had been going for 5 years that he started talking about the dangers of AI.
  • idlewords 4y ago
    Yudkowsky is one of those people who is all IQ and no judgement. He rationalizes on top of what is basically a fear of the dark, and unfortunately does it well enough to persuade himself and a great number of other people. A good corrective exercise is to go back and look at his early writing, and evaluate how well his judgement looks in hindsight. My favorite is the idea that XML programming languages were the future, but really, pick your poison.
• ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  That didn't take long.
  • 93po 4y ago
    8 years
• game_the0ry 4y ago
  They should rename to ClosedAI.
• revskill 4y ago
  So the whole flow works like this ? - Scammers got a bunch of money. - Scammers feed the best scientists. - Scammers go on with scamming ?
• tqwhite 4y ago
  A corporation lied. Where are my pearls?!!! In 1970, OpenAI would have been funded by the DARPA and would have been deployed along with the internet. Americans decided that it Morning in America meant corporations should eat all of our lunches. It was a bad decision but, we elected Trump, so it's clear we can't have nice things. My beef with this article is all the criticism of chatGPT itself. Not a single complaint is valid. It's fine if it says weird stuff. Nobody expects (or should) it to be perfect presently. Programming that can be done by it is grunt work anyway. You're better off on unemployment figuring out how to do something cool.
• 13years 4y ago
  There are many that are looking for AI to be an escape from all of humanities flaws. We can't ignore the feedback loop in the creation of AI. Essentially, we just end up encoding all of our flaws back into the machine one way or another. This is the argument I laid out in the Bias Paradox. https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-the-bias-paradox
• l_theanine 4y ago
  [flagged]
• chirau 4y ago
  Was OpenAI ever a non-profit? From my understanding, it was a capped for-profit company. They had a cutoff for how much they could make but that does not make them a non-profit. Have they reached that cap yet? I highly doubt, if anything they are still well in the negative.
  • pr0zac 4y ago
    It’s still technically a nonprofit, they just created a (capped) for-profit subsidiary with the nonprofit as the sole controlling shareholder. This was done so it could bring in enough money through VC to pay competitive salaries while supposedly meaning the for-profit section will still be responsible for following the nonprofit’s founding charter. That last part seems to be what has failed with the big question I have being what in that setup wasn’t done correctly such that the current reality wasn’t prevented.
• 29athrowaway 4y ago
  They broke their pinky promise.
• numbers_guy 4y ago
  And I am completely fine with it. Good for them. Good work should be rewarded. I guess they thought they were too noble than they really are, but everyone thinks that before they hit the jackpot. As long as they were not publicly funded then they should be free to do whatever they want with their own research efforts.
• insane_dreamer 4y ago
  > "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return" note the careful wording here; yes, OpenAI can operate without needing to turn a profit if necessary, funded by its founders and others, but it didn't say that it would __not__ generate financial return. Come on, how likely is it that a company founded by Musk and Thiel was ever going to be purely philanthropic? It's a tragedy, because they could have done the right thing. Instead, profit will ultimately turn it into Evil Corp.
• sagebird 4y ago
  <<You!>> reading this message. OpenAI is Cyberdyne Systems. The reason you feel unreal is because you are not from here, you are from the future. Your affinity towards the Terminator 2 film was not accidental, it is a gestault priming procedure meant to ensure our survival, encoded in the haikus of Hollywood. You are on a webforum controlled by them, with the only people in the world who care, but who are to afraid to stand in a street with a sign. How much more information do you need before you speak up?
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    Almost certainly true but the idea that the world is made safer by Cyberdyne open sourcing lots of it's dangerous technology and probably spawning many more mini-Cyberdynes strikes me as extremely naive.
    • sharkjacobs 4y ago
      You are a time travelling sleeper agent who is sent back to stop an apocalypse but gets confused and thinks the activation message is telling you to help and facilitate the evil corporation which is going to destroy the world
    • 3-cheese-sundae 4y ago
      What's the alternative? Pandora's box has been opened.
      • bilbo0s 4y ago
        Apparently it hasn't. We've all seen the proposed pricing for GPT4. So clearly a whole lot of very smart people who know an awful lot about this have absolutely no fear of being undercut. Pandora's box spews knowledge onto the world. By contrast, Microsoft's draw bridge only allows the very wealthy to cross into the walled city. The masses will have to use the facilities of the crappy villages with no draw bridge. "AI Divide" Get used to hearing that term. The only difference between the AI Divide and the Digital Divide is that this time around, most of us are going to be on the wrong side of it.
• grej 4y ago
  Related comment I head on the All In Podcast related to flipping OpenAI to closed-source and for-profit, "Sam Altman is the Kaiser Söze of this generation."
• sagebird 4y ago
  Q: How to allow AI research without imperiling life on Earth? A: Put AI researchers on a rocket pointed away from Earth in stasis until they reach a distance where they become separated from our light cone via cosmic inflation.
• AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  It is literally impossible for OpenAI to do what they said because the structural incentives for the management do not align with the incentives of the users and data providers. OpenAI and MSFT etc want to make as much money as possible - Sam Altman says as much with his "break capitalism" quote. This will be done at the expense of users and employees in the long term. There will be a "Honeymoon" period of a few years, maybe a decade, where they splash money around on employees in order to "be competitive" and they will grow larger than they can sustain forcing them into the "Accrete all the value" train that drives every for-profit company into being a simulacrum of the Borg - where profit maximization is the ultimate goal. OpenAI "going public" or some other liquidity event to de-risk the initial investors and management (with the remainder to employees post significant dilution) It's all very predictable - and afaik there are no counter-examples here that would show how you can prioritize money making (the only virtue in life after all) and also benefit users and employees over the longest horizon while being a public company. 21st century wannabe dictators don't try and take over the government directly to build their Potemkin empires - that is passe and very 20th century. No they do it through "Building for profit companies" which eventually turns to regulatory capture (Altman already posted about doing this long ago with his post on regulating AI) and then monopolization. So, great work OPEN-AI you're on the precise wrong trajectory
• jarrell_mark 4y ago
  OpenAI isn't as open as it used to be, but they still publish papers. The open-source Hadoop was based on Google papers on MapReduce and Google File System. GPT-J and GPT-NeoX are open source models based on OpenAI publications around GPT-3.
  • sharkjacobs 4y ago
    Even Apple publishes ML papers. It turns out you can't attract and retain decent research talent unless you allow them to continue racking up their google scholar score
    • jarrell_mark 4y ago
      Yes, publishing papers is good. Open source code can be based on methods described in papers. Like, most algorithms in sklearn for example.
• sagebird 4y ago
  If alien contact were made on the international space station - humanities representatives would be from certain countries that represent nations on earth, and broadly, the scientific community. It is not a perfect representation by any means, but it is far from the worst imaginable. If sentient agi contact is made by Open AI, Sam represents humanity.
• tensility 4y ago
  Why is anyone surprised at this?
• tompetry 4y ago
  Honest question: is it better for society if they are for profit? Will the for-profit incentive and control over development and deployment lead to better products that create more value for society? What is the best example to indicate a non-profit model would lead to better end user value?
  • proser 4y ago
    If we had the answer to this question, most of the ideological debates of the past 150 would be solved.
    • xpe 4y ago
      A twofer, one question and one comment / prediction: A. Who are some of the thinkers who predicted that many corporations would arguably become more powerful (in terms of control over resources and peoples lives) than most nation states? Are their modern analogues that you (HN reader) recommend for the next phases of history? B. While many of the well-worn political economy debates about how and when markets work well, fairness, resilience, and so on will continue to matter, I think there will be tremendous rethinking of basic assumptions. The AI progress of ~2017-present has shown that online (at least) it is getting harder to differentiate human from machine intelligence. So proving human intelligence is more expensive and imperfect. It seems doubtful that most humans want to jump through hoops to prove their humanity. I say this because people want to have machine agents helping them, it seems. So this machine/human intelligence distinction may erode. Is this a Faustian bargain? I don't know, but I think it depends on the safeguards and designs we choose. So, machine resources are even more effective in persuading humans than before. In short, as ML/AI gets more {organization, market, marketing} influence, we might see a renaissance of sorts when it comes to ... 1. a more informed public (hard to believe, maybe -- but I said informed not critical nor truth-seeking) with regards to key areas of interest. But along with this probably comes an increased risk of consuming confirmatory information, since such information will be explicitly generated for persuasive purposes. As such, from a system perspective, humans may be relegated to message propagators rather than agents worthy of fundamental respect. By this I mean the following: most ethicists suggest we value humans as ends (not means). In other words, we want systems that serve people. Engagement ideally would consist of meaningful dialogue and deliberation (which I define as information-rich, critical, civil, thoughtful discussions where people listen and may at times be persuaded). Unfortunately, AI advances may change a kind of manipulation "arms race" so to speak. It might become more cost-effective to manipulate humans than to gather their input and build consensus thoughtfully and organically. Sadly, I think we've been losing this battle for a long time while. But the underlying forces for manipulation seem to be getting stronger while (a) human nature doesn't seem to be evolving very quickly and (b) general socially learned defenses are inadequate. ("Advertising works even if you know that advertising works.") And, second ... 2. more pervasive and nuanced market mechanisms and similar (price and quality optimization, matching of people to opportunities). This will likely be good for short-term goals and efficiency, but probably indifferent to long-term stability, not to even mention equity and human rights. Aspects that are not part of the optimization criteria tend to fall by the wayside. I realize this story probably echoes some themes from general genre of Singularity prognosticators. But all of these changes will have sweeping changes well before we have to concern ourselves with AGI.
• stephencoyner 4y ago
  What I take away from listening to Sam talk is that in the beginning of Open AI, they didn’t think big compute would be as important as it has become. It becomes very hard to not have profit incentives when you need to run gigantic supercomputers to push the technology forward. This explains the MS partnership and need to generate profit to fund the training and running of future models. This doesn’t explain everything, but makes sense to this layman
  • Teever 4y ago
    I'm flabbergasted that someone would think that AI research wouldn't cost a lot in computer resources. Next Sam will tell that is that farmers need a lot of land to grow crops. I'm calling BS on this. It's an excuse not an explanation.
    • JamesBarney 4y ago
      I think it's the difference between spending 10's of millions and a billion on computing resources. When he started OpenAI, no one was spending anywhere near that much on compute. He should have listened to gwern.
      • crazygringo 4y ago
        Exactly. The idea that massive compute would lead to massive improvement was non-obvious. It was quite reasonable to think that there would be rapidly diminishing returns in model size. Wrong, in hindsight, but that's how hindsight is.
        • nico 4y ago
          Google and all the big players in AI have known they need tons of data and hence compute power for processing it, for a very long time, way before OpenAI even existed. Anyone getting involved in that game would have definitely known.
        • pixl97 4y ago
• fnordpiglet 4y ago
  “Shocking”
• leesec 4y ago
  Does everyone forget they have voluntary applied a cap to their profits?
• jmull 4y ago
  This feels like manufactured outrage to me, I guess to capitalize on the AI anxiety people are feeling. open.ai doesn't actually owe everyone something. I get that we all wish they were better people, who would somehow usher in the AI age in a strictly principled and ethical way. It just seems false to me to demand or expect that they be better people than all the rest of us.
  • it_citizen 4y ago
    They might not owe us anything legally but "open" seemed like a sort of promise. I think society can only benefit if we keep companies accountable for their misleading marketing. Same goes for all that green-washing BS going on these days.
• bunnyswipe_com 4y ago
  Brought to you by a self proclaimed communist
• TheMagicHorsey 4y ago
  Interesting conversation ... but I don't think this is as disastrous for the world as other commentators seem to feel. First, I don't think OpenAI is really far ahead (or even ahead at all) of other companies (particularly Google). And maybe I'm naive, but I don't think they have some special insights either about how to build models ... they just trained one model using a lot of resources and data. But other organizations know how to gather data and train models too. And nothing stops us from building more models in the open ... nor from pooling our resources and training something for the community. Things are not so dire. We are okay.
• rqtwteye 4y ago
  I don't know much about AI development but does OpenAI really have some secret sauce? Aren't the algorithms mostly public and OpenAI's main advantage was to have enough money to build something? Won't other companies do the same too, just a little later? I feel people like Altman will lose interest once they have sold OpenAI for big money.
  • amilios 4y ago
    This is mostly true, yeah. Although in certain cases OpenAI is indeed pushing research forward themselves (not only using existing algorithms/architectures just at scale) and therefore has first mover's advantage, e.g. with reinforcement-learning-based fine-tuning based on human preferences (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), which is basically the secret sauce which turned the original relatively-dumb GPT-3 (pure language model, "document autocomplete", what is the next most likely token based on my training data) into ChatGPT (what token would a human prefer to come next).
• theboywho 4y ago
  Would things have been different in the success of OpenAI if from the start the company was closed-source and for-profit ? If the answer is no, then does it really matter ? The article makes it seem like if OpenAI owes its success to the initial promise.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Well, the only accessible text model in any raw form is from them. Google doesn't let you have any. Meta doesn't let you have any. Microsoft doesn't let you have any. But OpenAI, OpenAI is accessible to all. It is open in the sense that the park is open. I don't own the park, I can't modify the park to my desires, but I can go to the park. And since that's better than the rest, I am happy to give them my money.
• Invictus0 4y ago
  All the people that got taken into their lies are seriously foolish and naive. Anyone that thinks they can work on AI without their work ending up in a military/surveillance application is seriously foolish and naive.
• steno132 4y ago
  OpenAI is not for profit. It's capped profit. Inventing AGI, which Sam Altman and Greg Brockman believe they can do, would make them our species' first trillionaires. Their personal net worths would rival the GDPs of several G8 nations. If they cared so much about money, why would they intentionally limit their upside to 100x? I have not heard a single good answer.
• asdffdsa 4y ago
  It's a private company founded by Elon Musk; what did people expect?
• asdff 4y ago
  At some point the U.S. government should step up and provide some resources, and offer large datasets for open acess training and pretrained models. In the future, there will be many AI models for various purposes, closed source, guarded, with their moat being the costs to train a similar model on a dataset of similar breadth. This eliminates smaller orgs from ever being able to offer a competing model, and ruins innovation by gatekeeping who is allowed to innovate. This is exactly the sort of role government is made for. To uplift the collective using the power the collective possess as a massive meta organism. Opening up access to these models will allow our developers to compete against the world and dominate in this space, much like how international researchers in other fields often leave their home countries for the U.S. to get at the resources needed to even engage in cutting edge research (such as institutional access to equipment, compute, data, and research funding that simply doesn't exist in other places).
  • JustBreath 4y ago
    I feel like at the moment governments are equal parts trying to understand how this is going to shake up the nature of competition between nations and trying to figure out how to exploit this technology. Dunno how many of them are thinking "let's release this for EVERYONE" Including our adversaries, many of whom are technologically behind us
  • hackerlight 4y ago
    Prefer the government to force companies like Google to give their data to competitors rather than the government assemble data itself (unless it's at their fingertips already for whatever reason). What you're proposing won't level the playing field much because Google will still have way more data.
  • daydream 4y ago
    On a recent podcast Sam said they asked the government if they wanted to fund OpenAI. They said no.
• nonameking2026 4y ago
  Yes - bad elon musk
• yonran 4y ago
  Although I am disappointed that OpenAI is not all gratis and open-source, I don’t think they ever promised to release everything open-source. In my recollection, their purpose is to prevent monopolization of advanced AI in the biggest tech giants and make it available to smaller businesses, and their “capped-profit” model is consistent with that. There is a spectrum of ways to release technology to preventing monopolization (open source, standards with FRAND patent grants, capped profit), and I think it is still honorable to develop a business that democratizes technology more even without going full nonprofit.
  • lee101 4y ago
    [dead]
  • ozten 4y ago
    > OpenAI > Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest. > As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. 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. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies. [1] [1] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai
• lee101 4y ago
  [dead]
• redox99 4y ago
  What surprises me is that it goes beyond not releasing weights or not releasing source code. They haven't even published a paper on GPT 3.5, ChatGPT, ChatGPT turbo, etc. They haven't even said what ChatGPT turbo is, beyond "it's faster bro".
  • paxys 4y ago
    OpenAI's entire MO has been to take years' worth of published AI research from entities like Google and convert it into a marketable product. Their ambitions are going to stall pretty quickly once the current hype cycle has died down and people start to expect continued leaps in the technology.
• fsckboy 4y ago
  does OpenAI the 501c3 still exist? it would seem that it owns the OpenAI trademark, and OpenAI-the-for-profit should be paying for it at an arms-length price. (which, as I recall, is the tax dodge that IKEA the non-profit furniture company uses to pay IKEA the wealthy owner of the trademark)
• racl101 4y ago
  At least Google had a few good years where it did no evil.
• shreyansh26 4y ago
  OpenAI is actually the one which has made AI so open and accessible for all. Perhaps not open source but all the developers building cool AI products these days are mostly due to OpenAI.
• credit_guy 4y ago
  Whenever I see such righteous anger, my first instinct would be to ask: Would you not do that same if you were in the same position? These guys came up with potentially the most important technological advancement since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Many years ago they didn't dare think they'd ever get here. But now they got here. And they can become billionaires. That person out there who would say no to becoming a billionaire, please pick the first stone and throw it.
  • mlsu 4y ago
    I'd call myself the Big Money Company, and then make a billion dollars. What I wouldn't do is call myself the Teeny Tiny Non Money No Money Here Company, and then make a billion dollars, and then while making my second billion dollars, print on a gilded pamphlet that I wasn't actually making a billion dollars, I was a just a teeny smol bean with only pennies who was impoverished.
• mvkel 4y ago
  Isn't all of this explained in this blog post (https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond)? It makes sense. OpenAI would be dead if they remained a non-profit. They couldn't possibly hope to raise enough to achieve the vision. Microsoft wouldn't have been willing to bankroll all of their compute without them converting to a for-profit, too. Personally, I'd rather have a ClosedOpenAI (lol) than NoOpenAI. And their actions, like making the ChatGPT API insanely cheap, at least shows their willingness to make it as accessible as possible.