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"Open" AI, a charity to benefit us all by pushing and publishing the frontier of scientific knowledge. Nevermind, fuckers, actually it's just to take your jobs

"Open" AI, a charity to benefit us all by pushing and publishing the frontier of scientific knowledge. Nevermind, fuckers, actually it's just to take your jobs and make a few VCs richer. We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama https://github.com/openlm-research/open_llama https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-7b-open-instruct-GGML https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-7b-open-instruct-... https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-13b-open-instruct-GGML https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/open-llama-13b-open-instruct... You can use the above without paying OpenAI. You don't even need a GPU. There are no license issues like with the facebook llama.

BoorishBears 3y ago
Why the vitriol towards OpenAI? If Elon hadn't pulled the rug out from under them after they refused his forceful takeover*, they wouldn't have had to go to Microsoft and they'd still be open. * a takeover which he predicated on the claim that OpenAI was "doomed to fail"
- PostOnce 3y ago
  It's several reasons, first it's the lies and the abuse of a charity, that wouldn't be an issue if they had began as a private company instead of robbing a charity. But secondly, even if they were a private company, it's dishonest and reprehensible to claim to congress that you want to "protect the public" when you really only give a shit about protecting your moat, I'm not happy about that either. I'm also tired of tech oligarchs general tomfuckery in all our daily lives, as I suspect many more people here are. OpenAI is just particularly egregious about it. I also think it's my civic duty to let other developers know that OpenAI does not have, by any stretch of the imagination, a stranglehold on this technology or any secret sauce. That's why they're lying and sweating in front of congress.
  - victor9000 3y ago
    Yeah, they went from v1 to regulatory capture in the span of months
    - echelon 3y ago
      > regulatory capture If this leak is correct, regulatory capture is likely the only moat OpenAI could have hoped for. It would explain why Sam was so absolutely adamant that this tech needed to receive oversight. If correct, every big tech company now has a recipe to build their own GPT-4. I'd expect for the open source efforts to try to duplicate the results as well. LLMs will increase in quality across the board and become fairly interchangeable, leading to thin margins and a race to the bottom. We could be watching $13 billion going up in flames, all of it predicated on a secret as flimsy as the Coca-Cola recipe.
      - fnordpiglet 3y ago
        Just wait until the RLHF class action hits them.
      - cma 3y ago
        $13 billion isn't $13 billion if $N billion of it has to mandatorily be spent on high margin (70%?) Azure services.
      - K0balt 3y ago
        Tbf the coca-cola recipe is a more sustainable trade secret, since the product is “perfected”. GPT4 is a work in progress so a competitor can be objectively better. I’m hoping for open source models to start incorporating some of these ideas.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    Did you actually read my comment or did you have a preplanned diatribe? They didn't start the private company until the person who promised them $1B reneged. That person reneged because they tried to forcefully takeover and were rebuked. They were running out of money and forced to raise funds in a very for-profit way or fold. - Edit: Rate limited because the hivemind has decided that it's unacceptable to insult their leader People keep acting like if it wasn't for OpenAI we'd be in some LLM utopia. The reality is some other big tech giant would reach the current SOTA first and we'd be in the same predicament except with a company with 1000x more machinery to do the things you're complaining about. It's ridiculous the sense of entitlement some people must have to keep insisting that OpenAI should have crawled into a cave and died because some megalomaniac threw a tantrum.
- 93po 3y ago
  This a really interesting spin on reality
  - BoorishBears 3y ago
    I think this commentary was pithier in your head... https://hackernoon.com/how-openai-transitioned-from-a-nonprofit-to-a-$29b-for-profit-company https://hackernoon.com/how-openai-transitioned-from-a-nonpro...
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      A "capped" profit of 100x is absolutely ridiculous. That is not even the slightest attempt to stay in the same ballpark as nonprofit. Blaming any loss of Elon money for that is spin. And he still gave them a hundred million.
      - BoorishBears 3y ago
        Not sure what you're on about, both my comment and the article are about how they went for-profit. They went for-profit because they needed to raise. They raised after Elon reneged a fraction of the way into his promise of $1B. (and not 100MM deep: he silently revised his figures after TC started digging.) It's not complicated but you seem to want to make it complicated.
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        They didn't need to go that far, and they gaslit people about it. Elon is not responsible for either of those. And was their existing money pile actually not enough?
  - valval 3y ago
    If it involves Elon being a bad guy, it is certain to have HNers salivating at the thought.
    - 3y ago
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Every company who promotes and develops AI is morally responsible for the coming disaster that it will bring on us. If I could have one wish it would be that every trace of AI research is destroyed.
  - astrange 3y ago
    I recommend reading comments like this and substituting "a baby" for AI. A baby also can't be aligned and is capable of deciding to destroy the world. It's not gonna do it though.
    - Brometheus 3y ago
      A baby doesn't output propaganda at 6GB/s in computer readable text.
      - blitz_skull 3y ago
        Not with that attitude! /s
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - mdp2021 3y ago
    > develops AI is morally responsible Responsible for an attempt to arrive at the construction of production facilities for a good that seems to be in dire scarcity in today's world: intelligence. If somebody comes and implements "artificial morons", that is actually out of the root that made the field of research necessary.
- courseofaction 3y ago
  It was a massive bait and switch, luckily AI isn't powerful enough to take over the world we'd be done for.
flangola7 3y ago
[flagged]
carabiner 3y ago
We must destroy OpenAI!
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Not sure if you're being sarcastic but I agree. Humans should not have AI research or advanced AI at all. It (a) removes purpose from people, (b) presents a situation that is too alien for human minds to handle, (c) increases the addictiveness of technology and thereby pushes us further into growing the technological system, (d) crosses the "adaptability threshhold", i.e. the point at which the PACE of technological development is so rapid that adaptation of our society to such a pace is NO longer possible. In short, we do not have the maturity to handle AI; we are playing with fire. Every person who contributes anything to AI development is responsible for the disasters that AI will bring, and all AI research should be destroyed.
  - M3L0NM4N 3y ago
    This is such a pessimistic view to take that I cannot even begin to describe how you are wrong.
    - vouaobrasil 3y ago
      I would love to see your rebuttals, especially since I have never seen any strong arguments in favour of AI being a net benefit to society, and I have thought and read about this at lenght. Of course, I always expect downvotes on my posts here since there is a strong tendency towards loving technology here. But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. Before you downvote, please just ask yourself the following: is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? And in response to your reply, humanity is in quite a precarious state now, so isn't it expected that a sober analysis of it is rather pessimistic, especially with regard to hyper-advanced technologies?
      - jackstraw14 3y ago
kyledrake 3y ago
Unfortunately I've found the current OSS models to be vastly inferior to the OpenAI models. Would love to see someone actually get close to what they can do with GPT-3.5/4, except capable of running on commodity GPUs. What's the most impressive open model so far?
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Probably Wizard 30B, they released the training weights at every offset as well.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  In my testing, the chat and instruct-tuned versions of MPT-30B is very close to 3.5 for many tasks, but of course the team who made it got bought up immediately and it’s licensed only for non-commercial use. I’m hoping the open source community runs with the base model in the same way they did with LLaMA.
- Roark66 3y ago
  Have you tried falcon 40b instruct? Also take into account that chatgpt likely has some preprompt and by talking to falcon or other OS models it's all in your hands. Furthermore, Not many people discuss the significance of proper output sampling. I myself used to just test open source models with the greedy decoding only. Who knows if they wouldn't even beat (not at all)OpenAI with some clever output sampling scheme.
  - schappim 3y ago
    Does anyone have a link / instructions on getting Falcon 40b to install on Apple Silicon? Apparently "Hugging Face" have some internal swift code that works (but it has not been released). I'm keen to see how it performs on a maxed out Mac Studio (with all that unified memory available).
    - _ea1k 3y ago
      I thought this too, but it sounds like the performance of the GPU ultimately holds it back. Maybe it is the software, but I have yet to see a test on Mac silicon that performed well.
KronisLV 3y ago
> You can use the above without paying OpenAI. You don't even need a GPU. There are no license issues like with the facebook llama. I actually wrote about getting an LLM chatbot up and running a while ago: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/self-hosting-an-ai-llm-chatbot-without-going-broke https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/self-hosting-an-ai-llm-cha... It's good that the technology and models are both available for free, and you don't even need a GPU for it. However, there are still large memory requirements (if you want output that makes sense) and using CPU does result in somewhat slower performance. There are async use cases where it can make sense, but for something like autocomplete or other near real time situations we're not there yet. Nor is the quality of the models comparable to some of the commercial offerings, at least not yet. So I don't have it in me to blame anyone who forks over the money to a SaaS platform instead of getting a good GPU/RAM and hosting stuff themselves. Here's hoping the more open options keep getting better and more competitive, though!
- antupis 3y ago
  I bet that open models win in the end because porn. There is already very weird and vibrant community creating "waifus" and tinkering with these models.
  - KronisLV 3y ago
    Huh, more power to those folks then, I guess. But I can easily imagine more conventional forms of entertainment, as well. Like a game of D&D that's narrated by the AI, or a text based adventure set in the Mass Effect universe, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer or any other fandom, really. Maybe like those old Choose Your Own Adventure games. I think some companies are also experimenting with characters in video games that get their dialogue from these models - where the developers give the character a persona, provide information about events in the world and let players interact with them, like the Detective Origins demo. Of course, due to the slightly unpredictable nature of these models and their hardware requirements, no idea how viable this will be.
    - mahathu 3y ago
satvikpendem 3y ago
See also, Orca and Falcon models which are also open source. I'm not sure if any frontends support them yet.
charcircuit 3y ago
>There are no license issues like with the facebook llama. OpenLLaMa uses a dataset which does not seem to have gotten propper commercial licensing for the training data. There is potential licensing issues because the copyright situation is not well defended.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  So far as anyone knows, this is not a derivative work, its transformative, and therefore not subject to any licensing requirement. You're right though, that's arguably still up for debate, but I think the precedent of transformative work is pretty well attested.
  - dacryn 3y ago
    is it? Because condensation is literally part of the definition of derivative, and basically the weights are a condensed form of the input data. It's some sort of lossy compression, when looking at it from the right point of view. Summarization and translation are also clearly derivative. The definition of transformative I found: - add something new (context of other books I guess, this one might pass) - with a further purpose or different character (further purpose clearly yes) - do not substitute for the original use of the work (this one I find difficult. In the case of books, probably. In the case of github, it aims to replace quite some aspects of it)
    - PostOnce 3y ago
      is it compression though? It's a model of the way our language works and contains a set of knowledge. If I read 200 physics textbooks, I couldn't recall any of them exactly, but I could write another book... that would contain largely the same knowledge. The same is true of AI, it's not "compression", it's "learning" (by recording statistics about relationships between pieces of information) -- it can't (usually) recreate whole works, it'll make stuff up and alter it and whathaveyou. How much of the sum total of the internet and all books can you compress into an n-gigabyte model? I've got an 8 gigabyte file here that seems remarkably smart, but it can't recite the contents of most books to me, though it knows their famous quotes and some excerpts. The "compression" argument does seem to have some merit, but it also seems thin in the end and, in my opinion, unlikely to hold up in court, but we'll see. I do think a very strong, probably winning argument could be made in court that it is transformative, but that's the nature of this whole debate, we don't know yet with certainty.
pyeri 3y ago
In today's world, "Science equals Capitalism". Or at least Science is allowed to progress and get funded only as long as it serves the interest of Capitalism.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  That's engineering, not science.
  - meroes 3y ago
    The National Science Foundation is the architect behind the whole STEM Pipeline. It’s one in the same
ChildOfChaos 3y ago
You forgot to link where I can buy your tin foil hat at the end.
grondilu 3y ago
> try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. I mean the guy who created GPT-4 literally demanded a ban of any system more powerful than GPT-4.
- wrasee 3y ago
  I don’t understand this. Won’t that hurt their progress on GPT-5?
  - ben_w 3y ago
    The public position (as opposed to the rumour mills) is that they're not working on a 5, and don't intend to at least until they can figure out how to do it safely.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      [or until someone else starts catching up] The same dynamic that incentivized a mass rollout of these unaligned systems will be perfectly sufficient to incentivize mass rollout of stronger, also unaligned systems.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        Yeah, that's one of Yudkowsky's fears. I'm not going to take his fears as gospel, as he's spent so long focussing on his fear there's a danger of availability heuristic/attention biases having him take the worst case for everything. I'm still going to promote caution, as the more potent a tech the greater the downside of being wrong, but it currently looks like we can cooperate with each other in this IRL iterated prisoner's dilemma.
    - namaria 3y ago
      And safely here means non disruptive to established businesses. If they create a tool so powerful that it can replace entire professional classes, that would just mean people can bypass the employers and get their value directly from an API. OpenAI needs to make sure they have a business model where they can charge enterprise fees and provide value to corporations, not directly to people. ChatGPT was merely a publicity stunt. I do believe they got scared of how much value people could derive independently from it tho, hence the "regulate this" pressure.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
>> We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. Just to be clear, there's no science being kept secret because there is no science being done. OpenAI's is a feat of engineering, borne aloft by a huge budget supporting a large team whose expertise lies in tuning neural net systems, and not in doing science. Machine learning, as it is practiced today, is not science. There is no scientific theory behind it and there is no scientific method applied. There are no scientific questions asked, or attempted to be answered. There is no new knowledge produced other than how to tune systems to beat benchmarks. The standard machine learning paper is a bunch of text and arcane-looking formulae around a glorified leaderboard: a little table with competing systems on one side and arbitrarily chosen benchmark datasets on the other side; and all our results in bold so everyone knows we're winning. That's as much doing science as is racing cool-looking sports cars.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  Still, the guys developing ML algorithms like Neural nets, Linear regression, Decision tree, SVM, Naive Bayes, KNN etc., weren't doing science?
  - varispeed 3y ago
    It's like asking whether a carpenter is a scientist because they developed a cabinet...
    - moolcool 3y ago
      I think that you could genuinely make that argument though.
    - DeathArrow 3y ago
      Well, Wikipedia might be wrong, but this is how they describe Computer Science: "Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Though more often considered an academic discipline, computer science is closely related to computer programming." You might argue, though, that Computer Science is not "real" science.
arthur_sav 3y ago
I would love to use these... but they suck. They don't even come close to what OpenAI offers.
- 0xDEF 3y ago
  I think most of HN has only tried ChatGPT with GPT-3.5 in December 2022 when the OpenAI servers were getting hammered. That is why they're impressed by these slow and low quality local models and mistakenly think they're on par with OpenAI's offerings. Honestly even reddit and teenagers on TikTok have a more accurate view on OpenAI vs. local LLMs than HN.
  - baanlox 3y ago
    [dead]
  - blitz_skull 3y ago
    There’s not a single thing out there that even comes close to GPT-4. Not one that I’ve used anyway. Benchmarks be damned, it’s the experience that matters and I’ve yet to have an LLM blow my mind the way GPT-4 does.
    - s3p 3y ago
      Have you used Claude? I regularly use them instead of GPT4 because of the larger context window. 4 is still useful when I want to give instructions to the system (Claude will refuse to do a lot), but generally the responses seem on par with each other.
tudorw 3y ago
Sorry about the link.in style links but I just posted this there and came here and felt it might be interesting to someone, they do work! ... Here's a round up of open source projects focused on allowing you to run your own model's locally ('AI'), they all take slightly different approaches although under the hood many use the same models. https://lnkd.in/exKqJZm8 https://lnkd.in/exKqJZm8 A gradio web UI for running Large Language Models like LLaMA, llama.cpp, GPT-J, Pythia, OPT, and GALACTICA. Its goal is to become the AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui of text generation. https://lnkd.in/etVCmZHB https://lnkd.in/etVCmZHB With OpenLLM, you can run inference with any open-source large-language models, deploy to the cloud or on-premises, and build powerful AI apps. State-of-the-art LLMs: built-in supports a wide range of open-source LLMs and model runtime, including StableLM, Falcon, Dolly, Flan-T5, ChatGLM, StarCoder and more. https://lnkd.in/e7-NKGzJ https://lnkd.in/e7-NKGzJ LocalAI is a drop-in replacement REST API that's compatible with OpenAI API specifications for local inferencing. It allows you to run LLMs (and not only) locally or on-prem with consumer grade hardware, supporting multiple model families that are compatible with the ggml format. Does not require GPU. https://lnkd.in/ef_Sa9AN https://lnkd.in/ef_Sa9AN Multi-platform desktop app to download and run Large Language Models(LLM) locally in your computer https://lnkd.in/e288q-Wb https://lnkd.in/e288q-Wb A desktop app for local, private, secured AI experimentation. Included out-of-the box are: A known-good model API and a model downloader, with descriptions such as recommended hardware specs, model license, blake3/sha256 hashes etc... A simple note-taking app, with inference config PER note. The note and its config are output into plain text .mdx format A model inference streaming server (/completion endpoint, similar to OpenAI) https://lnkd.in/eycRJn6b https://lnkd.in/eycRJn6b Transcribe and translate audio offline on your personal computer. Powered by OpenAI's Whisper. https://lnkd.in/eUrtE3uQ https://lnkd.in/eUrtE3uQ The easiest way to install and use Stable Diffusion on your computer. Does not require technical knowledge, does not require pre-installed software. 1-click install, powerful features, friendly community.
TradingPlaces 3y ago
Keep in mind, that was the idea originally. Then in 2018 Elon decided he wanted to be CEO, the board rejected that idea for now obvious reasons, and he reneged on 90% of a promised $1b donation. The only way forward was to become a for-profit company and do a normal funding round, which is what happened with Microsoft. Elon’s rug pull is why this happened.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- s3p 3y ago
  And to this day Elon slanders OpenAI for taking profit. It’s strange because their corporate structure is highly unique. They generate fixed returns on investments, so investors can’t make that much money. Also, the profit-generating division is wholly owned and controlled by the nonprofit. I don’t understand why Elon and others have so many problems with this.
- PostOnce 3y ago
  OpenAI was so destitute, having only $100,000,000, that they had no choice but to fuck us all and lobby congress to make it illegal for us to use this new technology? That doesn't make sense. If your choice is between $100M + doing earnest work, or $1B+ and debasing our free and competitive society, and you take the latter... what does that say about your collective character as an organization and as a set of people?
  - TradingPlaces 3y ago
    $100m buys you nothing. $1b is table stakes now.
lynx23 3y ago
Wow, the top comment is neither relevant to the post, nor friendly or interesting. Activism, even with false premises. Many of us tried, and those with a little sense left know that running your local LLM on a non-GPU is not really useful. Besides, what does your post add to the discussion, and why is it the top posting? Create your local LLM, use it, tell other people about how you did it exactly, and be happy. But why the heck do you need to fight a company in that space? Wehre have the times gone when someone motivated to do something nice just went ahead and did it, instead of running in circles and telling everyone else what they should NOT do.
- meroes 3y ago
  Well in 1929-1930 The stock market crashed and regulating others in a market became needed. Now it’s who can regulate the market best in their interests, like cooperations dominate with bailouts and subsidies. You’re picking a fight with a small actor while OpenAI is spending millions doing the same, fighting for regulating to keep their status quo
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. This is essentially the Capitalist Credo, expressed in practical vs theoretical terms.
- Xeoncross 3y ago
  > pressure the government into making it Not really, Capitalism is free-trade between two parties. The more government involvement you have the more it moves towards socialism or communism where the government controls trade. At least this was the historical meaning. These days Capitalism is being redefined to mean private (non-government) Communism. That is, power concentrated in the hands of a few.
  - immibis 3y ago
    Capitalism is not free trade between two parties. That's free market. Capitalism is control by capital.
    - Xeoncross 3y ago
      There is no free market without Capitalism. Capitalism is where the private citizens controls the capital. Not the government. It's not possible to have a free market without competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, and voluntary exchange.
      - KingMob 3y ago
        ??? Bazaars existed for millennia before capitalism arose. > Capitalism is where the private citizens controls the capital. Well, that's a tautology, but based on the examples you cite in the next sentence, you're mixing up "property" with "capital". Capital is specifically the means of production. All capital is property, but not all property is capital. A factory filled with machinery is capital; your toothbrush isn't. > It's not possible to have a free market without competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, and voluntary exchange. Most of these predate capitalism.
29athrowaway 3y ago
If OpenAI is open, the Congo Free State was a free state.
captainbland 3y ago
Enshitification comes fast these days.
imdsm 3y ago
> "Open" AI, a charity to benefit us all by pushing and publishing the frontier of scientific knowledge. > Nevermind, fuckers, actually it's just to take your jobs and make a few VCs richer. We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. 1. I don't think this is the right place for this kind of content, perhaps find your way back to Twitter or Reddit 2. Have you contributed funds to OpenAI? If not, where did your sense of entitlement come from? 3. What makes you think that any of what OpenAI has produced and provided would be available without funding? I assume the answer to 1 above will be no, so, how do you expect them to build without funds? and 4. What's stopping you from creating what you thought OpenAI should be? Feel free. Nobody stopping you.
- marstall 3y ago
  I think his post is appropriate here, and on point. how about responding to his arguments about algorithm secrecy and the push to regulate competition?
- feoren 3y ago
  > 2. Have you contributed funds to OpenAI? If not, where did your sense of entitlement come from? Is your argument that we need to have given a company money before we can be opposed to their unethical business practices? We're talking about a company that wantonly disregarded copyright, broke the DMCA billions of times (proving that law is for completely destroying individuals who want to personally enjoy some media they probably otherwise wouldn't buy, not for corporations who want to hoard the wealth collectively made by all of society), charges its users even when its product is not delivered due to their own server errors, and then goes in front of congress to try to put up a regulatory moat to make competition illegal. Everything they do is based on "the law applies to you, not us." And you're saying that we're entitled for being outraged by this? > 4. What's stopping you from creating what you thought OpenAI should be? Feel free. Nobody stopping you. That's literally what Sam Altman is trying to get congress to do. This will literally be illegal if we don't fight back. This is literally what the poster you're arguing against is saying is happening. How many more "literally"s do I need here!?
izktj 3y ago
The only people pissed are a bunch of developers who want to use it for their own good. GPT4 costs are ridiculously cheap for the value you get out of it. Any other company wouldn’t even release it to the public like they’ve done

BoorishBears 3y ago

Why the vitriol towards OpenAI? If Elon hadn't pulled the rug out from under them after they refused his forceful takeover*, they wouldn't have had to go to Microsoft and they'd still be open. * a takeover which he predicated on the claim that OpenAI was "doomed to fail"

PostOnce 3y ago
It's several reasons, first it's the lies and the abuse of a charity, that wouldn't be an issue if they had began as a private company instead of robbing a charity. But secondly, even if they were a private company, it's dishonest and reprehensible to claim to congress that you want to "protect the public" when you really only give a shit about protecting your moat, I'm not happy about that either. I'm also tired of tech oligarchs general tomfuckery in all our daily lives, as I suspect many more people here are. OpenAI is just particularly egregious about it. I also think it's my civic duty to let other developers know that OpenAI does not have, by any stretch of the imagination, a stranglehold on this technology or any secret sauce. That's why they're lying and sweating in front of congress.
- victor9000 3y ago
  Yeah, they went from v1 to regulatory capture in the span of months
  - echelon 3y ago
    > regulatory capture If this leak is correct, regulatory capture is likely the only moat OpenAI could have hoped for. It would explain why Sam was so absolutely adamant that this tech needed to receive oversight. If correct, every big tech company now has a recipe to build their own GPT-4. I'd expect for the open source efforts to try to duplicate the results as well. LLMs will increase in quality across the board and become fairly interchangeable, leading to thin margins and a race to the bottom. We could be watching $13 billion going up in flames, all of it predicated on a secret as flimsy as the Coca-Cola recipe.
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Just wait until the RLHF class action hits them.
    - cma 3y ago
      $13 billion isn't $13 billion if $N billion of it has to mandatorily be spent on high margin (70%?) Azure services.
    - K0balt 3y ago
      Tbf the coca-cola recipe is a more sustainable trade secret, since the product is “perfected”. GPT4 is a work in progress so a competitor can be objectively better. I’m hoping for open source models to start incorporating some of these ideas.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  Did you actually read my comment or did you have a preplanned diatribe? They didn't start the private company until the person who promised them $1B reneged. That person reneged because they tried to forcefully takeover and were rebuked. They were running out of money and forced to raise funds in a very for-profit way or fold. - Edit: Rate limited because the hivemind has decided that it's unacceptable to insult their leader People keep acting like if it wasn't for OpenAI we'd be in some LLM utopia. The reality is some other big tech giant would reach the current SOTA first and we'd be in the same predicament except with a company with 1000x more machinery to do the things you're complaining about. It's ridiculous the sense of entitlement some people must have to keep insisting that OpenAI should have crawled into a cave and died because some megalomaniac threw a tantrum.
93po 3y ago
This a really interesting spin on reality
- BoorishBears 3y ago
  I think this commentary was pithier in your head... https://hackernoon.com/how-openai-transitioned-from-a-nonprofit-to-a-$29b-for-profit-company https://hackernoon.com/how-openai-transitioned-from-a-nonpro...
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    A "capped" profit of 100x is absolutely ridiculous. That is not even the slightest attempt to stay in the same ballpark as nonprofit. Blaming any loss of Elon money for that is spin. And he still gave them a hundred million.
    - BoorishBears 3y ago
      Not sure what you're on about, both my comment and the article are about how they went for-profit. They went for-profit because they needed to raise. They raised after Elon reneged a fraction of the way into his promise of $1B. (and not 100MM deep: he silently revised his figures after TC started digging.) It's not complicated but you seem to want to make it complicated.
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        They didn't need to go that far, and they gaslit people about it. Elon is not responsible for either of those. And was their existing money pile actually not enough?
- valval 3y ago
  If it involves Elon being a bad guy, it is certain to have HNers salivating at the thought.
  - 3y ago
vouaobrasil 3y ago
Every company who promotes and develops AI is morally responsible for the coming disaster that it will bring on us. If I could have one wish it would be that every trace of AI research is destroyed.
- astrange 3y ago
  I recommend reading comments like this and substituting "a baby" for AI. A baby also can't be aligned and is capable of deciding to destroy the world. It's not gonna do it though.
  - Brometheus 3y ago
    A baby doesn't output propaganda at 6GB/s in computer readable text.
    - blitz_skull 3y ago
      Not with that attitude! /s
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- mdp2021 3y ago
  > develops AI is morally responsible Responsible for an attempt to arrive at the construction of production facilities for a good that seems to be in dire scarcity in today's world: intelligence. If somebody comes and implements "artificial morons", that is actually out of the root that made the field of research necessary.
courseofaction 3y ago
It was a massive bait and switch, luckily AI isn't powerful enough to take over the world we'd be done for.

flangola7 3y ago

[flagged]

carabiner 3y ago

We must destroy OpenAI!

vouaobrasil 3y ago
Not sure if you're being sarcastic but I agree. Humans should not have AI research or advanced AI at all. It (a) removes purpose from people, (b) presents a situation that is too alien for human minds to handle, (c) increases the addictiveness of technology and thereby pushes us further into growing the technological system, (d) crosses the "adaptability threshhold", i.e. the point at which the PACE of technological development is so rapid that adaptation of our society to such a pace is NO longer possible. In short, we do not have the maturity to handle AI; we are playing with fire. Every person who contributes anything to AI development is responsible for the disasters that AI will bring, and all AI research should be destroyed.
- M3L0NM4N 3y ago
  This is such a pessimistic view to take that I cannot even begin to describe how you are wrong.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I would love to see your rebuttals, especially since I have never seen any strong arguments in favour of AI being a net benefit to society, and I have thought and read about this at lenght. Of course, I always expect downvotes on my posts here since there is a strong tendency towards loving technology here. But what I find most interesting is that there is absolutely no taking of responsibility of any technological creations. Before you downvote, please just ask yourself the following: is it reasonable to say that all these latest AI developments have no serious risks? And in response to your reply, humanity is in quite a precarious state now, so isn't it expected that a sober analysis of it is rather pessimistic, especially with regard to hyper-advanced technologies?
    - jackstraw14 3y ago

kyledrake 3y ago

Unfortunately I've found the current OSS models to be vastly inferior to the OpenAI models. Would love to see someone actually get close to what they can do with GPT-3.5/4, except capable of running on commodity GPUs. What's the most impressive open model so far?

asynchronous 3y ago
Probably Wizard 30B, they released the training weights at every offset as well.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
In my testing, the chat and instruct-tuned versions of MPT-30B is very close to 3.5 for many tasks, but of course the team who made it got bought up immediately and it’s licensed only for non-commercial use. I’m hoping the open source community runs with the base model in the same way they did with LLaMA.
Roark66 3y ago
Have you tried falcon 40b instruct? Also take into account that chatgpt likely has some preprompt and by talking to falcon or other OS models it's all in your hands. Furthermore, Not many people discuss the significance of proper output sampling. I myself used to just test open source models with the greedy decoding only. Who knows if they wouldn't even beat (not at all)OpenAI with some clever output sampling scheme.
- schappim 3y ago
  Does anyone have a link / instructions on getting Falcon 40b to install on Apple Silicon? Apparently "Hugging Face" have some internal swift code that works (but it has not been released). I'm keen to see how it performs on a maxed out Mac Studio (with all that unified memory available).
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    I thought this too, but it sounds like the performance of the GPU ultimately holds it back. Maybe it is the software, but I have yet to see a test on Mac silicon that performed well.

KronisLV 3y ago

> You can use the above without paying OpenAI. You don't even need a GPU. There are no license issues like with the facebook llama. I actually wrote about getting an LLM chatbot up and running a while ago: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/self-hosting-an-ai-llm-chatbot-without-going-broke https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/self-hosting-an-ai-llm-cha... It's good that the technology and models are both available for free, and you don't even need a GPU for it. However, there are still large memory requirements (if you want output that makes sense) and using CPU does result in somewhat slower performance. There are async use cases where it can make sense, but for something like autocomplete or other near real time situations we're not there yet. Nor is the quality of the models comparable to some of the commercial offerings, at least not yet. So I don't have it in me to blame anyone who forks over the money to a SaaS platform instead of getting a good GPU/RAM and hosting stuff themselves. Here's hoping the more open options keep getting better and more competitive, though!

antupis 3y ago
I bet that open models win in the end because porn. There is already very weird and vibrant community creating "waifus" and tinkering with these models.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  Huh, more power to those folks then, I guess. But I can easily imagine more conventional forms of entertainment, as well. Like a game of D&D that's narrated by the AI, or a text based adventure set in the Mass Effect universe, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer or any other fandom, really. Maybe like those old Choose Your Own Adventure games. I think some companies are also experimenting with characters in video games that get their dialogue from these models - where the developers give the character a persona, provide information about events in the world and let players interact with them, like the Detective Origins demo. Of course, due to the slightly unpredictable nature of these models and their hardware requirements, no idea how viable this will be.
  - mahathu 3y ago

satvikpendem 3y ago

See also, Orca and Falcon models which are also open source. I'm not sure if any frontends support them yet.

charcircuit 3y ago

>There are no license issues like with the facebook llama. OpenLLaMa uses a dataset which does not seem to have gotten propper commercial licensing for the training data. There is potential licensing issues because the copyright situation is not well defended.

PostOnce 3y ago
So far as anyone knows, this is not a derivative work, its transformative, and therefore not subject to any licensing requirement. You're right though, that's arguably still up for debate, but I think the precedent of transformative work is pretty well attested.
- dacryn 3y ago
  is it? Because condensation is literally part of the definition of derivative, and basically the weights are a condensed form of the input data. It's some sort of lossy compression, when looking at it from the right point of view. Summarization and translation are also clearly derivative. The definition of transformative I found: - add something new (context of other books I guess, this one might pass) - with a further purpose or different character (further purpose clearly yes) - do not substitute for the original use of the work (this one I find difficult. In the case of books, probably. In the case of github, it aims to replace quite some aspects of it)
  - PostOnce 3y ago
    is it compression though? It's a model of the way our language works and contains a set of knowledge. If I read 200 physics textbooks, I couldn't recall any of them exactly, but I could write another book... that would contain largely the same knowledge. The same is true of AI, it's not "compression", it's "learning" (by recording statistics about relationships between pieces of information) -- it can't (usually) recreate whole works, it'll make stuff up and alter it and whathaveyou. How much of the sum total of the internet and all books can you compress into an n-gigabyte model? I've got an 8 gigabyte file here that seems remarkably smart, but it can't recite the contents of most books to me, though it knows their famous quotes and some excerpts. The "compression" argument does seem to have some merit, but it also seems thin in the end and, in my opinion, unlikely to hold up in court, but we'll see. I do think a very strong, probably winning argument could be made in court that it is transformative, but that's the nature of this whole debate, we don't know yet with certainty.

pyeri 3y ago

In today's world, "Science equals Capitalism". Or at least Science is allowed to progress and get funded only as long as it serves the interest of Capitalism.

DeathArrow 3y ago
That's engineering, not science.
- meroes 3y ago
  The National Science Foundation is the architect behind the whole STEM Pipeline. It’s one in the same

ChildOfChaos 3y ago

You forgot to link where I can buy your tin foil hat at the end.

grondilu 3y ago

> try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. I mean the guy who created GPT-4 literally demanded a ban of any system more powerful than GPT-4.

wrasee 3y ago
I don’t understand this. Won’t that hurt their progress on GPT-5?
- ben_w 3y ago
  The public position (as opposed to the rumour mills) is that they're not working on a 5, and don't intend to at least until they can figure out how to do it safely.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    [or until someone else starts catching up] The same dynamic that incentivized a mass rollout of these unaligned systems will be perfectly sufficient to incentivize mass rollout of stronger, also unaligned systems.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Yeah, that's one of Yudkowsky's fears. I'm not going to take his fears as gospel, as he's spent so long focussing on his fear there's a danger of availability heuristic/attention biases having him take the worst case for everything. I'm still going to promote caution, as the more potent a tech the greater the downside of being wrong, but it currently looks like we can cooperate with each other in this IRL iterated prisoner's dilemma.
  - namaria 3y ago
    And safely here means non disruptive to established businesses. If they create a tool so powerful that it can replace entire professional classes, that would just mean people can bypass the employers and get their value directly from an API. OpenAI needs to make sure they have a business model where they can charge enterprise fees and provide value to corporations, not directly to people. ChatGPT was merely a publicity stunt. I do believe they got scared of how much value people could derive independently from it tho, hence the "regulate this" pressure.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

>> We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. Just to be clear, there's no science being kept secret because there is no science being done. OpenAI's is a feat of engineering, borne aloft by a huge budget supporting a large team whose expertise lies in tuning neural net systems, and not in doing science. Machine learning, as it is practiced today, is not science. There is no scientific theory behind it and there is no scientific method applied. There are no scientific questions asked, or attempted to be answered. There is no new knowledge produced other than how to tune systems to beat benchmarks. The standard machine learning paper is a bunch of text and arcane-looking formulae around a glorified leaderboard: a little table with competing systems on one side and arbitrarily chosen benchmark datasets on the other side; and all our results in bold so everyone knows we're winning. That's as much doing science as is racing cool-looking sports cars.

DeathArrow 3y ago
Still, the guys developing ML algorithms like Neural nets, Linear regression, Decision tree, SVM, Naive Bayes, KNN etc., weren't doing science?
- varispeed 3y ago
  It's like asking whether a carpenter is a scientist because they developed a cabinet...
  - moolcool 3y ago
    I think that you could genuinely make that argument though.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    Well, Wikipedia might be wrong, but this is how they describe Computer Science: "Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Though more often considered an academic discipline, computer science is closely related to computer programming." You might argue, though, that Computer Science is not "real" science.

arthur_sav 3y ago

I would love to use these... but they suck. They don't even come close to what OpenAI offers.

0xDEF 3y ago
I think most of HN has only tried ChatGPT with GPT-3.5 in December 2022 when the OpenAI servers were getting hammered. That is why they're impressed by these slow and low quality local models and mistakenly think they're on par with OpenAI's offerings. Honestly even reddit and teenagers on TikTok have a more accurate view on OpenAI vs. local LLMs than HN.
- baanlox 3y ago
  [dead]
- blitz_skull 3y ago
  There’s not a single thing out there that even comes close to GPT-4. Not one that I’ve used anyway. Benchmarks be damned, it’s the experience that matters and I’ve yet to have an LLM blow my mind the way GPT-4 does.
  - s3p 3y ago
    Have you used Claude? I regularly use them instead of GPT4 because of the larger context window. 4 is still useful when I want to give instructions to the system (Claude will refuse to do a lot), but generally the responses seem on par with each other.

tudorw 3y ago

Sorry about the link.in style links but I just posted this there and came here and felt it might be interesting to someone, they do work! ... Here's a round up of open source projects focused on allowing you to run your own model's locally ('AI'), they all take slightly different approaches although under the hood many use the same models. https://lnkd.in/exKqJZm8 https://lnkd.in/exKqJZm8 A gradio web UI for running Large Language Models like LLaMA, llama.cpp, GPT-J, Pythia, OPT, and GALACTICA. Its goal is to become the AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui of text generation. https://lnkd.in/etVCmZHB https://lnkd.in/etVCmZHB With OpenLLM, you can run inference with any open-source large-language models, deploy to the cloud or on-premises, and build powerful AI apps. State-of-the-art LLMs: built-in supports a wide range of open-source LLMs and model runtime, including StableLM, Falcon, Dolly, Flan-T5, ChatGLM, StarCoder and more. https://lnkd.in/e7-NKGzJ https://lnkd.in/e7-NKGzJ LocalAI is a drop-in replacement REST API that's compatible with OpenAI API specifications for local inferencing. It allows you to run LLMs (and not only) locally or on-prem with consumer grade hardware, supporting multiple model families that are compatible with the ggml format. Does not require GPU. https://lnkd.in/ef_Sa9AN https://lnkd.in/ef_Sa9AN Multi-platform desktop app to download and run Large Language Models(LLM) locally in your computer https://lnkd.in/e288q-Wb https://lnkd.in/e288q-Wb A desktop app for local, private, secured AI experimentation. Included out-of-the box are: A known-good model API and a model downloader, with descriptions such as recommended hardware specs, model license, blake3/sha256 hashes etc... A simple note-taking app, with inference config PER note. The note and its config are output into plain text .mdx format A model inference streaming server (/completion endpoint, similar to OpenAI) https://lnkd.in/eycRJn6b https://lnkd.in/eycRJn6b Transcribe and translate audio offline on your personal computer. Powered by OpenAI's Whisper. https://lnkd.in/eUrtE3uQ https://lnkd.in/eUrtE3uQ The easiest way to install and use Stable Diffusion on your computer. Does not require technical knowledge, does not require pre-installed software. 1-click install, powerful features, friendly community.

TradingPlaces 3y ago

Keep in mind, that was the idea originally. Then in 2018 Elon decided he wanted to be CEO, the board rejected that idea for now obvious reasons, and he reneged on 90% of a promised $1b donation. The only way forward was to become a for-profit company and do a normal funding round, which is what happened with Microsoft. Elon’s rug pull is why this happened.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
s3p 3y ago
And to this day Elon slanders OpenAI for taking profit. It’s strange because their corporate structure is highly unique. They generate fixed returns on investments, so investors can’t make that much money. Also, the profit-generating division is wholly owned and controlled by the nonprofit. I don’t understand why Elon and others have so many problems with this.
PostOnce 3y ago
OpenAI was so destitute, having only $100,000,000, that they had no choice but to fuck us all and lobby congress to make it illegal for us to use this new technology? That doesn't make sense. If your choice is between $100M + doing earnest work, or $1B+ and debasing our free and competitive society, and you take the latter... what does that say about your collective character as an organization and as a set of people?
- TradingPlaces 3y ago
  $100m buys you nothing. $1b is table stakes now.

lynx23 3y ago

Wow, the top comment is neither relevant to the post, nor friendly or interesting. Activism, even with false premises. Many of us tried, and those with a little sense left know that running your local LLM on a non-GPU is not really useful. Besides, what does your post add to the discussion, and why is it the top posting? Create your local LLM, use it, tell other people about how you did it exactly, and be happy. But why the heck do you need to fight a company in that space? Wehre have the times gone when someone motivated to do something nice just went ahead and did it, instead of running in circles and telling everyone else what they should NOT do.

meroes 3y ago
Well in 1929-1930 The stock market crashed and regulating others in a market became needed. Now it’s who can regulate the market best in their interests, like cooperations dominate with bailouts and subsidies. You’re picking a fight with a small actor while OpenAI is spending millions doing the same, fighting for regulating to keep their status quo

michaelcampbell 3y ago

> We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. This is essentially the Capitalist Credo, expressed in practical vs theoretical terms.

Xeoncross 3y ago
> pressure the government into making it Not really, Capitalism is free-trade between two parties. The more government involvement you have the more it moves towards socialism or communism where the government controls trade. At least this was the historical meaning. These days Capitalism is being redefined to mean private (non-government) Communism. That is, power concentrated in the hands of a few.
- immibis 3y ago
  Capitalism is not free trade between two parties. That's free market. Capitalism is control by capital.
  - Xeoncross 3y ago
    There is no free market without Capitalism. Capitalism is where the private citizens controls the capital. Not the government. It's not possible to have a free market without competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, and voluntary exchange.
    - KingMob 3y ago
      ??? Bazaars existed for millennia before capitalism arose. > Capitalism is where the private citizens controls the capital. Well, that's a tautology, but based on the examples you cite in the next sentence, you're mixing up "property" with "capital". Capital is specifically the means of production. All capital is property, but not all property is capital. A factory filled with machinery is capital; your toothbrush isn't. > It's not possible to have a free market without competitive markets, price systems, private property, property rights recognition, and voluntary exchange. Most of these predate capitalism.

29athrowaway 3y ago

If OpenAI is open, the Congo Free State was a free state.

captainbland 3y ago

Enshitification comes fast these days.

imdsm 3y ago

> "Open" AI, a charity to benefit us all by pushing and publishing the frontier of scientific knowledge. > Nevermind, fuckers, actually it's just to take your jobs and make a few VCs richer. We'll keep the science a secret and try to pressure the government into making it illegal for you to compete with us. 1. I don't think this is the right place for this kind of content, perhaps find your way back to Twitter or Reddit 2. Have you contributed funds to OpenAI? If not, where did your sense of entitlement come from? 3. What makes you think that any of what OpenAI has produced and provided would be available without funding? I assume the answer to 1 above will be no, so, how do you expect them to build without funds? and 4. What's stopping you from creating what you thought OpenAI should be? Feel free. Nobody stopping you.

marstall 3y ago
I think his post is appropriate here, and on point. how about responding to his arguments about algorithm secrecy and the push to regulate competition?
feoren 3y ago
> 2. Have you contributed funds to OpenAI? If not, where did your sense of entitlement come from? Is your argument that we need to have given a company money before we can be opposed to their unethical business practices? We're talking about a company that wantonly disregarded copyright, broke the DMCA billions of times (proving that law is for completely destroying individuals who want to personally enjoy some media they probably otherwise wouldn't buy, not for corporations who want to hoard the wealth collectively made by all of society), charges its users even when its product is not delivered due to their own server errors, and then goes in front of congress to try to put up a regulatory moat to make competition illegal. Everything they do is based on "the law applies to you, not us." And you're saying that we're entitled for being outraged by this? > 4. What's stopping you from creating what you thought OpenAI should be? Feel free. Nobody stopping you. That's literally what Sam Altman is trying to get congress to do. This will literally be illegal if we don't fight back. This is literally what the poster you're arguing against is saying is happening. How many more "literally"s do I need here!?

izktj 3y ago

The only people pissed are a bunch of developers who want to use it for their own good. GPT4 costs are ridiculously cheap for the value you get out of it. Any other company wouldn’t even release it to the public like they’ve done