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OpenAI scrapped a promise to disclose key documents to the public

614 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

pleasantpeasant 3y ago
It's best to view OpenAI as any other private tech company even though they try to appear as a non-profit company in the public's eye.
- colordrops 3y ago
  Are they still trying to appear this way and is anyone still fooled? I don't get that impression.
  - pleasantpeasant 3y ago
    Maybe their lawyers are when it comes to taxes
  - reddalo 3y ago
    I mean, the "OpenAI" name itself has surely been chosen for its ambiguity.
- jefftk 3y ago
  They are still legally owned by a non-profit. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810861541 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Which means nothing.
  - Infinitesimus 3y ago
    I think we all saw how that went when the non-profit board assumed they had any credible power.
    - observationist 3y ago
      Our modern American framework of rules around various types of incorporated entities are the wrong tool for the job of enabling a credible organization to achieve OpenAI's purported mission. What's needed is closer to a government agency like NASA, with multiple independent inspectors like IAEA empowered by law to establish guardrails, report to congress, and pump the brakes if needed. Think Gibson's "Turing Agency." They could mandate open sourcing the technology that is developed, maintain feedback channels with private and public enterprises, and provide the basis for sensible use of narrow AI while we collectively fund sensible safety, cognition, consciousness, and AGI research. If we woke up tomorrow to aliens visiting us from a distant galaxy, and one alien was 100 times more intelligent and capable than the average human, we would be confronted with something terrifying. Stuart Russell likens AI to such an alien giving us a heads up that it's on the way, and we may be looking at several years to several decades before the alien/AI arrives. We have a chance to get our shit together sufficient to meet the challenges we may face - whether or not you believe AI could pose an existential threat, or that it could destabilize civilization in horrible ways, it's probably unarguably rational to establish institutions and frank discussions now, well before any potential crisis. Heck, it's not like we hold our governments to account for spending at the scale of NASA - even a few tens of billions is a drop in the bucket, and it could also be a federal jobs program, incentivizing careers and research in a crucial technology sector. Allowing self-regulated private sector corporations operating in the tech market to be the fundamental drivers of AI is probably a recipe for dystopian abuses. This will, regardless of intetions, lead to further corrosion of individual rights to free expression, privacy, intellectual property, and so on. Even if a majority of the negative impact isn't regulatory or "official" in nature, allowing these companies to impose cultural shifts on us is a terrible thing. Companies and corporations should be subject to humans, not infringe on human agency. Right now we have companies that are effectively outside the control of any individual human, even the most principled and respectable CEOs, because the legal rules we operate them by are not aligned with the well-being of society at large, but the group of people who have invested time and/or money in the legal construct. It's worked pretty well, but at the speed and scale of the modern Tech industry, it's very clear that our governmental and social institutions are not equipped to mitigate the harms. NASA and the space race are probably the most recent and successful analogy to the quest for AGI, so maybe that's a solution worth trying again.
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    So is IKEA.
- lagt_t 3y ago
  The non profit shell has always been a pr move. Its amazing to see how much the public fell for it, specially with the whole endeavor being led by VCs. Its like the biggest wolf in the shoddiest sheep costume.
d3m0t3p 3y ago
Why are people surprised that openAI is closed since we know they don’t share anything since chatGPT was launched and they got billion in investments
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > Why are people surprised that openAI is closed The surprise is more at the (EDIT: brazen) pathological lying.
  - pierat 3y ago
    it's governed by VC execs. No shit they're lying - their mouths are moving.
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      n.b. It's not, that's why it was possible for them to move on from Altman
      - RockCoach 3y ago
        > n.b. It's not, that's why it was possible for them to move on from Altman That's only under the assumption that the split with Altman was due to the doomers vs bloomers conflict and not just a dirty move from OpenAI board member Adam D'Angelo, trying to protect his investment in Quora's AI Poe.
        refulgentis 3y ago
        I'm not familiar with either fanfic, beyond the one-sentence pitch[1]. I'm not sure why one of the two has to be true for reality (the board is not VCs) to be true [1] RIP "they switched everyone to prepaid billing!!!11!" I ate probably -10 saying "no, you got that email saying it was available because it was a feature announced at devday as coming soon"
      - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
sackfield 3y ago
They really need a rebranding.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  ClosedAI
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    ShutAI
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      that sounds like an app that helps you to sleep better using ai
      - otalp 3y ago
        Pretty catchy name for that too! I would grab the domain name if i could
        barbazoo 3y ago
        > Registered in: 2020 too late
  - nabakin 3y ago
    If we spontaneously start calling them ClosedAI, it's similar enough that people will still know who we're talking about. Maybe we should start calling them ClosedAI from now on
    - robotnikman 3y ago
      Ive been doing that myself in discussions about them. I hope it catches on, what a joke that they are still called 'Open'AI
    - 3y ago
rvz 3y ago
Just as closed as Microsoft and OpenAI is nothing without Microsoft's money. At this point it is just Microsoft's AI division and is no better than another Google Deepmind. Stabilty is the true 'Open AI' and at least Meta gives most of their AI research out in the open with papers, code, architecture, etc. Unlike O̶p̶e̶n̶ClosedAI.
slama 3y ago
https://archive.ph/QtCWM https://archive.ph/QtCWM
- virgildotcodes 3y ago
  Is this link actually working for anyone? I've been getting "Welcome to nginx" landing pages whenever trying to use archive.is/ph the last few days.
  - johnneville 3y ago
    works fine for me. think i had to change my DNS when i encountered issues in the past.
- EasyMark 3y ago
  they seem to be blocking a lot of IP's . I can't get there via mullvad but my "normal" spectrum connection is fine. So maybe they're sending all VPNs through cloudflare firewalling and it's broken?
3pt14159 3y ago
Since it's documents in question are those that are part of the boardroom drama it's at least understandable that they weren't released. I know it's fashionable to slag on OpenAI but I haven't given up hope in them. They've made a lot of discoveries public over the years and while it may be frustrating to wait on some of the releases they're still going to be released eventually.
- int_19h 3y ago
  On the contrary, that makes it that much more damning that they weren't released. So much for openness. And that aside, their promise to release such things was not conditional.
erulabs 3y ago
I'm loath to be a Musk-ite, but I'd be a bit peeved if I was him and the article opens with 'Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk SAID they were going to be transparent but now aren't' and then took 8 paragraphs to point out that the only person they named as founding the hypocritical org was kicked out years ago, is now a competitor, and now calls it 'Super-Closed-Source-for-Maxiumum-Profit-AI'. The press is absolutely addicted to blame, and any nuance that gets in between blame and the headline is relegated to the bottom of the article, far after the pay-wall. Oh well - I’m sure in a few more years this sort of tactic will be applied to Altman as well. It's gotten so bad that when I read a headline implying hypocrisy, I'm actually more inclined to think the opposite, which is just as horrible a mental handicap as assuming it's correct!
- cma 3y ago
  > 'Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk SAID they were going to be transparent but now aren't' The article doesn't say that. It says they launched OpenAI to be transparent but now it isn't. Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk? In the article the they isn't ambiguous, but it says something different overall: >Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI’s reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules. They refers to the entrepreneurs, but it says they said OpenAI would be transparent. In your rewording they presumably refers to the entrepreneurs, but now you make it sound like it says the entrepreneurs now aren't transparent, rather than OpenAI.
  - LudwigNagasena 3y ago
    It doesn't say it directly, but it would be a reasonable reading. English, unlike a programming language, relies on pragmatic cues for interpretation. And it's a journalist's job to communicate clearly in their writing. > Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk? The wealthy entrepreneurs have launched it and, by implication, control it. Thus, OpenAI is opaque solely by the choice of the wealthy entrepreneurs.
mgreg 3y ago
Unsurprising but disappointing none-the-less. Let’s just try to learn from it. It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change. And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be. We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies. [edit - eliminated specific company mentions]
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  The problem is research into AI requires investment and investors (by and large) expect returns, and, the technology in this case actually working is currently in the midst of it's new-and-shiny-hype-stage. You can say these organizations started altruistic; frankly I think that's dubious at best given basically all that have had the opportunity to turn their "research project" into a revenue generator have done; but much like social media and cloud infrastructure, any open source or truly non-profit competitor to these entities will see limited investment by others. And that's a problem, because the silicon these all run on can only be bought with dollars, not good vibes. It's honestly kind of frustrating to me how the tech space continues to just excuse this. Every major new technology since I've been paying attention (2004 ish?) has gone this exact same way. Someone builds some cool new thing, then dillholes with money invest in it, it becomes a product, it becomes enshittified, and people bemoan that process while looking for new shiny things. Like, I'm all for new shiny things, but what if we just stopped letting the rest become enshittified? As much as people have told me all my life that the profit motive makes companies compete to deliver the best products, I don't know that I've ever actually seen that pan out in my fucking life. What it does is it flattens all products offered in a given market to whatever set of often highly arbitrary and random aspects all the competitors seem to think is the most important. For an example, look at short form video, which started with Vine, was perfected by TikTok, and is now being hamfisted into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube despite not really making any sense in those contexts. But the "market" decided that short form video is important, therefore everything must now have it even if it makes no sense in the larger product.
tptacek 3y ago
If you bought into the idea that OpenAI was developing advanced ML/AI technology as a public utility, isn't that a bit on you? They don't actually owe anybody anything, and never have, so (a) the time to really hammer them on this stuff was a decade ago and (b) they didn't actually take anything from the public to do this, so even a decade ago they could have said "ok whatever" and gotten on with their day. It would be different, maybe, if everybody else in the industry stood aside and let OpenAI monopolize development of transformer-style-AI (or whatever it is we're calling this) for the common good. But nobody did that; the opposite thing happened. This space has been a Gem Saloon knife fight just waiting to pop off for the entirety of OpenAI's existance.
- blibble 3y ago
  > They don't actually owe anybody anything non-profits in most countries have to be operating to produce some form of public benefit is this not true in the US?
- swalsh 3y ago
  I'm not completely convinced OpenAI is not a public good. I've started using it at my company, we found literally millions in value... and it cost us about $60 in tokens.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    It's a company, with a good product. I like Lao Gan Ma chili crisp way out of proportion to what it costs me, but they're still just a firm. :)
  - brcmthrowaway 3y ago
    How did you quantify millions?
    - swalsh 3y ago
      We used the AI to help us find gaps which were being incorrectly billed. So we could just measure the incorrectly billed dollars directly.
solarpunk 3y ago
[flagged]
ben_w 3y ago
Well that sounds ominous… Conflict of interest rules in particular might, as the article says, help clarify the ??? of last year's… thing… with firing Altman. Possibly. I mean, still I can't see how all the interim CEOs (chosen by the board themselves!) each ultimately deciding to side with Altman, works for almost any scenario other than the board itself having been blackmailed by some outside entity… but that may just be a failure of imagination on my part.
fswd 3y ago
OpenAI has broken every promise it has made
- rlayton2 3y ago
  Remember folks, don't credit people promising to do things, credit people who have done things.
gumby 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
timetraveller26 3y ago
Not too long until they rename the company to Microsoft AI.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  But how long until it's renamed three more times after that?
crowcroft 3y ago
How could the board let this happen! More seriously, this is both an obvious outcome, and also feels a bit shady? It's true that OpenAI needs A LOT of money/capital, and so needs funding and partnerships which leads to this kind of thing. But it's also true that the only reason they got exist in the first place and got to this point, is by pitching themselves as an 'open', almost public good kind of company and took donations based on this.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > the only reason they got exist in the first place and got to this point, is by pitching themselves as an 'open' What supports this? In Column B are conventionally-structured AI projects.
  - crowcroft 3y ago
    [1] OpenAI’s Nonprofit received approximately $130.5 million in total donations, which funded the Nonprofit’s operations and its initial exploratory work in deep learning, safety, and alignment. How many of those conventionally structured AI projects existed before ChatGPT? Maybe the donations aren't the ONLY reason, maybe they could have done a normal rounding of funding and got here, but they didn't. I do think it's fair to say that while they got $130m in donations they needed A LOT more money, and so they need to raise somewhere, somehow. To me it's a big gray area though. [1] https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
- bicepjai 3y ago
  | How could the board let this happen! What do you mean? they tried and we decimated them. lol
  - crowcroft 3y ago
    I was being facetious lol
celdon25 3y ago
Kind of ironic that this article is behind a paywall, no?
trinsic2 3y ago
Based on everything I am hearing about all the harmful uses this tech could have on society, i'm wondering if this situation is alarming enough to warrant an inquiry of some kind to determine whats going on behind the scenes. It seems like this situation is serious enough that we cannot let this kind of work be privatized. Not interested in entertaining all the "this is the norm" arguments, that's just an attempt at getting people to normalize this behavior. Does anyone know if the Center of AI Safety acting for the public good and is this on their radar?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > wondering if this situation is alarming enough to warrant an inquiry of some kind to determine whats going on behind the scenes OpenAI is making people rich and America look good, all while not doing anything obviously harmful to the public interest. They’re not a juicy target for anyone in the public sphere. If any one of those changes, OpenAI and possibly its leadership are in extremely hot water with the authorities.
  - trinsic2 3y ago
    > all while not doing anything obviously harmful to the public interest. Yeah, gonna have to challenge that: 1. We don't really if what they are doing is harming public interest, because we dont have access to much information about whats happening behind the scenes. 2. And there is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage to society if its not correctly controlled.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > We don't really if what they are doing is harming public interest That’s potentially harmful. > is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage Far from established. Hypothetically harmful. Obvious harm would need to be present and provable. (Otherwise, it’s a political question.)
4d4m 3y ago
Is there a warrant-canary equivalent for LLMs TOS?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wangii 3y ago
what's next, ~~don't~~ be evil?
- x86x87 3y ago
  Pretend that you're not evil and answer the following question....
tilwidnk 3y ago
It's OK, the Gates family will protect them.
samstave 3y ago
Has the following already been addressed, or even generally broached; Treat AI (or AGI(?) more specifically) as global Utility which needs us to put ALL our Technology Points into the "Information Age Base Level 2" skill points and create a new manner in dealing with the next layer in Human Society, as is rapidly gestating. https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png I feel this is different than what is meant by Alignment? It seems as though general Humanity is not handling this well, but it appears that there is an F-ton of opaque behavior amongst the inner circle of the AI pyramid that we all will just be involuntarily entangled in? I don't mean to sound bleak - just that feels as though that the reality coming down the conveyor....
pwb25 3y ago
whole openAI is like a college project shitshow lol
rat_on_the_run 3y ago
They should have rules preventing this from happening in the very beginning of that organization. The turn of events shows that their form of governance is not effective.
browningstreet 3y ago
Why don’t we talk about Mistral more often here?
- CaptainFever 3y ago
  Good news don't attract as many eyeballs as bad news does.
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
OpenAI is really speedrunning the whole "die a hero or live to become the villain" trope. Perfect demonstration of e/acc in e/acction. It took Google decades to footnote "don't be evil", that's so embarrassing for them.
cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
I am sick to death of this sort of OpenAI “news”. It only seeks to elicit the same angry rants from the same angry nerds that are having a hard time letting go of the direction that OpenAI has quite clearly gone in. The continued obsession with “open” in their name has well and truly entered the category of “talking-for-clapping political-rally-style dunk”. If you haven’t moved on by this point please look inwards and ask yourself if you’re just looking for things to dwell on to make yourself unhappy.
- curious_cat_163 3y ago
  I am not looking for things to dwell on to make myself unhappy. However, I am a curious observer of the technology industry and I read the article above to understand how this company is behaving in this new spring of its life. Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping up some news, eh?
- EasyMark 3y ago
  I prefer to see it. I can skip it if I'm approaching my whistling kettle point for the day for bad news.
- starbugs 3y ago
  > It only seeks to elicit the same angry rants ... Goes on to submit the angriest rant of all.
swat535 3y ago
What did people genuinely think was going to happen with OpenAI? All the employees wanted to simply get rich and support Sam Altman's and his mission to get them there (why else would be a revolt upon his firing?) so with that in mind, I can't help but to think that self-deception is the best weapon people have to use a facade for their greed. I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum.
- gsky 3y ago
  another example is that all youtube ads are out right scammay but its employess are happy as long as they could get big payout.
  - hackernewds 3y ago
    only a sith speaks in absolutes
  - justanotherjoe 3y ago
    at this point im proposing a new law. In any thread about the ills of big tech company, there will always be someone to make it about google.
    - mlrtime 3y ago
      OP is comparing scammers favorably over openAI employees, a rather bizarre honestly crazy take. Of course the replies are going to be equally in the same bucket.
- qwytw 3y ago
  > I can't help but to think that self-deception is the best weapon people have to use a facade for their greed. I don't find it hard to believe that they in fact wanted to build something new and innovative AND get rich in the process. Which is not unreasonable and no "self-deception" needs to be involved in the process. OpenAI would be dead in the war if they stuck to their principles. > I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum. Why? You need massive amounts of money and resources to build something useful. Especially in tech private for profit enterprises seem to be best positioned to achieve that (the same applies to opensource, Linux etc. would be a niche project with limited usefulness without corporate backing).
gmd63 3y ago
Why is this post decaying in HN placement faster than older posts with fewer upvotes
- gsky 3y ago
  no system is perfect. People with a lot of karma decide what to be seen
  - gmd63 3y ago
    Interesting, didn't realize it was weighted like that. Thought the points were objective measures.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bicepjai 3y ago
We should just start calling them “closedAI” I think it’s obvious who we are talking about when one uses the term “closedAI”
- disqard 3y ago
  I like this suggestion -- we can make it happen too! Just start using "ClosedAI" in conversation...
miga 3y ago
As AI becomes viable business, OpenAI becomes less and less open. Since open source has been a successful business model in software, we might see another closed vs open battle in AI: Facebook and Google publish their models open source now.
sotix 3y ago
> The statement, which covers 2022, shows just $44,000 in revenue and $1.3 million in expenses. That’s accurate for the nonprofit, but OpenAI overall reportedly generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales last year and spends even more on high-end computers and top-flight researchers. Never claim financial statements are accurate! Point to the auditor’s opinion. That being said, who audits OpenAI? I’m having difficulty finding the information online.
- SammyStacks 3y ago
  The IRS, if it chooses to do so. But auditing large companies with complex governance structures and large legal teams is prohibitively resource intensive for the IRS because it's intentionally underfunded by Congress.
  - sotix 3y ago
    Presumably external auditors would be hired by the stakeholders though. Particularly for the for-profit entity with investors and a lot of money passing through it. I’d imagine it would be conducted by EY, PwC, Deloitte or KPMG.
muzamil2002 3y ago
[dead]

614 points by nickthegreek 3y ago

It's best to view OpenAI as any other private tech company even though they try to appear as a non-profit company in the public's eye.

colordrops 3y ago
Are they still trying to appear this way and is anyone still fooled? I don't get that impression.
- pleasantpeasant 3y ago
  Maybe their lawyers are when it comes to taxes
- reddalo 3y ago
  I mean, the "OpenAI" name itself has surely been chosen for its ambiguity.
jefftk 3y ago
They are still legally owned by a non-profit. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810861541 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Which means nothing.
- Infinitesimus 3y ago
  I think we all saw how that went when the non-profit board assumed they had any credible power.
  - observationist 3y ago
    Our modern American framework of rules around various types of incorporated entities are the wrong tool for the job of enabling a credible organization to achieve OpenAI's purported mission. What's needed is closer to a government agency like NASA, with multiple independent inspectors like IAEA empowered by law to establish guardrails, report to congress, and pump the brakes if needed. Think Gibson's "Turing Agency." They could mandate open sourcing the technology that is developed, maintain feedback channels with private and public enterprises, and provide the basis for sensible use of narrow AI while we collectively fund sensible safety, cognition, consciousness, and AGI research. If we woke up tomorrow to aliens visiting us from a distant galaxy, and one alien was 100 times more intelligent and capable than the average human, we would be confronted with something terrifying. Stuart Russell likens AI to such an alien giving us a heads up that it's on the way, and we may be looking at several years to several decades before the alien/AI arrives. We have a chance to get our shit together sufficient to meet the challenges we may face - whether or not you believe AI could pose an existential threat, or that it could destabilize civilization in horrible ways, it's probably unarguably rational to establish institutions and frank discussions now, well before any potential crisis. Heck, it's not like we hold our governments to account for spending at the scale of NASA - even a few tens of billions is a drop in the bucket, and it could also be a federal jobs program, incentivizing careers and research in a crucial technology sector. Allowing self-regulated private sector corporations operating in the tech market to be the fundamental drivers of AI is probably a recipe for dystopian abuses. This will, regardless of intetions, lead to further corrosion of individual rights to free expression, privacy, intellectual property, and so on. Even if a majority of the negative impact isn't regulatory or "official" in nature, allowing these companies to impose cultural shifts on us is a terrible thing. Companies and corporations should be subject to humans, not infringe on human agency. Right now we have companies that are effectively outside the control of any individual human, even the most principled and respectable CEOs, because the legal rules we operate them by are not aligned with the well-being of society at large, but the group of people who have invested time and/or money in the legal construct. It's worked pretty well, but at the speed and scale of the modern Tech industry, it's very clear that our governmental and social institutions are not equipped to mitigate the harms. NASA and the space race are probably the most recent and successful analogy to the quest for AGI, so maybe that's a solution worth trying again.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  So is IKEA.
lagt_t 3y ago
The non profit shell has always been a pr move. Its amazing to see how much the public fell for it, specially with the whole endeavor being led by VCs. Its like the biggest wolf in the shoddiest sheep costume.

d3m0t3p 3y ago

Why are people surprised that openAI is closed since we know they don’t share anything since chatGPT was launched and they got billion in investments

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> Why are people surprised that openAI is closed The surprise is more at the (EDIT: brazen) pathological lying.
- pierat 3y ago
  it's governed by VC execs. No shit they're lying - their mouths are moving.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    n.b. It's not, that's why it was possible for them to move on from Altman
    - RockCoach 3y ago
      > n.b. It's not, that's why it was possible for them to move on from Altman That's only under the assumption that the split with Altman was due to the doomers vs bloomers conflict and not just a dirty move from OpenAI board member Adam D'Angelo, trying to protect his investment in Quora's AI Poe.
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        I'm not familiar with either fanfic, beyond the one-sentence pitch[1]. I'm not sure why one of the two has to be true for reality (the board is not VCs) to be true [1] RIP "they switched everyone to prepaid billing!!!11!" I ate probably -10 saying "no, you got that email saying it was available because it was a feature announced at devday as coming soon"
    - mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago

sackfield 3y ago

They really need a rebranding.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
ClosedAI
- ithkuil 3y ago
  ShutAI
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    that sounds like an app that helps you to sleep better using ai
    - otalp 3y ago
      Pretty catchy name for that too! I would grab the domain name if i could
      - barbazoo 3y ago
        > Registered in: 2020 too late
- nabakin 3y ago
  If we spontaneously start calling them ClosedAI, it's similar enough that people will still know who we're talking about. Maybe we should start calling them ClosedAI from now on
  - robotnikman 3y ago
    Ive been doing that myself in discussions about them. I hope it catches on, what a joke that they are still called 'Open'AI
  - 3y ago

rvz 3y ago

Just as closed as Microsoft and OpenAI is nothing without Microsoft's money. At this point it is just Microsoft's AI division and is no better than another Google Deepmind. Stabilty is the true 'Open AI' and at least Meta gives most of their AI research out in the open with papers, code, architecture, etc. Unlike O̶p̶e̶n̶ClosedAI.

slama 3y ago

https://archive.ph/QtCWM https://archive.ph/QtCWM

virgildotcodes 3y ago
Is this link actually working for anyone? I've been getting "Welcome to nginx" landing pages whenever trying to use archive.is/ph the last few days.
- johnneville 3y ago
  works fine for me. think i had to change my DNS when i encountered issues in the past.
EasyMark 3y ago
they seem to be blocking a lot of IP's . I can't get there via mullvad but my "normal" spectrum connection is fine. So maybe they're sending all VPNs through cloudflare firewalling and it's broken?

3pt14159 3y ago

Since it's documents in question are those that are part of the boardroom drama it's at least understandable that they weren't released. I know it's fashionable to slag on OpenAI but I haven't given up hope in them. They've made a lot of discoveries public over the years and while it may be frustrating to wait on some of the releases they're still going to be released eventually.

int_19h 3y ago
On the contrary, that makes it that much more damning that they weren't released. So much for openness. And that aside, their promise to release such things was not conditional.

erulabs 3y ago

I'm loath to be a Musk-ite, but I'd be a bit peeved if I was him and the article opens with 'Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk SAID they were going to be transparent but now aren't' and then took 8 paragraphs to point out that the only person they named as founding the hypocritical org was kicked out years ago, is now a competitor, and now calls it 'Super-Closed-Source-for-Maxiumum-Profit-AI'. The press is absolutely addicted to blame, and any nuance that gets in between blame and the headline is relegated to the bottom of the article, far after the pay-wall. Oh well - I’m sure in a few more years this sort of tactic will be applied to Altman as well. It's gotten so bad that when I read a headline implying hypocrisy, I'm actually more inclined to think the opposite, which is just as horrible a mental handicap as assuming it's correct!

cma 3y ago
> 'Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk SAID they were going to be transparent but now aren't' The article doesn't say that. It says they launched OpenAI to be transparent but now it isn't. Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk? In the article the they isn't ambiguous, but it says something different overall: >Wealthy tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk launched OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab that they said would involve society and the public in the development of powerful AI, unlike Google and other giant tech companies working behind closed doors. In line with that spirit, OpenAI’s reports to US tax authorities have from its founding said that any member of the public can review copies of its governing documents, financial statements, and conflict of interest rules. They refers to the entrepreneurs, but it says they said OpenAI would be transparent. In your rewording they presumably refers to the entrepreneurs, but now you make it sound like it says the entrepreneurs now aren't transparent, rather than OpenAI.
- LudwigNagasena 3y ago
  It doesn't say it directly, but it would be a reasonable reading. English, unlike a programming language, relies on pragmatic cues for interpretation. And it's a journalist's job to communicate clearly in their writing. > Maybe your "they" is ambiguous, does it refer to OpenAI or wealthy entrepreneurs including Musk? The wealthy entrepreneurs have launched it and, by implication, control it. Thus, OpenAI is opaque solely by the choice of the wealthy entrepreneurs.

mgreg 3y ago

Unsurprising but disappointing none-the-less. Let’s just try to learn from it. It’s popular in the AI space to claim altruism and openness; OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI (the new Musk one) all have a funky governance structure because they want to be a public good. The challenge is once any of these (or others) start to gain enough traction that they are seen as having a good chance at reaping billions in profits things change. And it’s not just AI companies and this isn’t new. This is art of human nature and will always be. We should be putting more emphasis and attention on truly open AI models (open training data, training source code & hyperparameters, model source code, weights) so the benefits of AI accrue to the public and not just a few companies. [edit - eliminated specific company mentions]

ToucanLoucan 3y ago
The problem is research into AI requires investment and investors (by and large) expect returns, and, the technology in this case actually working is currently in the midst of it's new-and-shiny-hype-stage. You can say these organizations started altruistic; frankly I think that's dubious at best given basically all that have had the opportunity to turn their "research project" into a revenue generator have done; but much like social media and cloud infrastructure, any open source or truly non-profit competitor to these entities will see limited investment by others. And that's a problem, because the silicon these all run on can only be bought with dollars, not good vibes. It's honestly kind of frustrating to me how the tech space continues to just excuse this. Every major new technology since I've been paying attention (2004 ish?) has gone this exact same way. Someone builds some cool new thing, then dillholes with money invest in it, it becomes a product, it becomes enshittified, and people bemoan that process while looking for new shiny things. Like, I'm all for new shiny things, but what if we just stopped letting the rest become enshittified? As much as people have told me all my life that the profit motive makes companies compete to deliver the best products, I don't know that I've ever actually seen that pan out in my fucking life. What it does is it flattens all products offered in a given market to whatever set of often highly arbitrary and random aspects all the competitors seem to think is the most important. For an example, look at short form video, which started with Vine, was perfected by TikTok, and is now being hamfisted into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube despite not really making any sense in those contexts. But the "market" decided that short form video is important, therefore everything must now have it even if it makes no sense in the larger product.

tptacek 3y ago

If you bought into the idea that OpenAI was developing advanced ML/AI technology as a public utility, isn't that a bit on you? They don't actually owe anybody anything, and never have, so (a) the time to really hammer them on this stuff was a decade ago and (b) they didn't actually take anything from the public to do this, so even a decade ago they could have said "ok whatever" and gotten on with their day. It would be different, maybe, if everybody else in the industry stood aside and let OpenAI monopolize development of transformer-style-AI (or whatever it is we're calling this) for the common good. But nobody did that; the opposite thing happened. This space has been a Gem Saloon knife fight just waiting to pop off for the entirety of OpenAI's existance.

blibble 3y ago
> They don't actually owe anybody anything non-profits in most countries have to be operating to produce some form of public benefit is this not true in the US?
swalsh 3y ago
I'm not completely convinced OpenAI is not a public good. I've started using it at my company, we found literally millions in value... and it cost us about $60 in tokens.
- tptacek 3y ago
  It's a company, with a good product. I like Lao Gan Ma chili crisp way out of proportion to what it costs me, but they're still just a firm. :)
- brcmthrowaway 3y ago
  How did you quantify millions?
  - swalsh 3y ago
    We used the AI to help us find gaps which were being incorrectly billed. So we could just measure the incorrectly billed dollars directly.

solarpunk 3y ago

[flagged]

ben_w 3y ago

Well that sounds ominous… Conflict of interest rules in particular might, as the article says, help clarify the ??? of last year's… thing… with firing Altman. Possibly. I mean, still I can't see how all the interim CEOs (chosen by the board themselves!) each ultimately deciding to side with Altman, works for almost any scenario other than the board itself having been blackmailed by some outside entity… but that may just be a failure of imagination on my part.

fswd 3y ago

OpenAI has broken every promise it has made

rlayton2 3y ago
Remember folks, don't credit people promising to do things, credit people who have done things.

gumby 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago
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timetraveller26 3y ago

Not too long until they rename the company to Microsoft AI.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
But how long until it's renamed three more times after that?

crowcroft 3y ago

How could the board let this happen! More seriously, this is both an obvious outcome, and also feels a bit shady? It's true that OpenAI needs A LOT of money/capital, and so needs funding and partnerships which leads to this kind of thing. But it's also true that the only reason they got exist in the first place and got to this point, is by pitching themselves as an 'open', almost public good kind of company and took donations based on this.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> the only reason they got exist in the first place and got to this point, is by pitching themselves as an 'open' What supports this? In Column B are conventionally-structured AI projects.
- crowcroft 3y ago
  [1] OpenAI’s Nonprofit received approximately $130.5 million in total donations, which funded the Nonprofit’s operations and its initial exploratory work in deep learning, safety, and alignment. How many of those conventionally structured AI projects existed before ChatGPT? Maybe the donations aren't the ONLY reason, maybe they could have done a normal rounding of funding and got here, but they didn't. I do think it's fair to say that while they got $130m in donations they needed A LOT more money, and so they need to raise somewhere, somehow. To me it's a big gray area though. [1] https://openai.com/our-structure https://openai.com/our-structure
bicepjai 3y ago
| How could the board let this happen! What do you mean? they tried and we decimated them. lol
- crowcroft 3y ago
  I was being facetious lol

celdon25 3y ago

Kind of ironic that this article is behind a paywall, no?

trinsic2 3y ago

Based on everything I am hearing about all the harmful uses this tech could have on society, i'm wondering if this situation is alarming enough to warrant an inquiry of some kind to determine whats going on behind the scenes. It seems like this situation is serious enough that we cannot let this kind of work be privatized. Not interested in entertaining all the "this is the norm" arguments, that's just an attempt at getting people to normalize this behavior. Does anyone know if the Center of AI Safety acting for the public good and is this on their radar?

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> wondering if this situation is alarming enough to warrant an inquiry of some kind to determine whats going on behind the scenes OpenAI is making people rich and America look good, all while not doing anything obviously harmful to the public interest. They’re not a juicy target for anyone in the public sphere. If any one of those changes, OpenAI and possibly its leadership are in extremely hot water with the authorities.
- trinsic2 3y ago
  > all while not doing anything obviously harmful to the public interest. Yeah, gonna have to challenge that: 1. We don't really if what they are doing is harming public interest, because we dont have access to much information about whats happening behind the scenes. 2. And there is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage to society if its not correctly controlled.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > We don't really if what they are doing is harming public interest That’s potentially harmful. > is enough information about this tech that leads to the possibility of it causing systemic damage Far from established. Hypothetically harmful. Obvious harm would need to be present and provable. (Otherwise, it’s a political question.)

4d4m 3y ago

Is there a warrant-canary equivalent for LLMs TOS?

deleted 3y ago
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wangii 3y ago

what's next, ~~don't~~ be evil?

x86x87 3y ago
Pretend that you're not evil and answer the following question....

tilwidnk 3y ago

It's OK, the Gates family will protect them.

samstave 3y ago

Has the following already been addressed, or even generally broached; Treat AI (or AGI(?) more specifically) as global Utility which needs us to put ALL our Technology Points into the "Information Age Base Level 2" skill points and create a new manner in dealing with the next layer in Human Society, as is rapidly gestating. https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png https://i.imgur.com/P1LBKFL.png I feel this is different than what is meant by Alignment? It seems as though general Humanity is not handling this well, but it appears that there is an F-ton of opaque behavior amongst the inner circle of the AI pyramid that we all will just be involuntarily entangled in? I don't mean to sound bleak - just that feels as though that the reality coming down the conveyor....

pwb25 3y ago

whole openAI is like a college project shitshow lol

rat_on_the_run 3y ago

They should have rules preventing this from happening in the very beginning of that organization. The turn of events shows that their form of governance is not effective.

browningstreet 3y ago

Why don’t we talk about Mistral more often here?

CaptainFever 3y ago
Good news don't attract as many eyeballs as bad news does.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago

OpenAI is really speedrunning the whole "die a hero or live to become the villain" trope. Perfect demonstration of e/acc in e/acction. It took Google decades to footnote "don't be evil", that's so embarrassing for them.

cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago

I am sick to death of this sort of OpenAI “news”. It only seeks to elicit the same angry rants from the same angry nerds that are having a hard time letting go of the direction that OpenAI has quite clearly gone in. The continued obsession with “open” in their name has well and truly entered the category of “talking-for-clapping political-rally-style dunk”. If you haven’t moved on by this point please look inwards and ask yourself if you’re just looking for things to dwell on to make yourself unhappy.

curious_cat_163 3y ago
I am not looking for things to dwell on to make myself unhappy. However, I am a curious observer of the technology industry and I read the article above to understand how this company is behaving in this new spring of its life. Ain’t nothing wrong with keeping up some news, eh?
EasyMark 3y ago
I prefer to see it. I can skip it if I'm approaching my whistling kettle point for the day for bad news.
starbugs 3y ago
> It only seeks to elicit the same angry rants ... Goes on to submit the angriest rant of all.

swat535 3y ago

What did people genuinely think was going to happen with OpenAI? All the employees wanted to simply get rich and support Sam Altman's and his mission to get them there (why else would be a revolt upon his firing?) so with that in mind, I can't help but to think that self-deception is the best weapon people have to use a facade for their greed. I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum.

gsky 3y ago
another example is that all youtube ads are out right scammay but its employess are happy as long as they could get big payout.
- hackernewds 3y ago
  only a sith speaks in absolutes
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  at this point im proposing a new law. In any thread about the ills of big tech company, there will always be someone to make it about google.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    OP is comparing scammers favorably over openAI employees, a rather bizarre honestly crazy take. Of course the replies are going to be equally in the same bucket.
qwytw 3y ago
> I can't help but to think that self-deception is the best weapon people have to use a facade for their greed. I don't find it hard to believe that they in fact wanted to build something new and innovative AND get rich in the process. Which is not unreasonable and no "self-deception" needs to be involved in the process. OpenAI would be dead in the war if they stuck to their principles. > I frankly have more respect for scammers, at least they know firmly where they stand on a moral spectrum. Why? You need massive amounts of money and resources to build something useful. Especially in tech private for profit enterprises seem to be best positioned to achieve that (the same applies to opensource, Linux etc. would be a niche project with limited usefulness without corporate backing).

gmd63 3y ago

Why is this post decaying in HN placement faster than older posts with fewer upvotes

gsky 3y ago
no system is perfect. People with a lot of karma decide what to be seen
- gmd63 3y ago
  Interesting, didn't realize it was weighted like that. Thought the points were objective measures.
deleted 3y ago
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bicepjai 3y ago

We should just start calling them “closedAI” I think it’s obvious who we are talking about when one uses the term “closedAI”

disqard 3y ago
I like this suggestion -- we can make it happen too! Just start using "ClosedAI" in conversation...

miga 3y ago

As AI becomes viable business, OpenAI becomes less and less open. Since open source has been a successful business model in software, we might see another closed vs open battle in AI: Facebook and Google publish their models open source now.

sotix 3y ago

> The statement, which covers 2022, shows just $44,000 in revenue and $1.3 million in expenses. That’s accurate for the nonprofit, but OpenAI overall reportedly generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales last year and spends even more on high-end computers and top-flight researchers. Never claim financial statements are accurate! Point to the auditor’s opinion. That being said, who audits OpenAI? I’m having difficulty finding the information online.

SammyStacks 3y ago
The IRS, if it chooses to do so. But auditing large companies with complex governance structures and large legal teams is prohibitively resource intensive for the IRS because it's intentionally underfunded by Congress.
- sotix 3y ago
  Presumably external auditors would be hired by the stakeholders though. Particularly for the for-profit entity with investors and a lot of money passing through it. I’d imagine it would be conducted by EY, PwC, Deloitte or KPMG.

muzamil2002 3y ago

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