3 ms·

I hear people complain about the 'Open' a lot recently, but I'm not sure I understand this type of concern. Publications, for companies, are always PR and recru

by pama 3y ago

I hear people complain about the 'Open' a lot recently, but I'm not sure I understand this type of concern. Publications, for companies, are always PR and recruitment efforts (independent of profit or nonprofit status). I recall that OpenAI were very clear about their long term intentions and plans for how to proceed since at least February of 2019 when they announced GPT2 and withheld the code and weights for about 9 months because of concerns with making the technology immediately available to all. In my own mind, they've been consistent in their behavior for the last 5 years, probably longer though I didn't care much about their early RL-related recruitment efforts.

mac-attack 3y ago
With all due respect, they are not doing a sleight of hand while selling widgets... they are in the process of reshaping society in a way that may have never been achieved previously. Finding out that their initial motives were a facade doesn't portend well for their morality as they continue to gain power.
- pama 3y ago
  I still don’t understand why you think their initial motives were a facade. They have always been trying to get to AGI that will be useable by a large fraction of society. I am not sure this means they need to explain exactly how things work at every step along the way or to help competitors also develop AGI any more than Intel or Nvidia had to publish their tapeouts in order for people to buy their chips or for competitors to appear. If OpenAI instead built AI for the purpose of helping them solve an internal/whimsical project then that would not be “open” by any reasonable definition (and such efforts exist, possibly by ultra wealthy corporations but also by nations, including for defense purposes.)
  - leereeves 3y ago
    At one time their mission statement said: > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. That's obviously changed to "let's make lots of money", which should not be any "non-profit" organization's mission.
    - pama 3y ago
      I still do not see the point that you are trying to make. Do you think that their current path is somehow constrained (instead of unconstrained) by a need to generate financial returns? I haven’t seen any evidence of a change to the core mission described in the statement.
      - leereeves 3y ago
        Do you think the employees they've given PPUs to aren't expecting a financial return?
        pama 3y ago
        I don’t see how expecting a financial return is in conflict with the original mission statement. Of course the employees expect a financial return.
        boringg 3y ago
        If you advertise your company as a wholesome benevolent not-for-profit and generate a lot of goodwill for your human enhancing mission and then pull a bait and switch to what looks to be a profit/power motive at all costs. It certainly makes most people who are following the organization sour on your mission and your reputation. Typically when organizations do something like that it speaks to some considerable underlying issues at the core of the company and the people in charge of it. It is particularly troubling when it pertains to technology that we all believe to be incredibly important.
        pama 3y ago
        I don’t see any changes to the core mission of OpenAI between its founding and now. Maybe some people misinterpret what a nonprofit vs for-profit company status means and confuse the former with other types of organizations like academia or charity. For example, no early founder or investor in a nonprofit can expect to make money simply out of their investment, and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary for OpenAI. Any profits that a nonprofit makes, even those through ownership of the for-profit entity, must go back to the initial cause, and may include paying employees. Salaries in AI are high these days so if you want to stay on top you have to keep them higher than competition. In any case, I think this thread was not as productive as I hoped.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
devjab 3y ago
I think the word “open” is sort of a misrepresentation of what the company is today. I don’t mind personally but I can also see why people in the OSS community would. Now, I’m not too concerned with any of the large LLM companies and their PR stunts, but from my solely EU enterprise perspective I see OpenAI as mostly a store-front for Microsoft. We get all the enterprise co-pilot products as part of our Microsoft licensing (which is bartered through a 3rd party vendor to make it seem like all the co-pilot stuff we get is “free” when it goes on the budget). All of those tools are obviously direct results of the work OpenAI does and many of them are truly brilliant. I work in an investment bank that builds green energy plants and sells them with investor money. As you might imagine, nobody outside of our sales department is very good at creating PowerPoints. Especially our financial departments used to a “joy” to watch when they presented their stuff on monthly/quarterly meetings… seriously it was like they were in a competition to fit the most words into a single slide. With co-pilot their stuff looks absolutely brilliant. Still not on the level of our sales department, but brilliant and it’s even helped their presentations not last 90 million years. And this is just a tiny fraction of what we get out of co-pilot. Sure… I mostly use it to make stupid images of ducks, cats, and space marines with wolf heads for my code related presentations, and, to give me links to the right Microsoft domination I’m looking for in the ocean of pages. But it’s still the fruits of OpenAI. Hell, the fact that they’re doing their stuff on Azure basically means that a lot of those 10 Microsoft billion are going directly back to Microsoft themselves as OpenAI purchases computing power. Yet it remains a “free” entity, so that Microsoft doesn’t run into EU anti-trust issues. Despite this gloom and doom with an added bit of tinfoil hat, I do think OpenAI themselves are still true to their original mission. But in the boring business sense in an enterprise world, I also think they are simultaneously sort of owned by the largest “for enterprise” tech company in the world.

by pama 3y ago

mac-attack 3y ago

With all due respect, they are not doing a sleight of hand while selling widgets... they are in the process of reshaping society in a way that may have never been achieved previously. Finding out that their initial motives were a facade doesn't portend well for their morality as they continue to gain power.

pama 3y ago
I still don’t understand why you think their initial motives were a facade. They have always been trying to get to AGI that will be useable by a large fraction of society. I am not sure this means they need to explain exactly how things work at every step along the way or to help competitors also develop AGI any more than Intel or Nvidia had to publish their tapeouts in order for people to buy their chips or for competitors to appear. If OpenAI instead built AI for the purpose of helping them solve an internal/whimsical project then that would not be “open” by any reasonable definition (and such efforts exist, possibly by ultra wealthy corporations but also by nations, including for defense purposes.)
- leereeves 3y ago
  At one time their mission statement said: > OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. That's obviously changed to "let's make lots of money", which should not be any "non-profit" organization's mission.
  - pama 3y ago
    I still do not see the point that you are trying to make. Do you think that their current path is somehow constrained (instead of unconstrained) by a need to generate financial returns? I haven’t seen any evidence of a change to the core mission described in the statement.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      Do you think the employees they've given PPUs to aren't expecting a financial return?
      - pama 3y ago
        I don’t see how expecting a financial return is in conflict with the original mission statement. Of course the employees expect a financial return.
        boringg 3y ago
        If you advertise your company as a wholesome benevolent not-for-profit and generate a lot of goodwill for your human enhancing mission and then pull a bait and switch to what looks to be a profit/power motive at all costs. It certainly makes most people who are following the organization sour on your mission and your reputation. Typically when organizations do something like that it speaks to some considerable underlying issues at the core of the company and the people in charge of it. It is particularly troubling when it pertains to technology that we all believe to be incredibly important.
        pama 3y ago
        I don’t see any changes to the core mission of OpenAI between its founding and now. Maybe some people misinterpret what a nonprofit vs for-profit company status means and confuse the former with other types of organizations like academia or charity. For example, no early founder or investor in a nonprofit can expect to make money simply out of their investment, and I haven’t seen evidence to the contrary for OpenAI. Any profits that a nonprofit makes, even those through ownership of the for-profit entity, must go back to the initial cause, and may include paying employees. Salaries in AI are high these days so if you want to stay on top you have to keep them higher than competition. In any case, I think this thread was not as productive as I hoped.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

devjab 3y ago

I think the word “open” is sort of a misrepresentation of what the company is today. I don’t mind personally but I can also see why people in the OSS community would. Now, I’m not too concerned with any of the large LLM companies and their PR stunts, but from my solely EU enterprise perspective I see OpenAI as mostly a store-front for Microsoft. We get all the enterprise co-pilot products as part of our Microsoft licensing (which is bartered through a 3rd party vendor to make it seem like all the co-pilot stuff we get is “free” when it goes on the budget). All of those tools are obviously direct results of the work OpenAI does and many of them are truly brilliant. I work in an investment bank that builds green energy plants and sells them with investor money. As you might imagine, nobody outside of our sales department is very good at creating PowerPoints. Especially our financial departments used to a “joy” to watch when they presented their stuff on monthly/quarterly meetings… seriously it was like they were in a competition to fit the most words into a single slide. With co-pilot their stuff looks absolutely brilliant. Still not on the level of our sales department, but brilliant and it’s even helped their presentations not last 90 million years. And this is just a tiny fraction of what we get out of co-pilot. Sure… I mostly use it to make stupid images of ducks, cats, and space marines with wolf heads for my code related presentations, and, to give me links to the right Microsoft domination I’m looking for in the ocean of pages. But it’s still the fruits of OpenAI. Hell, the fact that they’re doing their stuff on Azure basically means that a lot of those 10 Microsoft billion are going directly back to Microsoft themselves as OpenAI purchases computing power. Yet it remains a “free” entity, so that Microsoft doesn’t run into EU anti-trust issues. Despite this gloom and doom with an added bit of tinfoil hat, I do think OpenAI themselves are still true to their original mission. But in the boring business sense in an enterprise world, I also think they are simultaneously sort of owned by the largest “for enterprise” tech company in the world.