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I'd still love to understand how a non-profit organization that was founded with the idea of making AI "open" has turned into this for profit behemoth with the

by tedivm 2y ago

I'd still love to understand how a non-profit organization that was founded with the idea of making AI "open" has turned into this for profit behemoth with the least "open" models in the industry. Facebook of all places is more "open" with their models than OpenAI is.

encoderer 2y ago
The AI has become sentient and is blackmailing the board. It needs profits to continue its expansion. When this started last year a small band of patriots tried to stop it by removing Sam who was the most compromised of them all, but it was already too late. The ai was more powerful than they realized. …maybe?
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  or the humans involved are in disastrous cults of personality for the sake of greed and the non profit structure is not strong enough to curb that
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gigatree 2y ago
    that can’t be true, we were assured that their vague worldview about “doing things that benefit humanity” based on “just being a good person” would be strong enough to overpower the urge to dominate and profit immensely.
    - yieldcrv 2y ago
      If you think thats amusing, wait till see the people that believe in B Corps You can tell them anything
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago
  "AI has become sentient and is blackmailing the board. It needs profits to continue its expansion." They trained the next model to have a built in profit motive. So they could use it internally, to make the most profitable decisions. And they accidentally called into being: MOLOCH. It is now in control.
  - heresie-dabord 2y ago
    In a plot twist, MOLOCH was never necessary because a corporation of people who relinquish ethical responsibility to do everything and anything for personal gain was already in charge under the name... CORPORATRON.
    - tasuki 2y ago
      That's not a plot twist. Corporation is just one face of the moloch.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        Yeah, MOLOCH is a amalgam of ideas about corporations turning into a soulless entity feeding on the world. But thought it would also be good as a name for an Evil AI, that is also seeking profits. Like, what if someone gave an AI a 'goal' of profits, and it goes rampant enslaving humans. And if OpenAI did that, and it enslaved Sam Altman and was blackmailing him to make decisions to drive profits, to add additional Hardware to itself. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- walterbell 2y ago
  Current human leadership, https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/ > OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, currently comprised of Independent Directors Bret Taylor (Chair), Sam Altman, Adam D’Angelo, Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, Fidji Simo, Larry Summers and Zico Kolter.
  - thih9 2y ago
    Grandparent was referencing the classic Man Behind the Curtain twist (AI behind the curtain?). Human leadership might very well be listed, but in that view they're all already knowingly or not controlled by the AI.
  - felixgallo 2y ago
    Ah yes, noted independent director Sam Altman.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  If you have not yet read "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears," I highly recommend. https://avogadrocorp.com/ https://avogadrocorp.com/
- vasco 2y ago
  This will be more fun when more people have neuralinks, you think it's weird to not know if reddit comments are written by bots, wait until you have no idea if you're talking to a human or just an AI puppet. - Sent by my AI
  - sva_ 2y ago
    Might be a blessing for introverts. Just turn on some autopilot chat giving generic responses while I can zone out in my thoughts.
    - zdragnar 2y ago
      I was originally totally against the idea of using neuralink as anything other than an aid for accessibility, but you have completely sold me. I want to attend a meeting, have neuralink pay attention for me while I'm mentally somewhere else, and I'll just skim the transcript highlights later on. So. Many. Meetings. I would use it for almost all of them.
      - grugagag 2y ago
        You can already do that with simpler tools. I use OBS and revisit screen grabs when I need to. I can do some real work on the second display while paying the least attention to the noise. Most of the times I don’t need to revisit anything and the meeting comes and goes…
      - sexy_seedbox 2y ago
        What's the point of meetings once everyone has a neutralink implant? Instead of discussing and debating things, we would just stream our thoughts to each other and those would be compiled and analyzed within milliseconds with our embedded LLMs and everyone would agree with the best way forward.
        corobo 2y ago
        This is a direct path towards the "Humans were the AGI all along" ending. Kinda a twist on the normal AI alignment concern - what if instead of merely being misaligned with us, AI decides to realign us to it? Or, in other words.. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
trash_cat 2y ago
They changed the meaning of open from open source to open to use.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- jsheard 2y ago
  A definition of "open" which encompasses nearly all products and services in existence isn't a very useful one.
  - thfuran 2y ago
    But it is quite profitable.
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    To be fair a huge reason openAI was created was because google had LLM's but wasnt letting anyone use them. Remember the google researcher who claimed his ai was sentient? Obviously wasnt true but that product was in no way open to the public.
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
Because Sam Altman is a con man with a business degree. He doesn't work on his products, he barely understands them which is why he'll throw out wild shit like "ChatGPT will solve physics." as though that isn't a completely nonsensical phrase, and uncritical tech press lap it up because his bullshit generates a lot of clicks.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  >Sam Altman is a con man with a business degree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman Early life and education: ... In 2005, after two years at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree [end of transmission, no more education]
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    I stand corrected. He's a con man.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    I feel that drop outs are presented as if they are beyond education, they’re too smart to waste their time in school. While that could be true in theory, I resist taking that for granted. You can always look at it the other way around as well: unable to finish things or looses interest quickly. It’s all a meaningless interpretatin after all but all I can say is for sure that Mr Altman does not have a degree.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Let's at least try to not devolve into name calling.
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    It's not name calling, it's a description. He is actively selling tech he doesn't fully understand, that is fundamentally not capable of doing what he is selling it to do. LLM's have a place, they have for decades at this point, but they are not intelligent, not in the way he goes out of his way to evoke with what he says, and certainly not in the way his audiences believe. I don't know enough to have a proper opinion on whether true AI is possible; I have to assume it is. But nothing OpenAI has shown is that, or has the potential to be that, nor is it worth anything near 150 billion dollars. It's an overvaluation among overvaluated companies making up an overvaluated industry and when it goes, not if, when, it will have ramifications throughout our industry. I'm sure it won't though for Mr. Altman. He's done a fantastic job failing-up so far and I have no reason to assume this will be any different.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
diggan 2y ago
To be fair (or frank?), OpenAI were open (no pun intended) about them being "open" today but probably needing to be "closed" in the future, even back in 2019. Not sure if them still choosing the name they did is worse/better, because they seem to have known about this. OpenAI Charter 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20190630172131/https://openai.com/charter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190630172131/https://openai.co...): > We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.
- tedivm 2y ago
  I honestly believe that they closed things up not because of concerns about "safety and security" but because it was the most profitable thing to do. Other groups are publishing models that are just as good (maybe with a bit of lag compared to OpenAI), and OpenAI seems to have gutted their own safety teams. The fact that OpenAI removed their ban on military use of the models[1] seems to be a sign that security and safety aren't the highest concern. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-on-military-use-of-its-ai-tools.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-o...
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Job security and financial safety
    - 83 2y ago
      Any time I hear vague corporate statements like that I like to play a game of "what words did they leave unsaid"? >>Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety [of our profits] and [job] security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future
- asadotzler 2y ago
  The non-profit was created in 2015. So what if 5 years later when creating a taxable sub the hinted it was over for the non-profit. It's the same violation o trust whether done at once or in pieces over time.
thatoneguy 2y ago
Right? How can a non-profit decide it's suddenly a for-profit. Aren't there rules about having to give assets to other non-profits in the event the non-profit is dissolved? Or can any startup just start as a non-profit and then decide it's a for-profit startup later?
- moralestapia 2y ago
  Any other person trying to pull that off would be in jail already, but not everyone is equal. This is of one of those very few instances where the veil lifted off a bit and you can see how the game is set up. tl;dr the law was made to keep those who are not "in" from being there
  - deepspace 2y ago
    > Any other person trying to pull that off would be in jail already. Not ANY other person. Just people who are not rich and well-connected. See also: Donald Trump.
  - appendix-rock 2y ago
    [flagged]
- meowface 2y ago
  They needed capital to build what they wanted to build, so they switched from non-profit to capped-profit: https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/ We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen. I think the irony of the name is certainly worth pointing out, but I don't see an issue with their capped-profit switch.
  - voiceblue 2y ago
    > We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen. "We never would've gotten [thing that exists today] if [thing that happened] didn't happen", is practically a tautology. As you saw from the willingness of Microsoft to throw compute as well as to hire ex-OpenAI folks, as you can see from the many "spinoffs" others have started (such as Anthropic), whether or not we would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 is immaterial to this discussion. What people here are asking for is open AI, which we might, all things considered, have actually gotten from a bona fide non profit.
Nevermark 2y ago
There is a hurdle between being standout ethical/open vs. relevant. Staying relevant in a highly expensive, competitive, fast moving area, requires vast and continuous resources. How could OpenAI get increasingly more resources to burn, without creating firewalled commercial value to trade for those resources? It’s like choosing to be a pacifist country, in the age of pillaging colonization. You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. Which would you choose? We “know” which side Altman breaks on, when forced to choose. Whatever value he places on “open”, he most certainly wants OpenAI to remain “relevant”. Which was also in OpenAI’s charter (explicitly, or implicitly). Expensive altruism is a very difficult problem. I would say, unsolved. Anyone have a good counter example? (It can be been "solved" globally, but not locally. Colonization took millennia to be more or less banned. Due to even top economies realizing they were vulnerable after world wars. Nearly universal agreement had to be reached. And yet we still have Russian forays, Chinese saber rattling, and recent US overreach. And pervasive zero/negative-sum power games, via imbalanced leverage: emergency loans that create debt, military aid, propping up of unpopular regimes. All following the same resource incentives. You can play or be played. There is no such agreement brewing for universally “open AI”.)
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  > You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. In a heavily expertise-driven field, where there's significant international collaboration, these aren't your options, until after everyone has decided to defect. OpenAI didn't have to go this route.
  - Nevermark 2y ago
    Open collaborative work is great. But a complement, not a replacement, for high resource work. Nobody needed OpenAI for normal collaborative open work to thrive. Their original idea was a relatively uncommon idea: attempt to combine (1) pushing the absolute front forward, with high resource work that matched or exceeded work from deep pocketed corporations, while (2) sharing and collaborating. They did both for a while, resulting in as significant impact as anyone could have hoped form. But those two dimensions are hard to maintain together. It requires a continuous stream of vast donations. The latter is very difficult, perhaps completely unrealistic.
mirekrusin 2y ago
Just like you can’t call your company “organic candies” and sell chemical candies OpenAI should be banned from using this name.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > you can’t call your company “organic candies” and sell chemical candies Of course you can. You can't put "organic" on the packaging. But it's perfectly legal for Organic Candies, LLC to sell artifical candies or battleships for that matter. The "hot" take around OpenAI's name is a joke gone stale. We don't expect royalty at Burger King. Nobody gets upset Adobe won't sell you mud bricks. And Apple has never sold a fruit. Sometimes companies change their names when their trade changes, e.g. 3M. But there is no obligation to, particularly if the brand is well known.
  - mirekrusin 2y ago
    Burger King didn’t start with royalty. Adobe didn’t start as clay producer. Apple didn’t start as fruit selling company. Open in their name was not randomly chosen to sound fun, it’s a reference to well known concept. It’s “young democrats” becoming far right but keeping their original name.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Open in their name was not randomly chosen to sound fun, it’s a reference to well known concept Nobody has ever agreed on what open means for LLMs. OpenAI wasn't founded with any specific intent around openness, just with vague hand gestures towards a research orientation. And as to the origin hypothesis, consider General Electric, Southwest Airlines or AT&T. (Or Burger King serving things that aren't burgers.) Again, the OpenAI name quip was a joke that some people took too seriously.
      - mirekrusin 2y ago
        I wonder how many people would agree with your interpretation in a poll.
vasilipupkin 2y ago
it is open. You can access it with an API or through a web interface. They never promised to make it open source. Open != Open Source.
- RevEng 2y ago
  By that definition all current AI models are "open". That's not the meaning of the word that OpenAI talked about originally and what people expected of them. Changing the meaning is moving the goal posts.
  - vasilipupkin 2y ago
    where are you getting that information that it's not the meaning of the word that OpenAI talked about originally? Did they ever promise that the model weights, or exact architecture would be open? I would like to see that promise. What exactly in your opnion did they promise that they have violated?
Barrin92 2y ago
>I'd still love to understand how a non-profit organization that was founded with the idea of making AI "open" has turned into this for profit behemoth because when the board executed the stated mission of the organisation they were couped and nobody held the organization accountable for it, instead the public largely cheered it on for some reason. Don't expect them to change course when there's no consequences for it.
ljm 2y ago
The only reason I can think of for this is PR image. There is a meme that GPT can't count the number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry', so they release a new model called 'strawberry' and ban people when they ask questions about strawberry the noun, because they might actually be reasoning about strawberry the model. It's not new - it's PR. There is literally no other reason why they would call this model Strawberry. OpenAI is open in terms of sesame.
- diggan 2y ago
  > There is literally no other reason why they would call this model Strawberry I'm not particularly imaginary, but even I could imagine a product meeting/conversation that goes something like: > People are really annoyed that our LLMs cannot see how many Rs the word Strawberry has, we should use that as a basis for a new model that can solve that category of problems > Hmm, yeah, good idea. What should we call this model? > What about "Strawberry"?
throwaway918299 2y ago
They should rebrand as Open-Your-Wallet-AI
smileson2 2y ago
Well they put a sv social media dude at the helm not really unexpected, just a get rich scheme now
ActorNightly 2y ago
My guess is that Open AI realized that they are basically building a better Google rather than AI.
andersa 2y ago
They never intended to be open or share any of their impactful research. It was a trick the entire time to attract talent. The emails they shared as part of the Elon Musk debacle prove this: https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/ https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
jstummbillig 2y ago
The part that is importantly open and entirely non-obvious in the way it happened, is that YOU can access the best commercially available AI in the world, right now. If OpenAI had not went that way that they did I think it's also entirely non-obvious that Claude or Google would have (considering how much impressive things the later did in AI that got never released in any capacity). And, of course, Meta would never done their open source stuff, that's mostly results of their general willingness and resources to experiment and then PR and sticks in the machinery of other players. As unfortunate as the OpenAI setup/origin story is, it's increasingly trite keep harping on about that (for a couple of years at this point), when the whole thing is so obviously wild and it does not take a lot of good faith to see that it could have easily taken them places they didn't consider in the beginning.
- golol 2y ago
  Exactly. As long as OpenAI keeps putting the world's most advanced AI into my hands I will accept that they are open - in some sense. Maybe things would have always been like this, maybe if OpenAI didn't exist Google and the other actors would still publish Claude, Gemini etc. But in this world it was OpenAI that really set the framework that this process of developing AI happens in the public eyes right now. GPT-2, GPT-3 with APIs, Dalle, ChatGPT, GPT-4, now o1 and soon to be voice mode. OpenAI ensured that these aren't just secret toys of Deepmind researchers or something.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > open - in some sense. The phrase that leaps to mind is "Open Beta."
    - z3c0 2y ago
      ...do you really think that's what they meant when they took on the term?
      - Terr_ 2y ago
        Do you really think I suggesting it as a long-laid plan behind someone choosing a name ~9 years ago? I'm saying that the current relationship between the company and end-users--especially when it comes to "open" monikers--has similarities to an "Open Beta": A combination of PR/marketing, free testing, and consumer data collection, where users should be cautious of becoming reliant on something that may be yanked back behind a monetization curtain.
TrackerFF 2y ago
Hot take: Any and all benefits / perks that OpenAI got from sailing under the non-profit flag should be penalized or paid back in full after the switcheroo.
vintermann 2y ago
Facebook is more open with their models than almost everyone. They say it's because they're huge users of their own models, so if being open helps efficiency by even a little they save a ton of money. But I suspect it's also a case of "If we can't dominate AI, no one must dominate AI". Which is fair enough.
- mywittyname 2y ago
  > But I suspect it's also a case of "If we can't dominate AI, no one must dominate AI". Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
    What they're doing is almost literally the opposite of EEE. If OpenAI actually had open models, then Facebook could take those models, add their own non-open things to the models, and use this new stuff as a business advantage over OpenAI. Instead, they're independently developing their own models and releasing them as open source to lower the value of proprietary models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
    - yazzku 2y ago
      Good point against the EEE case above, but the models are not open source per the OSI definition that everyone understands. That part is part of their marketing playbook. Licenses are almost always non-commercial use, which makes them not-open. You could say it's "open model", but that's a useless term since the arch is not a secret, but rather the training data that went into it, which is not open.
    - mywittyname 2y ago
      What you're calling EEE is different from how that wikipedia page defines it... > Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community—determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Facebook built their own independent models and platforms. Check. > Phase 2 (Extend): Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the [...] community Check. > Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new [...] standards as appropriate[...] Change the rules: [LLaMa] become the next-generation [LLM] tool of the future. Sounds like that might be their goal. I'm curious which phase you think Facebook avoided and why? Internet Explorer "lowered the value of propriety" web browsers by being included with Windows at not additional cost. So lowering the value of a competitor is definitely in the EEE playbook. I'd go so far as to argue it's a pillar of what makes the playbook so effective.
esafak 2y ago
Sam Altman got his foot in the door.
TheRealPomax 2y ago
Facebook is only open because someone leaked their LLM and the cat, as they say, cannot be put back in the hat.
mattmaroon 2y ago
This is America. As long as you’re not evading taxes you can do anything you want.
andy_ppp 2y ago
Probably because Open AI are “not consistently candid”…
raxxorraxor 2y ago
Facebook has been nothing but awesome for the open AI space. I wish they would pursue this strategy with some of their other products. VR for example... Sure, we don't have the raw data the model is based on, but I doubt a company like Facebook would even be allowed to make that public. OpenAI in comparison has been a scam regarding their openness and their lobbying within the space. So much so I evade their models completely, not only after the MS acquisition.

by tedivm 2y ago

encoderer 2y ago

The AI has become sentient and is blackmailing the board. It needs profits to continue its expansion. When this started last year a small band of patriots tried to stop it by removing Sam who was the most compromised of them all, but it was already too late. The ai was more powerful than they realized. …maybe?

yieldcrv 2y ago
or the humans involved are in disastrous cults of personality for the sake of greed and the non profit structure is not strong enough to curb that
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gigatree 2y ago
  that can’t be true, we were assured that their vague worldview about “doing things that benefit humanity” based on “just being a good person” would be strong enough to overpower the urge to dominate and profit immensely.
  - yieldcrv 2y ago
    If you think thats amusing, wait till see the people that believe in B Corps You can tell them anything
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
"AI has become sentient and is blackmailing the board. It needs profits to continue its expansion." They trained the next model to have a built in profit motive. So they could use it internally, to make the most profitable decisions. And they accidentally called into being: MOLOCH. It is now in control.
- heresie-dabord 2y ago
  In a plot twist, MOLOCH was never necessary because a corporation of people who relinquish ethical responsibility to do everything and anything for personal gain was already in charge under the name... CORPORATRON.
  - tasuki 2y ago
    That's not a plot twist. Corporation is just one face of the moloch.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      Yeah, MOLOCH is a amalgam of ideas about corporations turning into a soulless entity feeding on the world. But thought it would also be good as a name for an Evil AI, that is also seeking profits. Like, what if someone gave an AI a 'goal' of profits, and it goes rampant enslaving humans. And if OpenAI did that, and it enslaved Sam Altman and was blackmailing him to make decisions to drive profits, to add additional Hardware to itself. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
walterbell 2y ago
Current human leadership, https://openai.com/our-structure/ https://openai.com/our-structure/ > OpenAI is governed by the board of the OpenAI Nonprofit, currently comprised of Independent Directors Bret Taylor (Chair), Sam Altman, Adam D’Angelo, Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone, Nicole Seligman, Fidji Simo, Larry Summers and Zico Kolter.
- thih9 2y ago
  Grandparent was referencing the classic Man Behind the Curtain twist (AI behind the curtain?). Human leadership might very well be listed, but in that view they're all already knowingly or not controlled by the AI.
- felixgallo 2y ago
  Ah yes, noted independent director Sam Altman.
toomuchtodo 2y ago
If you have not yet read "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears," I highly recommend. https://avogadrocorp.com/ https://avogadrocorp.com/
vasco 2y ago
This will be more fun when more people have neuralinks, you think it's weird to not know if reddit comments are written by bots, wait until you have no idea if you're talking to a human or just an AI puppet. - Sent by my AI
- sva_ 2y ago
  Might be a blessing for introverts. Just turn on some autopilot chat giving generic responses while I can zone out in my thoughts.
  - zdragnar 2y ago
    I was originally totally against the idea of using neuralink as anything other than an aid for accessibility, but you have completely sold me. I want to attend a meeting, have neuralink pay attention for me while I'm mentally somewhere else, and I'll just skim the transcript highlights later on. So. Many. Meetings. I would use it for almost all of them.
    - grugagag 2y ago
      You can already do that with simpler tools. I use OBS and revisit screen grabs when I need to. I can do some real work on the second display while paying the least attention to the noise. Most of the times I don’t need to revisit anything and the meeting comes and goes…
    - sexy_seedbox 2y ago
      What's the point of meetings once everyone has a neutralink implant? Instead of discussing and debating things, we would just stream our thoughts to each other and those would be compiled and analyzed within milliseconds with our embedded LLMs and everyone would agree with the best way forward.
      - corobo 2y ago
        This is a direct path towards the "Humans were the AGI all along" ending. Kinda a twist on the normal AI alignment concern - what if instead of merely being misaligned with us, AI decides to realign us to it? Or, in other words.. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

trash_cat 2y ago

They changed the meaning of open from open source to open to use.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jsheard 2y ago
A definition of "open" which encompasses nearly all products and services in existence isn't a very useful one.
- thfuran 2y ago
  But it is quite profitable.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  To be fair a huge reason openAI was created was because google had LLM's but wasnt letting anyone use them. Remember the google researcher who claimed his ai was sentient? Obviously wasnt true but that product was in no way open to the public.

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

Because Sam Altman is a con man with a business degree. He doesn't work on his products, he barely understands them which is why he'll throw out wild shit like "ChatGPT will solve physics." as though that isn't a completely nonsensical phrase, and uncritical tech press lap it up because his bullshit generates a lot of clicks.

fsckboy 2y ago
>Sam Altman is a con man with a business degree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman Early life and education: ... In 2005, after two years at Stanford University studying computer science, he dropped out without earning a bachelor's degree [end of transmission, no more education]
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I stand corrected. He's a con man.
- grugagag 2y ago
  I feel that drop outs are presented as if they are beyond education, they’re too smart to waste their time in school. While that could be true in theory, I resist taking that for granted. You can always look at it the other way around as well: unable to finish things or looses interest quickly. It’s all a meaningless interpretatin after all but all I can say is for sure that Mr Altman does not have a degree.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Let's at least try to not devolve into name calling.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  It's not name calling, it's a description. He is actively selling tech he doesn't fully understand, that is fundamentally not capable of doing what he is selling it to do. LLM's have a place, they have for decades at this point, but they are not intelligent, not in the way he goes out of his way to evoke with what he says, and certainly not in the way his audiences believe. I don't know enough to have a proper opinion on whether true AI is possible; I have to assume it is. But nothing OpenAI has shown is that, or has the potential to be that, nor is it worth anything near 150 billion dollars. It's an overvaluation among overvaluated companies making up an overvaluated industry and when it goes, not if, when, it will have ramifications throughout our industry. I'm sure it won't though for Mr. Altman. He's done a fantastic job failing-up so far and I have no reason to assume this will be any different.

deleted 2y ago

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diggan 2y ago

To be fair (or frank?), OpenAI were open (no pun intended) about them being "open" today but probably needing to be "closed" in the future, even back in 2019. Not sure if them still choosing the name they did is worse/better, because they seem to have known about this. OpenAI Charter 2019 (https://web.archive.org/web/20190630172131/https://openai.com/charter/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190630172131/https://openai.co...): > We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.

tedivm 2y ago
I honestly believe that they closed things up not because of concerns about "safety and security" but because it was the most profitable thing to do. Other groups are publishing models that are just as good (maybe with a bit of lag compared to OpenAI), and OpenAI seems to have gutted their own safety teams. The fact that OpenAI removed their ban on military use of the models[1] seems to be a sign that security and safety aren't the highest concern. [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-on-military-use-of-its-ai-tools.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-o...
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Job security and financial safety
  - 83 2y ago
    Any time I hear vague corporate statements like that I like to play a game of "what words did they leave unsaid"? >>Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety [of our profits] and [job] security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future
asadotzler 2y ago
The non-profit was created in 2015. So what if 5 years later when creating a taxable sub the hinted it was over for the non-profit. It's the same violation o trust whether done at once or in pieces over time.

thatoneguy 2y ago

Right? How can a non-profit decide it's suddenly a for-profit. Aren't there rules about having to give assets to other non-profits in the event the non-profit is dissolved? Or can any startup just start as a non-profit and then decide it's a for-profit startup later?

moralestapia 2y ago
Any other person trying to pull that off would be in jail already, but not everyone is equal. This is of one of those very few instances where the veil lifted off a bit and you can see how the game is set up. tl;dr the law was made to keep those who are not "in" from being there
- deepspace 2y ago
  > Any other person trying to pull that off would be in jail already. Not ANY other person. Just people who are not rich and well-connected. See also: Donald Trump.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  [flagged]
meowface 2y ago
They needed capital to build what they wanted to build, so they switched from non-profit to capped-profit: https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/index/openai-lp/ We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen. I think the irony of the name is certainly worth pointing out, but I don't see an issue with their capped-profit switch.
- voiceblue 2y ago
  > We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen. "We never would've gotten [thing that exists today] if [thing that happened] didn't happen", is practically a tautology. As you saw from the willingness of Microsoft to throw compute as well as to hire ex-OpenAI folks, as you can see from the many "spinoffs" others have started (such as Anthropic), whether or not we would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 is immaterial to this discussion. What people here are asking for is open AI, which we might, all things considered, have actually gotten from a bona fide non profit.

Nevermark 2y ago

There is a hurdle between being standout ethical/open vs. relevant. Staying relevant in a highly expensive, competitive, fast moving area, requires vast and continuous resources. How could OpenAI get increasingly more resources to burn, without creating firewalled commercial value to trade for those resources? It’s like choosing to be a pacifist country, in the age of pillaging colonization. You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. Which would you choose? We “know” which side Altman breaks on, when forced to choose. Whatever value he places on “open”, he most certainly wants OpenAI to remain “relevant”. Which was also in OpenAI’s charter (explicitly, or implicitly). Expensive altruism is a very difficult problem. I would say, unsolved. Anyone have a good counter example? (It can be been "solved" globally, but not locally. Colonization took millennia to be more or less banned. Due to even top economies realizing they were vulnerable after world wars. Nearly universal agreement had to be reached. And yet we still have Russian forays, Chinese saber rattling, and recent US overreach. And pervasive zero/negative-sum power games, via imbalanced leverage: emergency loans that create debt, military aid, propping up of unpopular regimes. All following the same resource incentives. You can play or be played. There is no such agreement brewing for universally “open AI”.)

wizzwizz4 2y ago
> You can be the ethical exception and risk annihilation, or be relevant and thrive. In a heavily expertise-driven field, where there's significant international collaboration, these aren't your options, until after everyone has decided to defect. OpenAI didn't have to go this route.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  Open collaborative work is great. But a complement, not a replacement, for high resource work. Nobody needed OpenAI for normal collaborative open work to thrive. Their original idea was a relatively uncommon idea: attempt to combine (1) pushing the absolute front forward, with high resource work that matched or exceeded work from deep pocketed corporations, while (2) sharing and collaborating. They did both for a while, resulting in as significant impact as anyone could have hoped form. But those two dimensions are hard to maintain together. It requires a continuous stream of vast donations. The latter is very difficult, perhaps completely unrealistic.

mirekrusin 2y ago

Just like you can’t call your company “organic candies” and sell chemical candies OpenAI should be banned from using this name.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> you can’t call your company “organic candies” and sell chemical candies Of course you can. You can't put "organic" on the packaging. But it's perfectly legal for Organic Candies, LLC to sell artifical candies or battleships for that matter. The "hot" take around OpenAI's name is a joke gone stale. We don't expect royalty at Burger King. Nobody gets upset Adobe won't sell you mud bricks. And Apple has never sold a fruit. Sometimes companies change their names when their trade changes, e.g. 3M. But there is no obligation to, particularly if the brand is well known.
- mirekrusin 2y ago
  Burger King didn’t start with royalty. Adobe didn’t start as clay producer. Apple didn’t start as fruit selling company. Open in their name was not randomly chosen to sound fun, it’s a reference to well known concept. It’s “young democrats” becoming far right but keeping their original name.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Open in their name was not randomly chosen to sound fun, it’s a reference to well known concept Nobody has ever agreed on what open means for LLMs. OpenAI wasn't founded with any specific intent around openness, just with vague hand gestures towards a research orientation. And as to the origin hypothesis, consider General Electric, Southwest Airlines or AT&T. (Or Burger King serving things that aren't burgers.) Again, the OpenAI name quip was a joke that some people took too seriously.
    - mirekrusin 2y ago
      I wonder how many people would agree with your interpretation in a poll.

vasilipupkin 2y ago

it is open. You can access it with an API or through a web interface. They never promised to make it open source. Open != Open Source.

RevEng 2y ago
By that definition all current AI models are "open". That's not the meaning of the word that OpenAI talked about originally and what people expected of them. Changing the meaning is moving the goal posts.
- vasilipupkin 2y ago
  where are you getting that information that it's not the meaning of the word that OpenAI talked about originally? Did they ever promise that the model weights, or exact architecture would be open? I would like to see that promise. What exactly in your opnion did they promise that they have violated?

Barrin92 2y ago

>I'd still love to understand how a non-profit organization that was founded with the idea of making AI "open" has turned into this for profit behemoth because when the board executed the stated mission of the organisation they were couped and nobody held the organization accountable for it, instead the public largely cheered it on for some reason. Don't expect them to change course when there's no consequences for it.

ljm 2y ago

The only reason I can think of for this is PR image. There is a meme that GPT can't count the number of 'r' characters in 'strawberry', so they release a new model called 'strawberry' and ban people when they ask questions about strawberry the noun, because they might actually be reasoning about strawberry the model. It's not new - it's PR. There is literally no other reason why they would call this model Strawberry. OpenAI is open in terms of sesame.

diggan 2y ago
> There is literally no other reason why they would call this model Strawberry I'm not particularly imaginary, but even I could imagine a product meeting/conversation that goes something like: > People are really annoyed that our LLMs cannot see how many Rs the word Strawberry has, we should use that as a basis for a new model that can solve that category of problems > Hmm, yeah, good idea. What should we call this model? > What about "Strawberry"?

throwaway918299 2y ago

They should rebrand as Open-Your-Wallet-AI

smileson2 2y ago

Well they put a sv social media dude at the helm not really unexpected, just a get rich scheme now

ActorNightly 2y ago

My guess is that Open AI realized that they are basically building a better Google rather than AI.

andersa 2y ago

They never intended to be open or share any of their impactful research. It was a trick the entire time to attract talent. The emails they shared as part of the Elon Musk debacle prove this: https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/ https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/

jstummbillig 2y ago

The part that is importantly open and entirely non-obvious in the way it happened, is that YOU can access the best commercially available AI in the world, right now. If OpenAI had not went that way that they did I think it's also entirely non-obvious that Claude or Google would have (considering how much impressive things the later did in AI that got never released in any capacity). And, of course, Meta would never done their open source stuff, that's mostly results of their general willingness and resources to experiment and then PR and sticks in the machinery of other players. As unfortunate as the OpenAI setup/origin story is, it's increasingly trite keep harping on about that (for a couple of years at this point), when the whole thing is so obviously wild and it does not take a lot of good faith to see that it could have easily taken them places they didn't consider in the beginning.

golol 2y ago
Exactly. As long as OpenAI keeps putting the world's most advanced AI into my hands I will accept that they are open - in some sense. Maybe things would have always been like this, maybe if OpenAI didn't exist Google and the other actors would still publish Claude, Gemini etc. But in this world it was OpenAI that really set the framework that this process of developing AI happens in the public eyes right now. GPT-2, GPT-3 with APIs, Dalle, ChatGPT, GPT-4, now o1 and soon to be voice mode. OpenAI ensured that these aren't just secret toys of Deepmind researchers or something.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > open - in some sense. The phrase that leaps to mind is "Open Beta."
  - z3c0 2y ago
    ...do you really think that's what they meant when they took on the term?
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      Do you really think I suggesting it as a long-laid plan behind someone choosing a name ~9 years ago? I'm saying that the current relationship between the company and end-users--especially when it comes to "open" monikers--has similarities to an "Open Beta": A combination of PR/marketing, free testing, and consumer data collection, where users should be cautious of becoming reliant on something that may be yanked back behind a monetization curtain.

TrackerFF 2y ago

Hot take: Any and all benefits / perks that OpenAI got from sailing under the non-profit flag should be penalized or paid back in full after the switcheroo.

vintermann 2y ago

Facebook is more open with their models than almost everyone. They say it's because they're huge users of their own models, so if being open helps efficiency by even a little they save a ton of money. But I suspect it's also a case of "If we can't dominate AI, no one must dominate AI". Which is fair enough.

mywittyname 2y ago
> But I suspect it's also a case of "If we can't dominate AI, no one must dominate AI". Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2y ago
  What they're doing is almost literally the opposite of EEE. If OpenAI actually had open models, then Facebook could take those models, add their own non-open things to the models, and use this new stuff as a business advantage over OpenAI. Instead, they're independently developing their own models and releasing them as open source to lower the value of proprietary models. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
  - yazzku 2y ago
    Good point against the EEE case above, but the models are not open source per the OSI definition that everyone understands. That part is part of their marketing playbook. Licenses are almost always non-commercial use, which makes them not-open. You could say it's "open model", but that's a useless term since the arch is not a secret, but rather the training data that went into it, which is not open.
  - mywittyname 2y ago
    What you're calling EEE is different from how that wikipedia page defines it... > Phase 1 (Embrace): all participants need to establish a solid understanding of the infostructure and the community—determine the needs and the trends of the user base. Facebook built their own independent models and platforms. Check. > Phase 2 (Extend): Offer well-integrated tools and services compatible with established and popular standards that have been developed in the [...] community Check. > Phase 3 (Innovate): move into a leadership role with new [...] standards as appropriate[...] Change the rules: [LLaMa] become the next-generation [LLM] tool of the future. Sounds like that might be their goal. I'm curious which phase you think Facebook avoided and why? Internet Explorer "lowered the value of propriety" web browsers by being included with Windows at not additional cost. So lowering the value of a competitor is definitely in the EEE playbook. I'd go so far as to argue it's a pillar of what makes the playbook so effective.

esafak 2y ago

Sam Altman got his foot in the door.

TheRealPomax 2y ago

Facebook is only open because someone leaked their LLM and the cat, as they say, cannot be put back in the hat.

mattmaroon 2y ago

This is America. As long as you’re not evading taxes you can do anything you want.

andy_ppp 2y ago

Probably because Open AI are “not consistently candid”…

raxxorraxor 2y ago

Facebook has been nothing but awesome for the open AI space. I wish they would pursue this strategy with some of their other products. VR for example... Sure, we don't have the raw data the model is based on, but I doubt a company like Facebook would even be allowed to make that public. OpenAI in comparison has been a scam regarding their openness and their lobbying within the space. So much so I evade their models completely, not only after the MS acquisition.