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The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just
by mtlmtlmtlmtl 2y ago
The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. Taken as a whole, OpenAI is now just a for-profit entity beholden to investors and Sam Altman as a shareholder. The non-profit is really just vestigial.
I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that goal clashes with the interests of investors, the latter wins out.
- bayindirh 2y ago> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use. At this point it's not even funny anymore.
- lioeters 2y agoScraping the entire internet for training data without regard for copyright or attribution - specifically to use for generative AI to produce similar content for profit. How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling. It does suit the modus operandi of a number of American companies that start out as literally illegal/criminal operations until they get big and rich enough to pay a fine for their youthful misdeeds. By the time some of them get huge, they're in bed with the government to dominate the market.
- FragrantRiver 2y agoWhat is the crime?
- brayhite 2y agoA tale as told as time.
- johnwheeler 2y agoTo me this is a no brainer. If it’s a choice between having AI and not,
- ceejayoz 2y agoEven if the knock-on effect is "all the artists and thinkers who contributed to the uncompensated free training set give up and stop creating new stuff"?
- brvsft 2y agoIf an "artist" or "thinker" stops because of this, I question their motivations and those labels in the first place.
- bayindirh 2y agoAfter Instagram started feeding user photos to their AI models, I stopped adding new photos to my profile. I still take photos. I wonder about your thoughts about my motivation.
- brvsft 2y ago[flagged]
- esafak 2y agoThey might be motivated to pay their bills. Weird people.
- brvsft 2y agoRight, people were trying to 'pay their bills' with content that was freely shared such that AI could take advantage of it. Weird people. Or we're all talking about and envisioning some specific little subset of artists. I suspect you're trying to pretend that someone with a literal set of paintbrushes living in a shitty loft is somehow having their original artwork stolen by AI despite no high resolution photography of it existing on the internet. I'm not falling for that. Be more specific about which artists are losing their livelihoods.
- mdgrech23 2y agoThe people running the show are well connected and stand to make billions as do would be investors. Give a few key players a share in the company and they forget their government jobs to regulate.
- barbazoo 2y agoMore likely the legal system just hasn’t caught up.
- llm_trw 2y agoMaybe, but for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it.
- dingnuts 2y agogod forbid that actually be happening in a way to improve the commons
- vezycash 2y ago> for the first time in a century there is more money to be made in weakening copyright rather than strengthening it Nope. The law will side with whoever pays the most. Once OpenAI solidifies its top position, only then will regulations kick in. Take YouTube, for example—it grew thanks to piracy. Now, as the leader, ContentID and DMCA rules work in its favor, blocking competition. If TikTok wasn’t a copyright-ignoring Chinese company, it would’ve been dead on arrival.
- Sakos 2y agoWe're already seeing it in things like Google buying rights to Reddit data for training. It's already happening. Only companies who can afford to pay will be building AI, so Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.
- archagon 2y agoThe big companies will sign lucrative data sharing deals with each other and build a collective moat, while open source models will be left to rot. Copyright for thee but not for me.
- immibis 2y agoEverything is allowed to happen until there's a lawsuit over it. A lawsuit requires a plaintiff, who can only sue over the damage suffered by the plaintiff, so taking a little value from a lot of people is a way to succeed in business without getting sued.
- swores 2y agoCould a class action suit be the solution? I've no idea if it could be valid when it comes to OpenAI, but it does seem to be a general concept designed to counter wrongdoers who take a little value from a lot of people?
- immibis 2y agoIt doesn't seem to work very well
- flkenosad 2y agoThe Earth needs a good lawyer.
- outside1234 2y agoNY Times has sued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-t... The crazy thing is that there hasn't been an injunction to make them stop.
- coding123 2y agojudges got to eat
- outside1234 2y agoThere is more money on the side of it being legal than on the side of it being illegal.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoIt's too soon for the legal system to have done anything. Court cases take years. It's going to be 5 or 10 years before we find out whether the legal system actually allows this or not.
- marviel 2y agoscraping is fine by me. burning the bridge so nobody else can legally scrape, that's the line.
- Vegenoid 2y agoWhat about the situation where the first players got to scrape, then all the content companies realize what’s going on so they lock their data up behind paywalls?
- avs733 2y agoUber for legalizing your business model
- golergka 2y agoIf information is publicly available to be read by humans, I fail to see any reason why it wouldn't be also available to be read by robots. Update: ML doesn't copy information. It can merely memorise some small portions of it.
- kanbankaren 2y agoDo a thought process. Should you and your friends be able to go to a public library with a van full of copiers with each one of you take a book and run to the van to make a copy? And you are doing it 24/7.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoSo what's your specific problem with that? Unless you open a bookstore selling the copies, it sounds fine.
- imiric 2y agoAre you implying that these AI companies aren't equivalent to bookstores?
- golergka 2y agoYes, they are not bookstores. They manufacture artificial erudites who have read all these books.
- WillPostForFood 2y agoFor it to be a bookstore, it would have to provide complete copies of the books, which it doesn't do at all.
- shagie 2y agoI would hold them exactly to the same standard. https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html https://www.copyright.gov/title37/201/37cfr201-14.html § 201.14 Warnings of copyright for use by certain libraries and archives. .... The copyright law of the United States (title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specific conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of “fair use,” that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law. You can make a copy. If you (the person using the copied work) are using it for something other than private study, scholarship, research, or reproduction beyond "fair use", then you - the person doing that (not the person who made the copy) are liable for infringement. It would be perfectly legal for me to go to the library and make photocopies of works. I could even take them home and use the photocopies as reference works write an essay and publish that. If {random person} took my photocopied pages and then sold them, that would likely go beyond the limits placed for how the photocopied works from the library may be used.
- neycoda 2y agoHonestly every Copilot response I've gotten cited sources, many of which I've clicked. I'd say those work basically like free advertising.
- coding123 2y agoIt is more likely that reddit stack and others are just being paid billions. In exchange they probably just send a weekly zip file of all text, comments, etc... back to oai.
- jstummbillig 2y agoIt's not baffling at all. It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species. The anti-AI stance is what is baffling to me. The path trotten is what got us here and obviously nobody could have paid people upfront for the wild experimentation that was necessary. The only alternative is not having done it. Given the path it has put as in, people either are insanely cruel or just completely detached from reality when it comes to what is necessary to do entirely new things.
- thomascgalvin 2y ago> It's unprecedented and it's hugely beneficial to our species. "Hugely beneficial" is a stretch at this point. It has the potential to be hugely beneficial, sure, but it also has the potential to be ruinous. We're already seeing GenAI being used to create disinformation at scale. That alone makes the potential for this being a net-negative very high.
- anon7725 2y ago> it's hugely beneficial to our species. Perhaps the biggest “needs citation” statement of our time.
- Terr_ 2y agoI can easily imagine people X decades from now discussing this stuff a bit like how we now view teeth-whitening radium toothpaste and putting asbestos in everything, or perhaps more like the abuse of Social Security numbers as authentication and redlining. Not in any weirdly-self-aggrandizing "our tech is so powerful that robots will take over" sense, just the depressingly regular one of "lots of people getting hurt by a short-term profitable product/process which was actually quite flawed." P.S.: For example, imagine having applications for jobs and loans rejected because all the companies' internal LLM tooling is secretly racist against subtle grammar-traces in your writing or social-media profile. [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
- 5040 2y ago
- eli 2y agoCopyright law is whatever we agree it is. At some point there will have to be either a law or a court case that comes up with rules for AI training data. Right now it's sort of unknown. I do not have confidence in the Supreme Court in general, and I think there's a real risk that in deciding on AI training they upend copyright of digital materials in a way that makes it worse for everyone.
- RIMR 2y ago>How this is being allowed to happen legally is baffling. It's completely unprecedented. We allowed scraping images and text en masse when search engines used the data to let us find stuff. We allow copying of style, and don't allow writing styles and aesthetics to be copyrighted or trademarked. Then AI shows up, and people change lanes because they don't like the results. One of the things that made me tilt towards the side of fair use was a breakdown of the Stable Diffusion model. The SD2.1 base model was trained on 5.85 billion images, all normalized to 512x512 BMP. That's 1MB per images, for a total of 5.85PB of BMP files. The resulting model is only 5.2GB. That's more than 99.999999% data loss from the source data to the trained set. For every 1MB BMP file in the training dataset, less than 1byte makes it into the model. I find it extremely difficult to call this redistribution of copyrighted data. It falls cleanly into fair use.
- ang_cire 2y agoExcept it's not just about redistribution of copyrighted data, it's about usage and obtainment. We don't get to obtain and use copyrighted content without permission, but they do? Hell no. Their arguments against this amounts to "we're not using it like they intend it to be used, so it's fine if we obtain it illegally", and that's a bs standard, totally divorced from any legal reality. Fair Use covers certain transformative uses, certainly, but it doesn't cover illegal obtaining of the content. You can't pirate a book just because you want to use it transformatively (which is exactly what they've done), and that argument would never hold up for us as individuals, so we sure as hell shouldn't let tech companies get a special carve-out for it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- herval 2y agoopenAI converted to evilAI really fast
- sim7c00 2y ago> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. I'm surprised people are surprised. >> That entity will scrape the internet and train the models and claim that "it's just research" to be able to claim that all is fair-use. a lot of people and entities do this though... openAI is in the spotlight, but scraping everything and selling it is the business model for a lot of companies...
- bayindirh 2y agoScraping the web, creating maps and pointing people to the source is one thing; scraping the web, creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another. In my eyes, all genAI companies/tools are the same. I dislike all equally, and I use none of them.
- IanCal 2y ago> creating content from that scraping without attributing any of the source material, and arguing that the outcome is completely novel and original is another. That's the business model of lots of companies. Take, collect and collate data, put it in a new format more useful for your field/customers, resell.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- belter 2y agoNo, it's very funny as the CEO is trying to become Leon... https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/sam-altman-psychedelic-experience-openai-ceo/ https://fortune.com/2024/09/25/sam-altman-psychedelic-experi...
- luqtas 2y agothat was fun at some point?
- bayindirh 2y agoIf you consider dark humor fun, yes. It was always dark, now it became ugly and dark.
- sneak 2y agoIf you invented search engines (or, for that matter, public libraries) today and ran one, you'd be sued into oblivion by rightsholders.
- johnalbertearle 2y agoNot funny anymore
- johnalbertearle 2y agoNot funny anymore.
- allie1 2y agoWe haven't even heard about who gets voting shares, and what voting power will be like. Based on their character, I expect them to remain consistent in this regard.
- tsimionescu 2y agoConsistent here meaning, I guess, that all voting power will go to Sam Altman personally, right?
- cenamus 2y agoWell, he is the one that did most of the actual research and work, riiiiight?
- UI_at_80x24 2y agoI'm ignorant on this topic so please excuse me. Why did `AI` happen now? What was the secret sauce that OpenAI did that seemed to make this explode into being all of a sudden? My general impression was that the concept of 'how it works' existed for a long time, it was only recently that video cards had enough VRAM to hold the matrix(?) within memory to do the necessary calculations. If anybody knows, not just the person I replied to.
- lesuorac 2y agoMostly branding and willingness. w.r.t. Branding. AI has been happening "forever". While "machine learning" or "genetic algorithms" were more of the rage pre-LLMs that doesn't mean people weren't using them. It's just Google Search didn't brand their search engine as "powered by ML". AI is everywhere now because everything already used AI and now the products as "Spellcheck With AI" instead of just "Spellcheck". w.r.t. Willingness Chatbots aren't new. You might remember Tay (2016) [1], Microsoft's twitter chat bot. It should seem really strange as well that right after OpenAI releases ChatGPT, Google releases Gemini. The transformers architecture for LLMs is from 2014, nobody was willing to be the first chatbot again until OpenAI did it but they all internally were working on them. ChatGPT is Nov 2022 [2], Blake Lemoine's firing was June 2022 [3]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT [3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient https://www.npr.org/2022/06/16/1105552435/google-ai-sentient
- rdtsc 2y ago> The most surprising thing to me in this is that the non-profit will still exist. Not sure what the point of it is anymore. As a moral fig leaf. They can always point to it when the press calls -- "see it is a non-profit".
- mossTechnician 2y ago[dead]
- bbor 2y agoTotally agree that it’s “vestigial”, so it’s just like the nonprofits all the other companies run: it exists for PR, along with maybe a bit of alternative fundraising (aka pursuing grants for buying your own stuff and giving it to the needy). A common example that comes to mind is fast food chains that do fundraising campaigns for children’s health causes.
- mdgrech23 2y agoThe non-profit side is just there to attract talent and encourage them to work harder b/c it's for humanity. Obviously people sniffed out the facts, realized it was all for profit and that lead to an exodus.
- fakedang 2y agoFunnily, I think all the non-profit motivated talent has left, and the people left behind are those who stand to (and want to) make a killing when OpenAI becomes a for-profit. And that talent is in the majority - nothing else would explain the show of support for Altman when he was kicked out.
- Gud 2y agoWhat “show of support”? Not willing to rock the boat is not the same as being supportive.
- fakedang 2y agoWhat were all those open letter and "let's jump to Microsoft with Altman" shenanigans that the employees were carrying out then?
- Gud 2y agoWhy wouldn't they, if everyone else is? Bills to pay, etc. Low level employees are there for the money, not for the drama.
- jprete 2y agoI read at the time that there was massive coordinated pressure on the rank and file from the upper levels of the company. When you combine that with OpenAI clawing back vested equity even from people who voluntarily leave, the 95% support means nothing at all.
- tedsanders 2y ago
- outside1234 2y agoScam Altman strikes again!
- htk 2y agoThe non-profit will probably freeze the value of the assets accumulated so far, with new revenue going to the for-profit, to avoid the tax impact. Otherwise that'd be a great way to start companies, as non-profit and then after growth you flip the switch.
- nerdponx 2y agoIt's just a tax avoidance scheme.
- 1oooqooq 2y agowhy wouldn't they keep it? the well known scammer successfully scammed everyone twice. obviously he's keeping it around for the third (and forth...) time
- elpakal 2y ago> I guess technically it's supposed to play some role in making sure OpenAI "benefits humanity". But as we've seen multiple times, whenever that goal clashes with the interests of investors, the latter wins out. A tale as old as time. Some of us could see it, from afar <says while scratching gray, dusty beard>. Lack of upvotes and excitement does not mean support, but how to account for that in these times? <goes away>
- bastardoperator 2y agoThe whole "safety" and "benefits humanity" thing always felt like marketing anyways.
- zo1 2y agoThis is 85% of what the Mozilla foundation and it's group of companies did. It may not be exact, but to me it rubs me the exact same way in terms of being a bait and switch, and the greater internet being 100% powerless to do anything about it.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoElon Musk sued over this: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/01/1235159084/elon-musk-openai-suit-chatgpt-sam-altman-greg-brockman https://www.npr.org/2024/03/01/1235159084/elon-musk-openai-s...