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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
The inevitability sounds like people will stop bothering participating in social networks, and just participate with their own virtual world produced by their local AI. I mean… in the end there will be no difference in output
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
Non-profits are allowed to own for profit entities and use the profits to fund their non-profit activities. It is a pretty common model used by many entities from Mozilla[1][2] to the National Geographic Society[3][4].
This is misleading at best. There are rules you must follow to do this legally and OAI's structure violates some of them and is under scrutiny from the IRS so their new plan is for the non-profit to completely sell off the subsidiary and then die or go into "maintenance mode" with the new fully commercial subsidiary carrying the ball (and the team) forward to riches.
I considered things like this as an original Mozilla person back in the day. Mozilla could have sold the Firefox organization or the whole corporation for billions when it had 30% of the web, but that would have been a huge violation o of trust so it was never even on the table.
That so many here are fans of screwing the world over for a buck makes this kind of comment completely unsurprising.
There's rules to follow to prevent what is called "private benefit", which OpenAI most likely broke with things like their (laughable) "100X-limited ROI" share offering.
>It is a pretty common model [...]
It's not, hence why most people are misinformed about it.
> 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.
> We never would've gotten GPT-3 and GPT-4 if this didn't happen
Well, of course. But we'd get similarly powerful models elsewhere. Maybe a few weeks or months later. Maybe even a few weeks or months earlier, if, say, OpenAI sucked up a lot of talent and used it wastefully, which I don't find implausible at all.
You forget that, at that time, OpenAI pushed SoTA LLMs massively forward by scaling them up ~3-4 orders of magnitude when others didn't think that would work or weren't willing to spend the money. But not just that. Following their example, Google and nVidia also attempted to scale up transformers but without really managing to push the SoTA.
So, I agree instead with meowface, and think it could even have been a 5+ year delay rather than 2 or 3. If you look at breakthroughs rather than incremental improvements, 5 years is not a long timescale. (And if OpenAI hadn't have made their breakthroughs, production of the highest-end GPUs/TPUs would be nowhere near where it is today.)
(I'm not attempting to justify OpenAI's structure or behaviour, just want to comment on one point.)
Maybe all companies are doomed this way, but it was the first step on a slippery slope. Not in terms of the slippery slope logical fallacy, that's only apply if someone argued they'd end up force-hiding output before GPT-3 if they went capped profit
It certainly would've been better, but they made OpenAI years before even GPT-1. They didn't realize how much money they'd need to scale the model or how insufficient donations would be.
I think the world is much better off with them having switched the structure vs. throwing their hands in the air and giving up because they were stuck as a non-profit forever.
>If they did something illegal why weren't they charged years ago?
Because the Microsoft/OpenAI deal was not even a thing "years ago". (Duh.)
That aside, I will answer the charitable interpretation of your question by sharing a bit of knowledge about how the law process works (in the Western hemisphere).
To put someone who committed fraud in jail, law enforcement conducts an investigation to gather evidence, leading to criminal charges filed by the prosecutor.
The defendant is arraigned, and pre-trial motions may be filed before the case goes to trial, where both sides present their arguments and evidence.
If found guilty, the court imposes a sentence, which can include incarceration, restitution, and fines. The defendant may appeal the verdict.
This is a very simplified overview of the whole ordeal, which could go on for years and years depending on the complexity of the case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
Safety and security is not why they are not showing chain of thought here though. Profit is. They cite "Competitive Advantage" directly. He admit it! [1]
"Safety and security." Probably the two most warped and abused words in the English language.
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.
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”.)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
"In some sense", any word can mean anything you want. "Open" carries with an accepted meaning in technology that in no way relates to what you're describing. You may as well call McDonald's "open".
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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/
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.
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]
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.
I mean I've said it before and I'll say it again: you do not need AI images/video for faking political spin shit. That was done LONG before chatGPT/Midjourney/Sora existed because the people you're targeting want to believe that Obama eats babies or whatever the fuck, they don't need a 4K photo-realistic rendering of it to buy in, you just tell them he's doing it and they're on board.
People still believe GamerGate was about ethics in journalism when we have screenshots of the posts where the dickheads responsible for it made fun of the people they would trick with that lie before they told it and they still believe it. Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
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.
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.
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?
