contrarian view - they are actually pretty open. sharing GPT, CLIP, Whisper, and high level details of alphastar, dalle, and others.
they're just not open source. they never called themselves OpenSourceAI. people get an inch of openness and expect the doors wide open and i think that is unfairly hostile.
Because of AI's surprising history, it's hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it'll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.
We're hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.
To me at least, having a walled garden and charging for you API, without releasing weights or other critical details, goes against this sentiment.
It pretty much sounds like they are doing what they said they are going to do? Expecting some sort of free API feels like entitlement to me. Have you tried running the models? Or training them? They get expensive very very fast. They charge a pretty reasonable amount all things considered. If they didn't have the name "Open" in them and or started as a subsidiary of one of the other 3 tech companies things would have gone a very very different route.
They charge that amount (on loss) to create a trench that will not allow a truly open model to proliferate, as happened with Dall-E and stable diffusion.
And no, I would not train or run the models, even if they released them. This does not mean I cannot point out the hypocrisy.
You yourself said that they get expensive very very fast. Of course I do not have an insider's view on OpenAI's economics. But let's be realistic here.
Let's. If I were to rent an instance for short bursts of time, I would be paying many multiples over a constant use instance. If I were to guarantee usage for x years, where the larger the X, the greater the discount. So already the delta between sporadic usage, X years use is large. There is evidence for this price discrepancy within all the cloud providers so this is not speculation. The the price difference is massive.
If you want to save even more cost, you could rent out VPSes or baremetal. They are insanely cheap, and compared to an AWS on demand instance the difference is night and day. Try comparing Hetzner with AWS. Hetzner, as far as I can tell, is not trying to entrench me into their system by offering extremely low prices. Nor are they a charity. I might even say they are an "open" hosting provider. To me it feels like they are passing along most of their savings and taking a small cut.
This is what it feels like to me what openAI is doing. I don't think their prices are so low its unprofitable. But because of their immense scale, its so much cheaper than me running an instance. I don't have to jump into conspiracy land to come up with a reasoning.
You seemed to want to speculate about how this is all some conniving trap based on their price and I simply pointed out why that's bad speculation using an example in a different industry. I rest my case.
If they were the first organization known as "OpenXY", then maybe they would have a point, but there's a long tradition of open source libraries/standards using this convention that makes this especially aggravating.
Examples I can think of off the top of my head: OpenGL (1992), OpenAL (2003?), OpenCL (2009), OpenCV (2000).
While looking up those dates though, it seems like OpenAL is now under a proprietary license, which annoys me for the same reason OpenAI annoys me.
In the 98-page document on GPT-4, I could not find anything about the actual architecture and details of the model, not only are they now not releasing the models but now also their actual overview.
Go take a look at the content of Civitai. Take everything you see there, and imagine what happens if you start prompting it with words that indicate things which may not be legal for you to see images of.
Please show me viable harm of GPT-4 that is higher than the potential harm from open sourced image generators with really good fine tuning. I'll wait, most likely forever.
Only within the context of programmer cults would people be unironically offended that a term as abstract as "open" not be exclusively used to mean "open source".
These words are not synonymous with each other: “open” is not inherently free, “free” is not inherently open, and “free” is not inherently “Free”.
They each capture notions that are often orthogonal, occasionally related, and almost always generate tedious debates about freedom vs. free goods, open-ness vs. open-source, etc.
But setting all of that aside, Microsoft never claimed (until recent shifts towards embracing FOSS) to be building an open and non-profit foundation.
The criticisms of OpenAI are reasonable to an extent, not because they are not open, but because they made claims about openness that are looking less and less likely to be true over time.
Except they already drew that line long ago, when they started out open-sourcing their papers, models and code.
As soon as they took VC capital, it is hardly 'Open' is it? Especially when they are now giving excuses for closing off their research?:
From the technical paper [0]
>> Given both the competitive landscape and the safety implications of large-scale models like GPT-4, this report contains no further details about the architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method, or similar.
people come out of the woodwork to rage about FSD but openAI, which is actually a sinister and evil company, gets the occasional snide remark about their name which is much more dishonest than FSD. at least tesla claims that they aspire to make FSD an accurate name but openai is a straight up lie.
I don’t like the name either, but I don’t think there’s anything descriptive enough in ‘open’ that a lawyer couldn’t explain away. We’re used to open meaning a specific thing in software, but a lot of leeway is given in branding.
Ideally the algorithm and tricks they used to train the model, which they didn't disclose in their associated gpt4 technical paper. We got this far this quickly in AI research because the sector was open with results and innovations.
They are so far from open at this point.
In Germany at least, you're not allowed to have a misleading name for your company