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I look at it much in the same way that OSF is open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Software_Foundation

Trying to legislate what certain words mean and no one can use a particular word as part of their company name unless it checks certain boxes gets into the "you're trying to regulate that?"




Rules on deceptive advertising and fraud are very much about what words you can use to describe stuff.

When a business chooses to use a word because it’s deceptive that’s very questionable IMO.


Organization names are quite different than products.

"GPT-4" and "DALL-E" don't use the word open in their description.

The research is accessible. ( https://openai.com/research )

Why are we trying to legislate and regulate the name of a company?


> The research is accessible. ( https://openai.com/research )

that's not what "open" customarily means in the context of software development.

> Why are we trying to legislate and regulate the name of a company?

Nobody on news.ycombinator.com is capable of legislating anything, but to answer your question, it's because the name is deceptive.

And anyways, the names of companies are already "legislated and regulated". If you don't believe me then I dare you to start a new software corporation called Microsoft and see how far you can go before somebody forces you to change it.


I’m not. That said, if you want to name your company Organic Milk and slap that label on some milk cartons the USDA may get up in your face.


https://www.spectrumorganics.com/products/culinary/

You'll note that even though the company is "Spectrum Organics" the word "organic" doesn't appear on neither the saffron oil nor avocado oil labels.

You can do a search for company names containing "organic" at https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/legacy/companysearch.h... and then go and see if they use the word "organic" on their food product labels.


Their point was that you might need to be careful with using words with specific trade meanings, like "organic", on product labelling or as part of marketing material even if it occurs as part of your company name.

As best as I can tell, you supported their point. Was that your intent?


What product listed in https://openai.com/product has "Open" as part of the name or marketing?


As far as I can tell, this is not part of the argument or discussion at this point, other than the starting observation that the initial "Open" might be a misnomer for OpenAI.


The research is open.

When you go to https://openai.com you will note that the left most drop down is "research" - not "products"

OpenAI is registered as a research laboratory. It has created a subsidiary corporation that deals with products and profits.

From https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

> 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.

Does this mean you can have a copy of the model? That is answered in https://openai.com/blog/openai-api

> Why did OpenAI choose to release an API instead of open-sourcing the models?

> There are three main reasons we did this. First, commercializing the technology helps us pay for our ongoing AI research, safety, and policy efforts.

> Second, many of the models underlying the API are very large, taking a lot of expertise to develop and deploy and making them very expensive to run. This makes it hard for anyone except larger companies to benefit from the underlying technology. We’re hopeful that the API will make powerful AI systems more accessible to smaller businesses and organizations.

> Third, the API model allows us to more easily respond to misuse of the technology. Since it is hard to predict the downstream use cases of our models, it feels inherently safer to release them via an API and broaden access over time, rather than release an open source model where access cannot be adjusted if it turns out to have harmful applications.


> OpenAI is registered as a research laboratory. It has created a subsidiary corporation that deals with products and profits.

this chicanery proves that they are being intentionally deceptive.

as for the rest of your post, i have no idea why you copied and pasted some unrelated crap from their website although it does make me wonder if youre using ChatGPT to generate your posts.


Their website makes it look like they're changing their branding to "Spectrum Culinary", probably for that reason.




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