Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Possibly a hot take:

I would say that OpenAI is still “open”, in about the same sense that Nginx or Redis is “open”. They seem to be pursuing an open-core model, where the architecture and skeleton of the project is open, but the extra stuff that lots of corporate money was dedicated to building on top is closed.

Remember, GPT-3 is just GPT-2 with (a lot) more training data—training data that cost a lot of money to acquire, and therefore training data that (unlike GPT-2’s training set) has corporate interests invested in its creation. GPT-2 is still the “core” of GPT-3’s architecture; GPT-3 can be seen as a commercial “extension” on top of the GPT-2 core.

If you want to understand “how GPT-3 works”, you can just study GPT-2. Nothing is different architecturally between them.

It is a shame that GPT-3 isn’t open for study, because it has emergent capabilities (meta-learning) that GPT-2 didn’t express, and which are worthy of study. But they couldn’t have known it would do that when they set off to create GPT-3; and they did know they needed a bunch of money for compute + training-data scraping, so they likely made agreements (handshake or contractual) to license this beefed-up “extension” to GPT-2 in advance of knowing what it could do; and in fact as a prerequisite to getting that funding to build it.

I would suspect that OpenAI’s goal with GPT-3 was mostly to observe for themselves what a much-better-trained GPT-2 would be capable of; to study those observed capabilities (like meta-learning), and to try to figure out if they can replicate them using only tweaks to GPT-2’s architecture, without needing the big load of commercially-funded training data. (Sort of like seeing what optimal solutions a brute-force algorithm can find, and then trying to come up with an efficient algorithm to emit those same solutions.)

If they can come up with something like that, then there’s likely a GPT-4 brewing right now, which wouldn’t need all that compute and training data to create; and therefore wouldn’t be beholden to corporate interests; and therefore would be open for study.

The "Open" in OpenAI means that they want their customer to open their pockets, it has nothing to do with Open Source, open core or anything like that.

The cultural war of "but they deserve to make money" is misguided. You are free to make money, just don't call your projects open source if for one reason or another you do not want to open up the source of your project. And don't call it open core if you don't want to open up the core of your project. GPT-3 might just be "GPT-2 plus something more", but a proprietary code based forked off of Linux would also just be "Linux plus something more", that doesn't make it open source or open core, because neither the core nor the source is open.

That said, I am not against the OpenAI project going forwards with early releases of proprietary offerings, it seems like a fine way to finance their work, and they can still support the open source community. But criticism of the choice is warranted if they keep trying to brand themselves as open.

I would compare GPT-3 to the original Doom. In both cases, the codebase/runtime/client part is open source; while the asset data that creates the experience everyone is familiar with, is proprietary. In both cases, you’re free to create your own asset data to use with their codebase/runtime/client.

In both cases, I find it helpful to imagine an alternative world where the “engine” and the “assets” were created by separate companies.

In such a world, you could imagine Id.A publishing a standalone open-source “Doom engine”; and then Id.B making a proprietary game called “Doom” using that engine.

Similarly, in such a world, you could imagine OpenAI.A publishing a standalone open-source “GPT-3 architecture”; and then OpenAI.B training a proprietary model called “GPT-3” using that architecture.

In both cases, that’s exactly what happened; only Id.A and Id.B were both just Id; and OpenAI.A and OpenAI.B were both just OpenAI. And because of that, each company decided to refer to the whole thing they were doing—both the open engine, and the proprietary assets—as a single project with a single name (where if they had been two separate companies, the necessity of securing trademarks would have pushed them to have two separate names for those two things.)

People’s moral paranoia in cases like this, comes down to the fact that there’s a name collision that they aren’t noticing. The engine of the original software Doom, and the assets of the original game Doom, are both just called “Doom”; and likewise, the architecture of GPT-3, and one trained model built on that architecture, are both just called “GPT-3.” If you separate them, it’s clear that one is intended to be open-source, while the other is not. But, for whatever reason, the companies involved didn’t separate the concepts, leading to this illegibility of whether “GPT-3” is open-source or not. It’s a meaningless question, because the label “GPT-3” isn’t cleanly pointing to a single concept.

> If you want to understand “how GPT-3 works”, you can just study GPT-2. Nothing is different architecturally between them.

This isn't true. At the very least, off the top of my head, GPT-2 didn’t have the sparse layers that GPT-3 has.

That seems logical and a like it would hold true, but the spirit of being "open" is completely lost once you involve commercial, for-profit interests. I would like to highlight Elon's (co-founder) thoughts on this as a clear deviation from their initial goals:

"This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft."

I would think that GPT-4 would be exclusively licensed to one of the other major players for even more money.

Just because it doesn't "need" the compute/training data to create doesn't mean people aren't going to sell it for money.

People need to eat at the end of the day.

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