A ton of negativity in the comments here. Greater availability of funding is awesome. I'm working on a project right now as a spinoff of a research contract that I'm going to land and apply with. Very exciting and very timely.
Which community?
There is an irreconcilable conflict between AI safety and AI openness. If you create a dangerous program, and you know it's dangerous, then it would be insane to release it.
This was widely pointed out when OpenAI was announced. They would need to pick one or the other, and they've picked safety.
I think it was the correct decision, though it does make their name sound rather stupid now.
Oh please. "Only we can control this terrible monster we have created."
Marketing guff.
>This was widely pointed out when OpenAI was announced. They would need to pick one or the other, and they've picked safety.
It is a bit strange that it just happened to correlate with huge amounts of money for everyone involved around the same time, if it was really just straightening out their philosophy around openness. It transitioned from non-profit to for-profit with a non-profit parent or something at the same time.
This sounds like a huge exaggeration. At the resolution of DALL-E, anyone can photoshop or draw something of the same quality.
Also, this argument was unsuccessfully used when OpenAI claimed that releasing GPT-2 was going to cause massive societal strife. They released it later, and life continues on.
Seems like you are setting a pretty low bar for what we will allow with AI on one end, and what will trigger an AI feature’s general availability to be cancelled, on the other end. Everything else in between these two is going to be even harder.
To make my point more clear, imagine a magic quadrant with two axes. On one axis it goes from capability - harsh to mild. Harsh would be like "it can physically burn and kill everything to ashes" and mild would be "it can temporarily distract someone."
The other axis would be who gets affected. That axis goes from "every living being in the known universe" on one end, to "nobody" on the other end, with "a very small handful of fanatics with extreme outlier beliefs" somewhere out there toward the "nobody" end.
In the graph, you are setting the bar way over on the "just a slight distraction" side, and way over toward the edge of the "nobody" side, and saying that this is sufficient reason to cancel AI access for the general public.
If you remember OpenAI's creation, the whole idea was that AI safety comes from democratizing AI. Their idea of AI safety was AI openness.
It's like how some would describe the Second Amendment in the US — by democratizing these dangerous weapons, there may be more chaos but people will be safer from some overlord who holds all the dangerous weapons.
This isn't to say that I agree, but what you're suggesting as their mission is in fact antithetical to what they claimed to be their mission.