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Comment by z77dj3kl | Hacker News Reader

I thought OpenAI was originally supposed to be some kind of for-the-good, non-profit institution studying AI and its safe use in particular with an effort to make it more accessible and available to all through more open collaboration. This is cool research, sure; but what happened to making models available for use by others instead of just through some opaque APIs?

Maybe I'm just remembering wrong or conflating OpenAI with some other entity? Or maybe I bought too much of the marketing early on.

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No, they did some good, they've done a few things to personally help me. They created OpenAI Gym which is a great help when doing reinforcement learning research and defined the standard interface for reinforcement learning libraries for a generation. But they not longer maintain OpenAI Gym.

They also created Spinning Up [0], one of the best resources I've found for learning reinforcement learning. Their teaching resources are detailed but relatively brief and are focused on implementing the algorithms, even if some of the "proofs" are neglected. But they no longer maintain Spinning Up.

So yes, originally they were for-the-good, but lately I've noticed them moving away from that in more ways than one. It seems they learned one cool trick with language sequence modelling, and they have a lot of compute, and this is all they do now.

[0]: https://spinningup.openai.com/en/latest/

That was the marketing message. They became for-profit in 2019 and took investment from Microsoft. Many people were skeptical before that because the main investors were mostly known for for-profit ventures.

I remember Sam Altman, when asked “How will you make money?”, reply they would ask the AI. I thought it was a fairly creative answer.

It turns out, however, that the way they plan on earning money is much less creative, and more run-of-the-mill SaaS monetization. In a way, I like to believe that a real AI would also end up with such a mundane strategy, as it’s the most likely to actually make them profitable and return money to investors.

OpenAI was founded in 2015. In 2015 Google was AI and AI was Google. There was legitimate concern that one American corporation was going to dominate AI. OpenAI was created to challenge that dominance and let "AI benefit all of humanity".

In the meantime China and Chinese companies have catched up. Turns out the fear that one company and one country dominating AI was overblown.

Maybe the OpenAI founders feel that the original goal has been fulfilled because AI is no longer dominated by the US and Google.

You're remembering correctly. OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to for-profit in 2019, took about $1 billion from Microsoft (there has been speculation that this was mostly in the form of Azure credits), and announced that Microsoft would be their preferred partner for commercializing OpenAI technologies: https://openai.com/blog/microsoft/

They very transparently transitioned to a for profit company. It doesn't seem like they are aggressively profit oriented though: I am a paying customer of OpenAI beta APIs and the cost to use the service is very low. It also solves several classes of tough NLP problems. I used to sell my own commercial NLP library - glad I gave up on the years ago.

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