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Comment by RONROC | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the only second order effects of wokeism is the fact that many times it gets results.

“Call out culture” runs the gamut from obvious to pendantic, and, more often than not, the result is a net positive.

So, my question is: Why isn’t there a concerted effort from [OpenAI’s] like-minded contemporaries to call them out on their incredibly embarrassing name?

To all the OpenAI engineers, investors, and onlookers: there is _nothing_ “open” about your platform. Am I stupid or are your efforts just casually misleading?

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I often see people calling them out for being 'ClosedAI' instead of OpenAI, so I do think they are being/have been called out by the ML community.

I’m not seeing the connection?

If they started out as an MSFT venture, they probably would be called something else.

The reality is, they have a lot of mouths to feed, and the money was going to have to come from somewhere.

I think it's fair to be cynical, but the name itself is an artifact of history.

Perhaps if they were more truly authentic, they'd have nudged the name as well, but I think the concerns should most be over the materiality of their actual 'openness' in operations, not so much the name.

There is, isn't there? You're responding to an article roasting OpenAI for not actually being open. They seem to get plenty of bad press. Is it just not enough is coming from other AI research labs for your liking?

Artificially Open Intelligence

The 'results' are more plain to see in callout culture, but the negative effects are usually systematic and hidden.

In entertainment - we don't see all the scripts that were given a pass, the actors that were not considered because they were going to cause controversy by being the wrong ethnicity/gender, comedy writing rooms in particular are generally 'anything can be said unsafe spaces', which is an important part of the culture of good writing that has a questionable future.

If you go and have a look at films made just between 2000-2015 - you can see how many of them - even though they don't rise to the level of controversy today, and are probably not inherently controversial - would not get made today.

'The Last Samurai' with Tom Cruise - some could argue it's 'appropriation' I think many would argue that it's not, it's not really a 'White Saviour' film either. Though it shouldn't be objectively controversial per say, though maybe fodder for discussion, it probably would not get made because it just has the potentiality for ruin: there is just far, far too much risk in an escalating cascade of populist voices calling the film all sorts of things with or without legitimate grievance it won't matter - the mob rules.

Tom Cruise has 10 projects on the drawing board, and he's getting pitches daily, so there's going to be 'a different film' without the risk profile to his personal brand.

Studios (and BigCos) are risk averse and so what we see is a 'watering down' effect across the board.

Conan O'Brien had Sean Penn as a guest on his podcast and has some thoughtful things to say about it.

So does the analogy hold for capitalist control of Open AI? Possibly.

MSFT might be able to push for some 'results' which are seemingly more obvious and public, but the systematic effect of 'closed' and 'proprietary' results in stifled innovation and opportunity otherwise.

It's actually an interesting analogy but I think it's probably good for maybe reasons you might not suspect, and that is, the big part of the iceberg that never gets seen.

Their mission of making AI available to a broad section of society vs concentrating power among a few special interests justifies the name as far as I’m concerned. The name open does not have to mean “everything is FOSS and available on GitHub” in my opinion.

But they keep their models secret. How is that "making AI available to a broad section of society"?

“Through licensing!”

A black box model, a subscription fee for API access and an exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft doesn't sound very open

I mean, you can make a better argument for Windows being "open". Available to a much broader section of society, as an installable product not API privileges that can be withdrawn, and a lot more of what's under the hood is exposed, documented and moddable.

I don't know what their mission used to be, but now their website says "Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." -- quite a bit difference than access!

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