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Comment by arsome | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is OpenAI the exact opposite of open?

They may as well just call it ClosedAI at this point, seems like every interesting thing they do is kept under wraps.

I feel like their initial mission of "democratizing AI" was just a way to recruit people. They're everything but "open".

They're as open as microsoft is micro.

Pretty sure Microsoft still makes `soft`ware for `micro`computers

Based on the constant pushes I get in Windows to use MS services, I believe the software is just an advertising platform, and the actual moneymakers are cloud services and selling users' data.

It’s a grey area, but I’d say they haven’t made software for microcomputers for some time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcomputer

I think that's a stretch, but even if you use that definition Windows IoT core fits the bill.

Ya sounds about right. Also curious if DALL-E 2 allows people to request edits to the generated images, or just one-shot attempts

You can use it to infill subregions. Or you could add a “but <your requested edit>“ to your and run again. It’s not super robust to prompts involving complicated composition though so that might not be a reliable strategy.

Democratising AI... through our opaque proprietary API...

> ... through our opaque proprietary API...

after you get approved on their wait list of course

Right. The switch away from openness coincided with their conversion to a for-profit and the Microsoft investment.

I agree; perhaps they are afraid of negative impacts of releasing their work to the public. Either way, I’m not sure I understand the name choice at this point.

Honestly, I think the main problem is, that training large models like this, or GPT-any, or anything like that costs a lot of compute power - which costs a lot of money. So if you're just investing a lot of compute but give everything away for free, that isn't a strategy which can be maintained.

So what we really need, are ways to train models in a distributed fashion. Their initial goal was to 'democratize AI'. But democratizing these models doesn't just mean giving everyone access to your trained parameters, it also means that everyone should be able to spend an effort on improving it. I think a good solution for this would be huge.

> So what we really need, are ways to train models in a distributed fashion.

How is the replication effort for this project handling that? They have over 600 people on their Discord right now, do they have some way for them to cooperate on training a single model?

As far as I can see, No.

GPT-J and GPT-Neo are previous open source reproductions of GPT, but distributed training is overrated. There’s way too much communications overhead. I’m not sure any of the various @home projects have ever accomplished much for that matter.

Instead they use donated time on a TPU or a GPU cloud provider.

An exception is Leela Zero since you can realistically have it play chess at home.

> Instead they use donated time on a TPU or a GPU cloud provider.

So instead distribute the funding? And distributing running models too? Something something crowdfunding blockchain cryptocurrency

Or alternatively https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/decentr...

>donated time on a TPU or a GPU cloud provider

hmmm... what about people who mine crypto on their hardware, and then that hardware goes into a pool of shared $ used to rent out a TPU

So when they formed OpenAI and thought "we are gonna hire the most brilliant scientists in the field" they forgot to account for hardware costs?

At this point it's more like doublespeak.

They just announced they'll be rebranding as OpenYourWallet

Do they have a revenue model? I thought it was a non-profit / public benefit company.

The training set is a one time computation though, running the model still costs cycles and people have to pay for it (see sites like Hugging Face or GooseAI). What people are asking about is the code itself and the one time computed training set. They're not asking to run the trained model for free.

Anyway, getting cycles isn't too hard, expect CoreWeave or another compute-centric company to hop on board in due course.

> They're not asking to run the trained model for free.

I am :D

The could have chosen to work on smaller models and used their already substantial amount of funding to be truly open. Instead they chose a path that demonstrates the Open part in OpenAI was just marketing.

It's the same phenomena as when a protocol or data interchange format brands itself as "simple"

That was their fear with GPT-3 because it would enable whole "fake news" articles to be written without much effort. At this point why should they release trained models? AI developers have a problem now, either show their work (locked down and limited to protect their image), or don't show it. If they do show it, it'll be reproduced. What's interesting to me is how we are approaching the free open source use of these systems. An open source DALL-E 2 could create some very abhorrent imagery.

This uses OpenAI’s CLIP model which is open source: https://github.com/openai/clip

I still think what happens is that they started out on a mission of "we're going to democratize AGI access!" and then shortly thereafter, the not-crazy people managed to convince them what an astoundingly terrible idea that would be.

Doesn't AGI fall under the first amendment? ;)

I would say that they are not as open as when they formed as a non-profit.

That said, their commercial APIs for GPT-3, etc. are very good and my monthly bill for using them seems like very good value.

Isn't that common for startups that want to gain users anyway? (Not charging entirety of what market will bear, anyway)

What do you use the API for? I've not really seen any interesting commercial uses other than customer support bots that are sightly more convincing but not something consumers actually want (they actually want the human that can solve their problem).

Github copilot?

It’s important to recognize the definition of “open” that sama and team embrace versus the definition of open source and “free as in beer.” The early team gathered around the idea of achieving lift (as in marketing lift) of the idea of sharing research results and building upon open source. They do that really well, relative to MS Research and Deepmind. OpenAI was never going to focus primarily on open source or “free as in beer”—- their goal was to market themselves such to draw attention away from that. Well, I’m sure some of the team wanted that, but I’m also sure sama was more than willing to embrace his own definition of success versus that if the dev community.

ClosedAI is a bit harsh, but they have definitely both divided the community somewhat on the definition of “Open” and been very comfortable with focusing on their toys and ignoring the conversation. I mean sama, especially when it comes to Worldcoin, has been very direct about ignoring criticism in general.

How much does it matter? Everyone's practically forgotten that compviz and Midjourney were just in the past few months, Sberbank has ruDALL-E which largest model is somewhere between DALL-E 1 and 2, FB has Make-A-Scene which is somewhat below GLIDE/DALL-E 2, and Tsinghua's Cogview2 paper was released just days ago and is claiming roughly DALL-E 2 parity. AI capabilities are advancing fast enough that whether or not OA releases something, there will be competitors soon. (Heck, you want a GPT-3 competitor? There's like a dozen of them of similar or better quality, several of which are public or API - BigScience, Aleph Alpha, & AI2 come to mind.)

Im not in this space...do you mind explaining more please? I'm really curious.

They were suppose to be a non-profit company that will help to develop AI. AI community is very open, and here you have someone different from OpenAI releasing an open source code from a research from OpenAI (because they didn't release their code)

It seems like it started open, but then they might have switched directions

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