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Comment by c7b | Hacker News Reader

Can we discuss again that OpenAI apparently gave an exclusive license for GPT to Microsoft [0]? If that's still correct, I simply don't see how that fits with their mission of creating safe and "Open" AI.

[0] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-...

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OpenAI just has the word "Open" in the name as a branding trick. They are not particularly more open than anyone else. They are just a company.

Remember, they are the ones that didn't publish GPT-2 because it was "too dangerous" for anyone else to have while numerous groups replicated it.

yeah, this. It’s not open in any sense of the word, not even pretending to be.

OpenAI is "Open" in the same way the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is "Democratic". In the name only.

OpenAI was conceptualized and founded in 2014/15 to avoid AI being dominated by one country and one company (Google).

That is no longer the case. OpenAI should change their misleading name but it's worth remembering that their original mission statement has been fulfilled by OpenAI, academia, Chinese/European companies alike.

I _think_ this means that the infra that GPT-3 runs on is exclusively Microsoft / Azure (e.g. you won't see GPT-3 models running on GCP or AWS).

You can sign up for an OpenAI API key and build products with it. I'd be really surprised if they closed that down to only Microsoft.

My understanding is that this means that Microsoft is the only one who gets the weights and can further train the model for their own applications, while everyone else just gets API access to some versions. Which really would be very exclusive. But would be good if someone with actual knowledge about the deal could comment.

That’s in the press release but it’s more than just infra.

“Microsoft is teaming up with OpenAI to exclusively license GPT-3, allowing us to leverage its technical innovations to develop and deliver advanced AI solutions for our customers”

This is a brilliant move by Microsoft which will finally do significant damage to Google's search dominance. They've tried everything else to crack that nut but there is just too much inertia behind Googling something. In my opinion, this changes the game completely and puts an already distrusted Google back on their heels. I can see it being the thing that finally undercuts that inertia and has people asking themselves if they really want more links to shitty SEO blogs on topic X.

If Google fails to filter out shitty SEO blogs on topic X, how is ChatGPT going to do the same? Changing the results format from a list of links to a paragragh of natural language doesn't alter the content.

Why would the content matter? People Google things because that's all they know how to do, not because the results are amazing. A new way of searching could be novel enough to get people to try, well, a new way of searching.

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