For those claiming OpenAI is for profit: Why would OpenAI do this if they were fixated on making money?
Also, while I wish OpenAI released the code for ChatGPT, I applaud OpenAI for actually making their AI model available, to everyone, right now.
* Google hyped their Bard chatbot...but where is it?
* Facebook took down Galatica.
* Even Bing Chat has a waitlist
Reducing costs by 10x may very well increase usage by more than 10x + it makes it even more difficult for competition to come in and undercut them.
Silicon Valley companies have for the past 25 years focused on getting as many users as possible to increase valuation in the hope of getting a $100 billion exit. They don't care about current or near future profitability.
However I agree that OpenAI is getting far too much hate. Their goal of bringing openness to AI made sense in 2015 when one American company (Google) was dominating the field.
However now there are plenty of other companies, countries and open source organizations doing advanced AI research.
To get lock-in from devs before competitors can enter the market and starves any would-be smaller competitors before they can raise money/gain traction.
Since Microsoft can foot the bill for the Azure infrastructure, there is going to be little area for anyone to seriously compete against OpenAI on price, API and features, unless it is completely free and open source, like Stability AI.
let's not forget the shift of narrative that "open" AI made from their name, their marketing and use of opensource and then their move to a commercial subset of microsoft. let's also not forget that they totally avoided discussing copyrights and the crawlings of datasources to extract knowledge from someone else property. the only close thing i can see today which avoided so much scrutiny while being highly sensitive are ICOs in crypto and Theranos in biotech.
I wish opensource win this battle.
They promised to create a lab where the benefits of AI would accrue to the people, not just existing tech giants.
They did that. They created a API where individuals and small businesses alike can use cutting edge AI technology via API. You have to pay, that's the only catch.
I don't see a DeepMind API. I don't see an Anthropic API. I don't see a Google Bard API. I don't see a FB Galactica API.
I hope OpenAI wins this battle.