Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

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A couple (wow, only 5!) months ago, I wrote up this long screed[1] about how OpenAI had completely missed the generative AI art wave because they hadn't iterated on DALL-E 2 after launch. It also got a lot of upvotes which I was pretty happy about at the time :)

Never have I been more wrong. It's clear to me now that they simply didn't even care about the astounding leap forward that was generative AI art and were instead focused on even more high-impact products. (Can you imagine going back 6 months and telling your past self "Yeah, generative AI is alright, but it's roughly the 4th most impressive project that OpenAI will put out this year"?!) ChatGPT, GPT4, and now this: the mind boggles.

Watching some of the gifs of GPT using the internet, summarizing web pages, comparing them, etc is truly mind-blowing. I mean yeah I always thought this was the end goal but I would have put it a couple years out, not now. Holy moly.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010982

No that wasn't what they had in mind at all, it was pretty clear from the start that they intended to monetize DALL-E. It's just that it turned out that you require far smaller models to be able to do generative art, so competitors like stability AI were able to release viable alternatives before OpenAI could establish a monopoly.

Why do you think that Sam Altman keeps calling for government intervention with regards to AI? He doesn't want to see a repeat of what happened with generative art, and there's nothing like a few bureaucratic road blocks to slow down your competitors.

Ironic given OpenAI's initial messaging explicitly was:

"OpenAl is a non-profit artificial intelligernce research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact."

Ultimately govt is an idiosyncratic, capricious (and sometimes corrupt?) God of what Nassem Taleb would call Hidden Asymmetries"; as in the case of which elonymous company ingests massive tax credits; or which banks get to survive etc

I like how you assume that a non-profit organization is hell-bent on monopolizing a market. What you wrote sounds made up, do you have any sources?

I can't speak to OpenAI being hell-bent on monopoly, but they stopped being a non-profit a while ago: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp

For me, this is why I hesitate to comment and write significant, lengthy comments on here, or any website. It's easy to be wrong (like you), and while being wrong isn't bad, there isn't necessarily any upside to being right either, aside from the dopamine rush of getting upvotes, which in life, doesn't amount to much.

What's wrong with being wrong? In this case, I'm delighted to be wrong (though I believe I had evaluated OpenAI mostly right given my knowledge at the time).

Owning up to the "wrong" is good in my book

You mean the "full accountability" in recent mass layoff notices ? =/

That's just some weird moral compass.

It's almost totally irrelevant if people own up to bring wrong, particularly about predictions.

I can't think of a benefit, really. You can learn from mistakes without owning up to them, and I think that's the best use of mistakes.

No, it’s not. Being willing to admit you were wrong is foundational if you ever plan on building on ideas. This was a galaxy brained take if I’ve ever seen one.

It's absolutely not weird. Saying "I was wrong" is a signal that you can change your mind when given new evidence. If you don't signal this to other people, they will be really confused by your very contradictory opinions.

I own up because it helps me grow personally and professionally, and if I’m not growing, what am I even doing?

I think this is a terrible take. It is so intensely important that one can admit they were wrong when new information comes to light.

Privately, sure. I don't think admitting it out loud makes better people.

The opposite of that is sticking to your statements which is stubborn and foolhardy. Owning up to it is courageous.

Which actually lends me to respect politicians who do that, and instead ridicule people who post old videos of Joe Biden or Obama or Hillary Clinton mandating heterosexual couples. A virtuous person is also open to adapting their convictions continually based on present day evidence and arguments - what is science otherwise?

I rather disagree!

Writing and discussion are great ways to explore topics and crystallize opinions and knowledge. HN is a pretty friendly place to talk over these earth moving developments in our field and if I participate here, I’ll be more ready to participate when I get asked if we need to spin up an LLM project at work.

As long as your opinions/predictions are backed by well-reasoned arguments, you shouldn't be afraid to share them just because they might turn out to be wrong. You can learn a lot by having your arguments rebutted, and in the end no one really cares one way or the other.

Just don't end up like that guy who predicted that Dropbox would never make it off the ground... that was not a well-reasoned position.

Though there might be nothing beneficial about being right or getting upvotes, and it is easy to be wrong, an important thing on a forum like this is the spread of new ideas. While someone might be hesitant to share something because it's half-baked, they might have the start to an idea that could have some discussion value.

Stable Diffusion A1111 and other webUIs are moving so fast with a bunch of OSS contributions, seems pretty rational for OpenAI to decide to not compete and just copy the interfaces of the popular tools once the users validate their usefulness rather than trying to design them a priori.

Agreed. This makes me realize that OpenAIs leadership is able to look long term and decide where to properly invest, as most of the decisions to take the projects in these directions were made >1 year ago.

One can only wonder what they’re working on at this very moment.

Hopefully they do not feel free the pressure to "move fast and break things" because this in turn has the ability to "move fast and break everything"

Then again, the new DALL-E model just released in Bing Chat is really good.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.

Is it better than Stable Diffusion 1.5?

Disclosure: No job, do whatever I want.

You’re right though

Disclosure: I work for Google

It's so good, I'm pretty sure it is Dall-E 3. Probably Microsoft negotiated a few weeks of exclusivity, like with GPT-4.

By the way, Microsoft made it completely free to use. Surprised it isn't discussed much.

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