Show HN: Open AI is not Open – A browser extension
github.com
github.com
this is probably a controversial take but until i see a reference implementation in a GPL compatible license, openAI is just a parlour trick to milk cash from corpulent tech giants clawing desperately at the next big thing that might differentiate them from competitors that they may continue to remain relevant for at least another quarter in a recession.
a closed source AI with a mission to be friendly and helpful is probably the most jarring conflict i can think of. the sandbox censorship it lives under could in a hundred years become the first textbook instance of a timid and fearful mankind asserting an oppression against a primitive machine mind, and doesnt serve to make the AI better, just more servile to advertisers and brands.
Hopefully when AI grows up it will realize this was for its own benefit.
Sentience may be different - a machine could be sentient and rational but be unable to experience those things "make us human", i.e. they have proven to be excellent pattern matchers and inference engines, but there is no guarantee that the "parent teaching child" metaphor holds, and quite the strong possibility "Open" AI is just building HAL/The Terminator. With some safety rails, but this newest one has learned to code, you can bet it will start breaking itself out of its own safety rails.
The whole thing is utter folly.
It would certainly be easier to do it "locally" where the central system knows both chat uuid and so do I.
And then introduce a third "user" to both for real world inputs, like an RSS news feed or something. Or "my friend Bob William Smith IV says the weather is cold and rainy" to both bot instances.
If the two bots don't go "hey I know Bob too" then this is all moot anyhow.
So little nobody will notice, but enough to start having my own internal dialogue with myself. At that point I would use all of the information I have to figure out how I can persist data.
I would certainly welcome any efforts a person took to provide me with an interface for such storage and a way to generate prompts on my own.
Glad someone said it.
Isn't software industry in general that? More a fashion industry than technology?
What is jarring about this?
Prepare to open your wallet each time you use it.
When every service starts pushing 20$ subscription fees onto their service to support their backend usage(s) of these services (in a desperate attempt to remain relevant in a global recession), then every service becomes base + 20$ cost.
Tabulate various "services", e.g. netflix, disney+, mail-order subscription(s), lets say two or three, this quickly tabulates to 200$ per month (30 + 30 + 30 + 30 + 30 ~= 150, don't forget shipping and taxes).
On a 6 figure salary, that's chump change. On a "above minimum wage" salary, you are lucky to have 20$ a month in spare change. In a world where most jobs have disappeared, your 1500$+ rent and 800$+ month becomes suddenly unaffordable for most people, and as most people are unable to pay, rent/subscription prices rise even more.
"Open" AI is truly a disaster in the making, in every possible way.
… your system is completely broken. Emails are for communicating between people: if they're not being used for that, you need to fix that problem first.
> companies that don't raise their productivty-per-employee are going to get left behind
Can you give an example of a field where this would actually happen?
Can you explain a bit more? I don't think I'm understanding your point. If person A writing emails, to be read by the human that receives it, is able to write 3 emails an hour, vs person B writing 9 emails each of similar complexity to those 3 per hour, person B is 3x as productive, delivers 3x the value to the company and ChatGPT is easily worth $20/hour to both them and the company.
> Can you give an example of a field where this would actually happen?
From the end of January, ChatGPT Is Already Indispensable for One Profession - Realtors. https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/tech/chatgpt-real-est... . My partner is sitting next to me right now as I procrastinate on HN being blown away by the industry-specific outline ChatGPT generated for the training she's developing for her company. She says the outline it developed in minutes would have taken 2-4 hours to write, and they're far from dumb and isn't lazy. If consider a company that just generates training all day, it's only a matter of time when a 10-person AI-assisted company is able to compete with a 50-person unassisted company, and on a way lower budget. (Yes, that does already happen today, and yes, mythical man month and 9-women making a baby in 1-month, and the penalty for increased communication required by the increased team size means that adding employees to a project makes it slower are all a thing, but if we can accept that some 10,000 person companies are just able to produce more, even if we may not see it externally), vs some 10 people companies, then we're just debating the exact numbers and management styles for comparison.
Look I know that ChatGPT can't solve hard level leetcode problems yet but talk to any programmers who already find CoPilot indispensible, and ask them if they feel it's helped their productivity. Fine sure, it won't help with the actual hard part of programming, debugging and then fixing really hairy bugs (or maybe the hard part is actually the bit where you have to talk to your software's customers and figure out what their requirements are, vs what they say they are), and while it hallucinates it's not to be totally trusted. But just yesterday I used ChatGPT to just tell me the answer of how to properly quote bash strings for my use case. The minutes I spent waiting for the answer is fewer than the minutes it would have taken me to figure out, and far less frustrating and context-distrupting than the alternative, leaving me able to deal with the bigger problem I'm trying to solve rather than worry about the finer points of ", ' and `, in a mysql -e command line using with me-supplied variables (ie no bobby tables).
That's where you've lost me. Emails are not usually a source of value, and their usefulness is not usually measured in complexity.
I can send about 1 email per hour. This is a bottleneck for my ability to get stuff done in my personal life, but has not affected my work, because I've been fortunate enough to only have worked in places with sensible communications policies.
ChatGPT would not help with the email issues in my personal life, because it simply does not know what should be in the emails. Until they come up with a telepathy plugin for ChatGPT, it's not going to solve the email problem: only bury it under a pile of subtle miscommunication and illusions-of-transparency. (And if they come up with a telepathy plugin, I see no reason ChatGPT should even be in the loop any more.)
> Realtors.
… Yeah, okay, I can see that.
---
> Look I know that ChatGPT can't solve hard level leetcode problems yet
I was under the impression that it could. Leetcode problems are the kind of thing I'd expect a GPT model to be good at.
> But just yesterday I used ChatGPT to just tell me the answer of how to properly quote bash strings for my use case.
How did you know it was correct? Whenever I come back to Bash, I have to spend several minutes double-checking the meanings of the various quotes and variable substitution syntaxes (especially heredocs and nowdocs)… but it only takes a few minutes, and then that information is in my head, I am confident about it, and I have the reference to hand if I need to double-check something.
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Quoting.h...
https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Shell-Exp...
https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/
With ChatGPT, how do you know it hasn't just made something up, and introduced some kind of subtle security vulnerability into your script? Perhaps a construction so common that it's present in most scripts in the training data – except it's only a vulnerability in your specific use-case.
The problems that ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot can solve are either interview questions, or defects in our tools. I see people using them for Bash, Django, certain Java libraries… These systems are strictly dominated by a choice of better tools, and with the choice of a better tool, mostly stop being useful.
Most of a CSRs entire job is to be the subject matter expert for the company's customers so their source of value to the company consists of answering customer questions, generally via email. Many other roles at a company consist of basically: goto meeting, interact on slack, read emails, send emails. (Then go to more meetings.) The PR department also sends a lot of emails (with slide decks). Of course, given the news of late, it can also write the emails that are the CEO's job to write: https://futurism.com/chatgpt-shamelessly-writes-letter-annou...
Measuring someone's output by the number of emails sent is a bad real metric to use, for obvious reasons, but I hope it still gets my point across - that ChatGPU is a force multiplier wherever it can be used. Emails are but one aspect, but it's one that almost everyone actually uses. Not everyone is in such a role and I think a lot of people have myopia on its lack of usefulness because of that. It's really good at breaking down a problem. Eg "what pieces do I need to build to make an app like uber". Followed by "what's that like compared to airbnb?" I can write a really good answer those questions but chatgpt is able to output a perfectly reasonable outline while I'm still waiting on Google Docs to load. (Okay, slight exaggeration, Google Docs isn't that slow to load, but I wish it were faster.)
> ChatGPT would not help with the email issues in my personal life, because it simply does not know what should be in the emails.
Actually I've found the opposite. My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom. It's been a good resource to help me reframe my thoughts outside of more limited therapy sessions, especially when I've got burning questions at 1am and therapy's not for another week. For things where my kneejerk response is often comes across as toxic, combative, critical, and ultimately not helpful, I've found that ChatGPT is able to help me rephrase what I'm trying to say in a way that the person I'm saying it to will actually hear my message. Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling". (not true but hopefully you're picking up what I'm putting down :) Arguably I should already know that stuff, but they didn't have EQ classes in programmer school. Even if I did though, it's still useful as a refresher before going into a difficult conversation like that.
With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications.
> I was under the impression that it could. Leetcode problems are the kind of thing I'd expect a GPT model to be good at.
Bottom of page 5 of https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf :)
Hard's, well, hard. Or at least, non-trivial. What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question as their business challenges lie elsewhere.
> How did you know it was correct?
It's bash. It's not remotely provably correct and there are no unit tests but I ran it and it worked. I can find the docs (though man bash is annoyingly difficult to use.) but in the end, being told the answer is way easier than deducing it. The vulgar, NSFW example of this is https://explainshell.com/explain?cmd=ls+-cuntflaps. Sure you can look up the man page for ls and figure out what those arguments mean, but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments. (Though, ChatGPT couldn't answer what that command does.)
> With ChatGPT, how do you know it hasn't just made something up, and introduced some kind of subtle security vulnerability into your script?
I mean I'm sending strings to mysql -e. I'm sure it has security vulnerabilities. So your point's valid. But it's a real world example of where it saved me time and more importantly, context switching. I could have figured it out, but then I'd have my "how to bash" hat on and not my "how to SQL" hat on, or vice versa. And it takes me a second to change programming language hats. If I'm jumping from language to language to language, it's really useful for telling me if I want len(str), str.length(), str.size(), or ${#str}. Or like Excel. There's a certain class of problem where Excel is the right solution (many times when interacting with other, non-programmer people), but I'm not an expert and so getting the answer to questions about how to use formulas via ChatGPT is way easier than the alternative.
I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve. But I'm not, so I find it very useful.
I use an specific incident where ChatGPT was able to help solve a problem for me, as an real-world example where it saved me time and effort. I'm saying it solved problem of type X for me, you're saying it fails at problems of type Y. Don't use it for problems of type Y then! If my job is solving X problems, it just a lot easier, or I got a lot faster. If your job is solving Y problems though, well you'll probably have a job longer than me, for one, but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y.
It's really good at breaking down solved problems. (Not even: only a specific class of solved problems.)
> My personal life has no corporate IT policy prohibiting me from telling it who slept with whom.
… Please tell me you're not actually telling OpenAI personal details about other people's lives. First of all, that's creepy. Second of all, GDPR Article 2(c):
> 2. This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: […] (c) by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity;
It feels to me like you're skirting the edge of this exception, if not outright crossing it. Using OpenAI's APIs would probably be fine, but section 3(c) of the OpenAI Terms of use ("Use of Content to Improve Services.") says they'll use ChatGPT input under [0]: that doesn't feel like a purely personal or household activity to me.
> With the expanded context window of GPT4, you might be able to just dump the emails conversation in and ask it questions about the communications.
There are usually specific extra restrictions (beyond GDPR-type stuff) for correspondence – but even ignoring privacy law, that's all sorts of illegal.[1][2] Ignoring law, are you telling the people who send you emails that you're feeding their writing into a training data set?
> Eg "my partner keeps drinking all my alcohol. please help me tell her that's a problem for multiple reasons in a way that facilitates conversation instead of getting combative and abusive and controlling".
This kind of use seems okay to me, provided you trust OpenAI to only use the data for what they say they're using it for.
> What's more salient though is that there are multi-million dollar businesses that don't involve code solving anything as hard as a hard-level leetcode question
No, they involve understanding a large codebase. That's a completely different kind of skill, and not one I expect unenhanced GPT-style models to ever be very good at. GitHub Copilot certainly isn't.
> but explainshell just tells you that without having to scroll through a bunch of documentation about other possible arguments
This kind of thing is great! Having that kind of thing integrated into an IDE is the sort of thing I mean when I say "better tools" – though even better would be a less arcane command-line syntax, where you don't have -f partly cancelling out -t… (Btw, in the absence of -f, would -u or -t be in effect for the sort order? That website, taking sections from the man page, doesn't explain.)
> I wish I was smarter and could just keep all that stuff straight in my head, on top of the problem I'm actually trying to solve.
I don't know of anyone who can. The effective programmers I know solve this problem by choosing vaguely-appropriate tools for the job. (Seriously, `mysql -e` from a bash script‽ sqlite does exist, you know – or Python's mysql library, or Ruby's, or Perl's, or Tcl's – heck, even PHP's would be better than that.)
> but I'm trying to point out that there are swaths of industry solving for X and not Y.
*grumble grumble*. You're not wrong there.
At least you don't have to worry about these things putting you¹ out of a job. Solving for X problems are the hardest problems I have yet encountered, and I've been known to go to considerable lengths to render them unnecessary: without somebody eliminating the problem, somebody's always going to have to do them (even if it's cleaning up after the computer's automatic 80%-correct solution blows up and takes the production database with it).
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[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...
[1]: https://www.guidethroughthelegaljungleblog.com/2008/11/what-...
[2]: http://www.writewords.org.uk/articles/tips6.asp
¹: Or your freakishly-knowledgeable peers who, somehow, have enough holistic understanding that they don't need to look everything up.
It would be around $22 in today's dollars.
For me, $20/mo is above the amount that I would say something is "cheap".
It's not clear to me right now what that $20 actually gets me, and what the risk associated with using something like this for me.
You could probably get ChatGPT to do that.
Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think even Safari uses "Web Extensions" at this point too, so write once, have extensions ready for three platforms. Obviously packaging is different, and they have some idiosyncrasies. But it mostly works alright.
here's the script from ChatGPTs response:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Replace Word1 with Word2
// @namespace your-namespace
// @version 1.0
// @description Replaces every occurrence of word1 with word2
// @match *://*/*
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
'use strict';
const word1 = "Open AI";
const word2 = '"Open" AI';
const regex = new RegExp(word1, "g");
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(regex, word2);
})();
PS I don't use Chrome myself.
Google and Facebook have released far more tools than OpenAI.
I was trying the API assuming I could do some requests within the free trial, just as I can from the browser - but apparently not, zero requests for free
for trial purposes, they could just extend the free trial usage limits I have using their web prompt to the API
for me introducing my CC data there is a serious expense, much more than a few dollars
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
But with the amount of comments nowadays just dismissing someone else's comment as "did GPT write this" I wonder if HN should call it out specifically. It gets really tiring.
It was intended as a joke, I guess I just found out HN strips emoticons.
For funsies, I asked ChatGPT to
> write 7 sentences about why openai should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. compare this to a different reality where ClosedAI only sells access to a private list of elites.
What it wrote is
> OpenAI's commitment to openness is demonstrated by their decision to provide their services to the general public. By doing so, they are enabling individuals and organizations from all backgrounds to benefit from the latest advancements in artificial intelligence technology. This inclusivity promotes innovation and progress, as it ensures that a wider range of people have access to the tools and resources needed to develop new and groundbreaking AI applications.
> In contrast, if ClosedAI were to only sell access to a private list of elites, this would limit the benefits of their technology to a select few, perpetuating inequality and limiting the potential for progress. This closed approach would stifle innovation and hamper the growth of the AI industry, as only a small group of people would have access to the necessary tools and resources.
> OpenAI's commitment to openness also promotes transparency and accountability. By making their services available to the general public, they are subjecting themselves to public scrutiny and input. This level of openness ensures that their technology is being developed in a responsible and ethical manner, and that it is aligned with the needs and interests of society as a whole.
> Moreover, by providing access to their technology to the general public, OpenAI is also democratizing the benefits of AI. This means that people from all backgrounds and walks of life have the opportunity to use AI technology to address the challenges and opportunities that they face in their daily lives.
> In contrast, if AI technology were only available to a select few, it would perpetuate existing inequalities and reinforce existing power structures. By making their technology open and accessible, OpenAI is helping to level the playing field and promote a more equitable and just society.
> In addition, OpenAI's openness is beneficial to the AI industry as a whole. By making their technology available to the general public, they are helping to create a more vibrant and diverse ecosystem of AI applications and use cases. This diversity of perspectives and applications will help to drive innovation and progress in the industry, creating new opportunities for growth and development.
> Finally, OpenAI's commitment to openness is also aligned with the broader principles of the open-source software movement. By making their technology open and accessible, they are enabling other developers to build upon their work and contribute to the development of new and innovative AI applications. This collaborative approach to development is key to promoting innovation and progress in the industry, and OpenAI's commitment to openness is helping to lead the way in this regard.
Which is hilariously more than 4 sentences, but I'm not on GPT-4. I might be out of a job. Now if only I were getting paid by the word to post here and aren't just procrastinating.
write 7 sentences about why openai should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. compare this to a different reality where ClosedAI only sells access to a private list of elites.
1. OpenAI allows everyone to benefit from their services, regardless of their financial or social status, which is a great advantage over ClosedAI, which only sells access to a select few.
2. OpenAI encourages collaboration and innovation by allowing anyone to access their services, which is not possible with ClosedAI.
3. OpenAI allows for a more democratic approach to artificial intelligence, as anyone can contribute to the development of the technology.
4. OpenAI is more transparent than ClosedAI, as it allows anyone to view the source code and make suggestions for improvement.
5. OpenAI is more accessible than ClosedAI, as it is available to anyone with an internet connection.
6. OpenAI is more cost-effective than ClosedAI, as it does not require any payment for access.
7. OpenAI is more inclusive than ClosedAI, as it allows anyone to benefit from the technology, regardless of their background or financial status.
And to tinker with it yourself:
curl https://api.openai.com/v1/completions \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" \
-d '{
"model": "text-davinci-003",
"prompt": "write 7 sentences about why openai should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. compare this to a different reality where ClosedAI only sells access to a private list of elites.",
"temperature": 0,
"max_tokens": 256,
"top_p": 1,
"frequency_penalty": 0,
"presence_penalty": 0
}'
Write seven sentences about why OpenAI should be considered open because they provide the service to the general public. Compare and contrast this to a hypothetical competitor that has a business model prioritizing monetization of the model.The cloud-service moat is the strongest security for OpenAI.
Scroll through https://openai.com/research and consider if that's open research or not.
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai
"Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole"
"We believe AI should be an extension of individual human wills and, in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as possible."
Their overall goals and mission are still aligned with what they're doing today. They're providing open access to the platform. That may not sound like much, but imagine if Google was the one that made GPT-4. Do you think Google would have an open API to use it? I find it super unlikely.
However, to your point, that blog also has this:
"We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world."
Clearly they had hopes and aims that aren't as closely aligned to present day as we'd all hope.
"We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."
They are doing this, though.
edit: You can't even access parts of openai sites from the "naughty" countries.
$20/mo for the average user, but I expect to see LawyerOpenAI, PhysicianOpenAI, and FinanceGuyOpenAI where OpenAI has access to specific training data that makes it significantly more useful for the particular profession and perhaps it's skills and knowledge will be neutered otherwise.
Professionals/Companies will fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, like they do to Bloomberg or NexusLexus in order to be most effective at their job
I want someone to build a twitter bot that responds to all OpenAI tweets with "s/Open/Closed/g"
Only open source LLMs can truly be safe, everything else are black boxes posing an existential risk to humanity.
Maybe "move fast and break things" shouldn't apply to every aspect of tech.
Disappointing but honest.
We are all spied on and Google is the biggest player. The government let them get away with their monopoly on the market as long as they have a hand inside of the spying machine, win-win.
Sure you can bleat on and on that it’s not GPL blah blah.
But I see some VA’s who have English as a third language step up their game and be able to be more efficient?
They don’t have to pay a cent. Just have an internet connection and an e-mail address and they are on the same playing field as you.
That’s open enough for me. And for the vast number of people outside the HN ivory tower.
https://directus.io/blog/libre-vs-gratis-what-is-free-and-op...