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Comment by sva_ | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried that OpenAI has started a trend of these AI companies being a lot more secretive about their research in the future. I mean basically OpenAI took Deepmind's/Google's public research on transformers and ran with it, not publishing back the results of improving it.

This probably sent a bad message with consequences for the whole public research field.

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I agree with this. Last decade was golden age of AI where all major players including Google brain, deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft Research contributed a lot. To honest OpenAI had the least intellectual contribution of them all except of few marketing material masquerading as papers. From now on we can expect all labs to secretive and not publish anything. This is really bad considering all this models are black box and research is needed to understand them better. Hope government comes into picture and forces this labs to explain details of each model

FAIR will continue to publish. Nvidia and Uber also. Then you have open source oriented labs who should continue publishing. Google is the big one. They have made more research contributions than all other labs combined basically.

I'm not that plugged-in to the AI world (though doing my best to catch up)... but is Uber really viewed as a powerhouse on the same level as FAIR?

No, not really. It was never really as large, and most of their output was in probabilistic programming (e.g. Pyro) and work that was relevant to self-driving cars (point cloud compression, etc.). But they shut down Uber AI in the layoffs last year.

This comment reminds me of what Facebook did to the open web in 2005.

Before Facebook, the web was more open, with websites being more accessible to each other. Google scraped resources like Wikipedia and Twitter, and augmented the results into their search page.

When Facebook appeared, Google tried to integrate Facebook data into their search page. But Facebook, then an up-and-coming internet company, wanted to protect their data as a competitive moat. With this seeming to set an example, each platform started to hoard their data on their website. The web no longer interoperated with their data, and all data began to be siloed in their own platforms.

How anyone is applauding OpenAI is beyond me. They have done nothing but make AI a more closed ecosystem since their inception.

Because they gave a product that everyone loves, which is a credit to them. At this point nobody cares about whether they made AI open, or they really care about the safety and negative aspect of LLMs.

Isn’t this a given as soon as there’s serious money in it?

Related, are there any examples of an "open" field of business, with public disclosure of the secret sauce that gives competitive advantage?

You mean Microsoft, right? OpenAI was publishing research papers until the MSFT partnership.

research papers yes, models no.

Don’t think this is true. Facebook has released both llama and segement-anything after ChatGPT took off, with llama being half-open and s-a being fully open. I think apart from google which worries about openai producing a google killer the show will go on. Facebook doesn’t sell language models or image models, its not a threat to their business.

That trend started at about the moment when Llama was leaked. We didn't really take the good-faith limited access in good faith ourselves, and as a result lost trust.

I disagree. Meta released a research paper and the model (the latter only to researchers.) OpenAI won't even release an actual paper detailing the specifics of their research. Thats a much lower bar, and I highly doubt those two incidents are really related.

Ah, the bottom right corner of the prisoner's dilemma rears it's ugly face again. The bane of capitalism.

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