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Comment by sharkjacobs | Hacker News Reader

> He reiterated his belief in the importance of open source and said that OpenAI was considering open-sourcing GPT-3. Part of the reason they hadn’t open-sourced yet was that he was skeptical of how many individuals and companies would have the capability to host and serve large LLMs.

Am I reading this right? "We're not open sourcing GPT-3 because we don't think it would be useful to anyone else"

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When you stop listening to what Sam Altman says and just focus on what he does, you can see the guy is a bit of a snake. Greedy power-hungry man imho.

I’ve tried very hard to like him because like it or not, ChatGPT has revolutionized the AI industry but he’s so hypocritical I just can’t stand him.

Pretty common for dislikeable people to be the most successful at an endeavor. It's not a coincidence.

Sam Altman is responsible for leading the team that have revolutionised AI in its position within society.

There is plenty to criticise OpenAI for but what he and they have achieved is extraordinary, and there is no need for that sort of toxic personal attack.

It’s fine to feel the ends justify the means but not everyone believes that.

Sam is responsible for marketing the team which popularized a certain kind of AI product. No need for personal attack.

I can’t comment on his personality because I don’t know him. But it’s delusional to think the leadership’s personal qualities are irrelevant to developing AI. There’s going to be a lot of subjectivity in fine-tuning the answers.

Success invites haters.

In your world how would you consider Sam Altman having no equity in OpenAI? And everyone finding out after it had a viral hit

Probably no different given his involvement in worldcoin

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/06/1048981/worldcoi...

and loopt

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt

There is no way this guy hasn't figured out some way to get paid out of this.

We just haven't figured out how yet.

that just sounds ridiculous. Teams would have been over the legals for a $10bn investment. Not everyone is financially incentivised.

Also he's already half way to being a billionaire anyway without OpenAI.

Wonder if it's indirectly through some stake in Microsoft or whoever deals with them at that level.

I mean, Occam's Razor says if he wanted a way to get paid, he would just have equity or a very large salary, the normal things CEOs do when they want to make lots of money from their very profitable company.

He gained a huge amount of reputation by saying "I don't have equity in the company. I'm doing it because I love it" in front of the Congress. While he was demanding licensing for AI because it's too dangerous.

I love it. It's dangerous. Hypocrisy? No. It's the tendency of man to pursue what is harmful to himself. Even though optimistic technologists of HN won't agree, much of technology has not benefitted humanity.

Or maybe he just doesn't need more money and wants to do something cool? If my basic needs were met, I'd go volunteer at any number of non-profits full time.

I can't judge the individual, but his words do not align with the company's actions in the slightest.

>> 4. OpenAI will avoid competing with their customers — other than with ChatGPT

On this I would not bet a dime.

He didn't even pinky promise.

I know it doesn't seem related on the surface, but I've found all startup CEOs who ban remote work to be snake-like and dishonest. Interesting coincidence at least.

Might it be that because they know that their own morals and ethics are so fluid that they therefore think than everyone else is the same and thus has to be surveilled to be sure to have "performance...? Just a thought....

So let me make an guess, you like remote work?

Most of the companies I work with are actively putting in place policies to prevent employees from using OpenAI's service because nobody wants to send their proprietary IP to them.

Almost all of these companies have the technical ability, desire, and means to self-host for their employee community. Imagine the internal coup for CTO/CIOs everywhere to buy whatever is the latest Nvidia GPU cluster box, stick it in the on-prem datacenter, load a licensed GPT model and provide "AI as a service to our employees".

Except what's happening is everybody is looking at buying the box from Nvidia, and sticking a large actually open model on it and simply ignoring OpenAI.

> Almost all of these companies have the technical ability, desire, and means to self-host for their employee community.

Well, one of companies I worked for could have hosted a canary service for cron jobs. But we bought it instead of building because we were focused on building features. And here you’re talking about hosting an entire LLM.

The cron job canary was probably not a service that employees were uploading tonnes of company confidential material into, was it? So I fail to see how the comparison makes sense.

The reason companies shun OpenAI and want a self hosted alternative isn't related to costs, it's becasue they don't want their code, internal emails, documentation etc to be uploaded to Microsoft and thus also directly to the NSA.

> The cron job canary was probably not a service that employees were uploading tonnes of company confidential material into, was it?

But they do to Slack and MS Teams. Also go mail services and other places.

OpenAI: Regulations must be passed to protect our moat

Also OpenAI: Meta is pissing in our moat, let's drop a hint about open sourcing our shit too!

I think I worded this poorly. What he said was that a lot of people say they want open-source models but they underestimate how hard it is to serve them well. So he wondered how much real benefit would come from open-sourcing them.

I think this is reasonable. Giving researchers access is great but for most small companies they're likely better off having a service provider manage inference for them rather than navigate the infra challenge.

The beauty of open source is that the community will either figure out how to make it easier, or collectively decide it’s not worth the effort. We saw this with stable diffusion, and we are seeing it with all the existing OSS LLMs.

“It’s too hard, trust us” doesn’t really make sense in that context. If it is indeed too hard for small orgs to self host then they won’t. Hiding behind the guise of protecting these people by not open sourcing it seems a bit disingenuous.

If he says he's inclined to open-source GPT-3, I don't see any good arguments not in favor of giving startups the choice of how they can run inference.

You're saying the same thing.

"I'm not sharing my chocolate with you because you probably wouldn't like it"

Here is how hard it is to serve and use LLMs: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp

“The original implementation of llama.cpp was hacked in an evening.”

If it goes same way as other open sourced models it takes about 5 days that someone will get it running at m1.

More like – it won't be useful to small-time developers (since they won't have the capability to host and run it themselves) and so all the benefits will be reaped by AWS and other large players.

This is what I understood as well. They want to either democratize adoption or not release it. The last thing they/anyone wants is for another BigCo or Govt to h take undue advantage of the model (through fine-tuning?) when others cannot.

That said, I can imagine a GPTQ/4-bit quantized model to be smaller and easier to run on somewhat commodity clusters?

Or it could run with GGML/llama.cpp on a cloud instance with a TB of RAM?

After seeing what people were able to do with LLaMA, I am positive that the community will find a way to run it - albeit with some loss in performance.

It would be truly amazing if they used their computing to develop quantized models as well.

If you really need, 170B parameter model can infer a few tokens per minute on commodity hardware.

A big chunk of developments based on Facebook’s LLaMA model are by small-time developers and individuals, not large players. Facebook has already shown a viable way to release models in the way you described.

It is weird, but GPT-3 is worse than much smaller LLaMA models so I doubt it would see much use anyway.

Are you referring to DaVinci or ChatGPT-3.5

DaVinci

How do you measure this? Pointers to papers would be very helpful

The LLaMA paper had a bunch of comparisons

Aren't the LLaMA weights leaked though? Did Facebook ever open up its license?

Doesn’t matter if you only use it yourself. No one will know.

It is a shame that Sama does not believe in Open Source. The community can solve their GPU bottleneck issue by making it run on CPUs and edge devices in a matter of days.

If small organizations and teams can’t use it, then open sourcing it mostly just benefits big tech

That’s not ideal

How does open source licensing work with respect to trained ai models anyway? Is something like the mit license even that valuable here? Or is it?

If the only barrier to a small team/org using it is cost/effort of hosting (as opposed to some licensing shenanigans), I fail to see how not releasing it is better for the world than releasing it would be. Even if it benefits big tech more than a small team.

Am I somehow being protected by a benevolent sama not open-sourcing the model?

I agree, this is so bizarre

yes i also can't wrap my head around how a ceo of a billion dollar company isn't sincere in his public statements

Really? Even after saying this? "While Sam is calling for regulation of future models, he didn’t think existing models were dangerous and thought it would be a big mistake to regulate or ban them."

Why couldn’t that be true? E.g. even scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project (justifiably) had antipathy toward the much more powerful hydrogen bomb.

It’s possible to think squirt guns shouldn’t be regulated but AR-15s should, or AR-15s shouldn’t but cruise missiles should. Or driving at 25mph should be allowed but driving 125mph shouldn’t.

It was a tongue in cheek reaction.

Its just a way to lie that doesn't sound as much like a lie.

lmao i had the same reaction. sounds like some bullshit.

Reads to me like "we don't know how many people will have hardware powerful enough to run this".

Exactly. If you make it open source, great, cool, but only well-funded entities - like massive corporations - can even afford the hardware costs.

Eh, better than nobody.

He wants the release of the model to primarily benefit individuals and smaller teams as opposed to large deep-pocketed firms.

And he'll do that by... keeping ChatGPT models away from individuals and small teams and in the hands of a few large deep-pocketed firms?

The great thing about open source is that people can try different approaches and gravitate towards what works best for them. Sam knows that of course, he's just being disingenuous because the truth makes him look bad.

How can you sign a statement that AI presents an extinction risk on par with nuclear weapons and then even consider open sourcing your research?

We don't provide nuclear weapons for everyone to keep in their basement, why would someone who believes AI is an existential risk provide their code?

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