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Comment by p1esk | Hacker News Reader

Not only there’s no model weights or code released, there’s not even a paper. Nothing is revealed about the model. “OpenAI”, ladies and gentlemen.

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At first I thought of it as Open(Web|Source|File Format|StreetMap|etc), now I group it with OpenTable.

Also at first this objection really resonated with me. I think the meaning of OpenAI has spread pretty well now, and that it's getting to the point where raising this objection is tiresome.

There is an important point to be made about how it got popularized as being open and then they went and closed it while keeping the momentum, but that should be made instead of just saying, "wait, it's called OpenAI but isn't open?!?!"

However, stuff gets started as an open play all the time and gets closed, without open in the brand name, for instance https://ghuntley.com/fracture/ - hence the term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openwashing

This is the first time they have not posted any sort of a paper when releasing a new model. Even the sort that accompanied GPT-4 announcement.

Qualifier intended. It's getting to the point where raising this objection is tiresome., soon it will be :-)

I still think publicly expressing how we feel about their “openness” is the right thing to do. And I’m sure there are people inside OpenAI who feel the same way.

To be fair, that usually implies that you're made tired by the recipient's statement. Like if your child (hypothetical) was misbehaving and you told him "I'm getting tired of your disobedience" that child should expect that you mean you want them to stop being disobedient.

Is it the complaining that is tiresome? Or is it the lying perpetrator who is tiresome?

We should just start calling them Closed AI from now on, just like we used to call Microsoft M$.

That’s always been bad taste as a joke. Like the French boomers who transform “Facebook” into “Face de bouc” thinking it’s funny. It’s really tiresome for people familiar with the subject, but it feels novel to them because they are not well-connected with other people.

Cynical monikers applied to corporations and/or brand names are not meant to be funny, at all. They are often useful warning signs, meant to demonstrate corporate deviousness over time.

C’est Fessse de Bouc :)

ShutAI is catchier.

Open could be used to describe the public interface to the closed model. As compared to Google's pre-chatgpt models which where inaccessible to the public.

Yeah, the trouble is, that they're open like the Apple App Store. They claim to have a fair policy and follow it consistently, but they don't.

https://community.openai.com/t/my-account-has-been-banned-fo... (see related topics for some more)

I think the least they could do is change their name, to better match their new philosophy.

They’ll wait until the first PR meltdown, rebrand as something silly like “Meta” or something, and then fade back into the collective unconscious.

Yeah, the whole 'open' part of this was them aligning themselves philosophically with open-source. But of course they throw that away when the money comes talking...

Meanwhile, competitors are choking in papers, but fail to release anything I can get my hands on (that’s worth a damn).

I can actually appreciate “open” as “open to access” or “open to actually having a product iso posturing about being so far ahead but never releasing anything worthwhile” (looking at Google).

Agreed, but there's room in the middle. Meta releases Llama papers and weights. And the community is all the better for it.

There's room for all here! May the best one win

Llama was leaked which forced Facebook's hand.

But if they release model weights to their algorithmic raster image generator and don't succeed in their lobbying efforts to ban their competitors, it will result in the AI apocalypse. Think of the children!

I am one of the more powerful open source fanatics out there, and yet this constant refrain, over and over, lamenting that the name of the company is inaccurate, is very tiresome. I think we know here. This does not add anything to the discussion IMO. Observing that no weights, code, or paper were released are useful, but the line about “OpenAI is not really open” is IMO tired and unproductive. They aren’t going to change it. It’s just sour grapes at this point.

So pretty much, "shut up and accept it, peon"

Yeahno... that's not gonna suffice. Squeaky wheel gets the oil!

Are you suggesting that if we complain hard enough about the name on Hacker News that… OpenAI is going to change their name? Because it is my position that this will never succeed, and all we’re doing is adding noise to the discussion here.

I don't want them to change their name, I want them to open-source their models.

And its not about HN, it is about the larger community grumbling. Not that it will do anything but if they're going to annoy us with their disingenuous naming then we can annoy them by calling them out for it. There are a million other names of blithe corpo-jibberish they could use, but they didn't.

And it is oh-so-convenient how discussion that you don't like is "noise". Us smarties are fantastic at rationlizing arent we? Yes let's just limit the conversation to breathless panty-creaming only. I'm sure the CEO would really like that!

Shut up and accept what? A company being closed source / for profit? Are we rioting against capitalism or something? Should I get my pitchforks? Just to be sure, we'll include literally all major tech companies, or is only OpenAI the target?

Only openAI, they're the ones absuing the word 'open'

> Are we rioting against capitalism or something?

That would be nice... can we do it Fight Club style?

I love and use OpenAI services everyday, but I also think a fundamental revulsion at Orwellian doublespeak is fine.

I agree - however is it really productive to the discussion if multiple people are commenting the exact same thing every single time? Upvoting one comment that shares this sentiment is enough, in my opinion...otherwise any valid criticisms are overshadowed by this outrage over the name.

Feeling it is fine. Taking time to say it every single time is tedious. We don’t have to speak every feeling we have.

Sure, but when you say something people resonate with it gets upvoted until it's the top comment relatively consistently. So while I have no issue with you objecting to this, most people clearly still agree with it. For what it's worth, I am very much in the "don't be a deceptive asshole" camp.

The other aspect you're missing is once you stop criticizing it, you are passively normalizing it. And that's horseshit. Call out the fuckers that do bad shit more often because they deserve it. I am not saying you are a shill, but you are doing exactly what the company wants - normalizing their shitty behavior and defending them against criticism for it.

You don’t have to. It’s clear many of us feel this way, and you’re not the arbiter of which feelings are valid.

Just to be clear I’m explicitly saying the feelings are valid, but that saying them over and over doesn’t add anything to the conversation.

Open in this context means open for business.

Open you wallet ;-)

I am certainly looking forward to the day that open source models can be evenly matched with "open"ai's models.

We get it. OpenAI is a for profit company now. The "Open" in name doesn't reflect their vision anymore. Can we stop it already? Or is this some kind of rant against for profit / closed source in general?

Fedex is part of the federal government, right? Names mean nothing.

https://www.fedex.com/en-us/about/history.html

> Mr. Smith thought the word “federal” suggested an interest in nationwide economic activity, and hoped the name would resonate with the Federal Reserve Bank, a potential customer.

A surprising number of people, still, to this day, believe that to be true. Names really do mean something.

Edit: and don’t get me started on the Better Business “Bureau”

A lowercase "i" prefix would really tie it together.

Has anyone who funded OpenAI back in 2015 spoken out against their non-openness? Elon Musk only did after he no longer had a stake in it.

Edit:

OpenAI is a corporation and their stakeholders include Microsoft, Peter Thiel, and Infosys.

Yeah, not really surprising that they are not "Open".

I think I remember there being an organizational structure where the outer organization was a non-profit and they separated out what is now OpenAI into a for-profit subsidiary with a profit cap of 100x investment.

I still can't believe such a deal is legal.

OpenAI is revolutionizing AI and somehow the only thing that occurs to you is this tiresome criticism of their name?

Joke's on you pal if you're still expecting that from 'OpenAI' :/

At this point, I won't hesitate a single bit of doubt that this company literally stole stable diffusion and built on top of it. Like how will we ever know? If they were so good they could have released before SDXL. But they waited.

The real open AI research institute these days seem to be DAIR.

NotActuallyOpenAI

Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Democratic Republic of the Congo. Anyone who puts the word Democratic in their name is likely to be less democratic than others

ClosedAI

Are you willing to fund their org and all their salaries? That's what it would take them to be open in a capitalistic society, realistically.

Don't get me wrong, I love open-source, open-weights research, but the elephant in the room is that people aren't willing to do that on dirt-poor postdoc salaries anymore, for good reasons, especially when greedy landlords are now charging upwards of $4000/month just to have a reasonable living space, and the government takes close to 50% of your salary.

Not only is there no nutritional information or recipe released, there's not even an ingredients list. Nothing is revealed about this fruit. 'Apple,' ladies and gentlemen. Heck, the only Apples you'll find at an Apple Store are running on iOS, not growing on trees!

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