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Comment by skwirl | Hacker News Reader

We have diversity in the space, and OpenAI just happens to be the leader and they are putting tremendous pressure on everyone else to deliver. If Sam leaves and starts an OpenAI competitor I think it would take quite some time for such a company to deliver a model with GPT-4 parity given the immense amount of data that would need to be re-collected and the immense amount of training time. Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating as that seems to be Ilya's goal.

For those of us trying to build stuff that only GPT-4 (or better) can enable, and hoping to build stuff that can leverage even more powerful models in the near future, Sam coming back would be ideal. I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.

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> I'm kind of worried that the new OpenAI direction would turn off API access entirely.

That is a good point, I didn't consider people who had built a business based on Gpt-4 access. It is likely these things were Sam Altman ideas in the first place and we will see less such productionalization work in the future from OpenAI.

But since Microsoft invested into it I doubt it will get shut down completely, Microsoft has by far the most to lose here so you got to trust that their lawyers signed a contract that will keep these things available at a fee.

There is no world in which Microsoft leaves their GPT4 customers dead in the water.

AFAICT Sam and his financial objectives was the reason for not open sourcing the work of a non profit.. He might be wishing he chose the other policy now that he can't legally just take the closed source with him to an unambiguously for profit company.

Personally, I would expect a lot more development of GPT-4+ as soon as this is split up from one closed group making gpt-5 in secret and it seems silly to exchange a reliable future for another few months of depending on this little shell game.

The architect of the coup (Ilya) is strongly opposed to open-sourcing OpenAI's models due to safety concerns. This will not - and would not - be any different without Sam. The decision to close the models was made over 2 years before the release of ChatGPT and long before anyone really suspected this would be an insanely valuable company, so I do believe that safety actually was the initial reason for this change.

I'm not sure what you mean by your second paragraph.

I think the closed source for safety thing started as a ruse as the closed source has been instrumental to keeping control and justifying a non profit that is otherwise not working in the public interest. Splitting off this ruse nonprofit would almost certainly end up unleashing the tech normally like every other tech google, etc, have easily copied.

> Meanwhile OpenAI would be intentionally decelerating

Once Microsoft pulls support and funding and all their customers leave they will be decelerating alright.

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