I think the word “open” is sort of a misrepresentation of what the company is today. I don’t mind personally but I can also see why people in the OSS community would.
Now, I’m not too concerned with any of the large LLM companies and their PR stunts, but from my solely EU enterprise perspective I see OpenAI as mostly a store-front for Microsoft. We get all the enterprise co-pilot products as part of our Microsoft licensing (which is bartered through a 3rd party vendor to make it seem like all the co-pilot stuff we get is “free” when it goes on the budget).
All of those tools are obviously direct results of the work OpenAI does and many of them are truly brilliant. I work in an investment bank that builds green energy plants and sells them with investor money. As you might imagine, nobody outside of our sales department is very good at creating PowerPoints. Especially our financial departments used to a “joy” to watch when they presented their stuff on monthly/quarterly meetings… seriously it was like they were in a competition to fit the most words into a single slide. With co-pilot their stuff looks absolutely brilliant. Still not on the level of our sales department, but brilliant and it’s even helped their presentations not last 90 million years. And this is just a tiny fraction of what we get out of co-pilot. Sure… I mostly use it to make stupid images of ducks, cats, and space marines with wolf heads for my code related presentations, and, to give me links to the right Microsoft domination I’m looking for in the ocean of pages. But it’s still the fruits of OpenAI.
Hell, the fact that they’re doing their stuff on Azure basically means that a lot of those 10 Microsoft billion are going directly back to Microsoft themselves as OpenAI purchases computing power. Yet it remains a “free” entity, so that Microsoft doesn’t run into EU anti-trust issues.
Despite this gloom and doom with an added bit of tinfoil hat, I do think OpenAI themselves are still true to their original mission. But in the boring business sense in an enterprise world, I also think they are simultaneously sort of owned by the largest “for enterprise” tech company in the world.