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Comment by mrinterweb | Hacker News Reader

The name "OpenAI" is a contraction since they don't seem "open" in any way. The only way I see "open" applying is "open for business."

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I believe Sam has answered that question its open to public, anyone in the world can use ChatGpt for free so its "open"

They have several open models, including Whisper.

They shared a bunch of breadcrumbs that fell off the banquet table. Mistral and Google, direct competitors, actually published a lot of goodies that you can actually use and modify for hobbyist use cases.

Reminds me of OpenText, which is basically a software sweatshop with the most closed source ecosystems you could think of

This is a tired and trite comment that appears on every mention of OpenAI but contributes little to the discussion.

I think the purpose is to shift public sentiment? I lot of people in the free software world are justifiably upset over ClosedAI's marketing tactics.

Shifting public sentiment seems a worthy goal, but this particular comment ("OpenAI?? more like ClosedAI amirite") gets repeated so often I don't think its doing anything. It shows up on every mention of OpenAI but has no bearing to the particular piece of news being discussed. I think there's lots of more productive ways to critique and shift public sentiment around OpenAI. But maybe I'm just grouchy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Apple isn't a fruit company.

I went to Burger King and there was no royalty working there at all!

But Burger King didn't claim once to be royalty.

Did their CEO insist on hearings that they are part of the royal family? Also - is Burger King a nonprofit organization? They just want to feed the people? Saviors of the human kind?

How can you be so sure? I've seen a documentary that detailed the experiences of a prince from abroad working in fast food after being sent to the US to get some life experience before getting married. Maybe it's more common than you think.

Prince Akeem of the nation of Zamunda! :D

You're thinking of McDowell's.

"A person or thing preeminent in its class"

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/king

What percentage of people who use their products care? 1%?

OpenAI is a brand, not a literal description of the company!

> OpenAI is a brand, not a literal description of the company!

If the brand name is deeply contradictory to the business practices of the company, people will start making nasty puns and jokes, which can lead to serious reputation damages for the respective company.

99% of people don't care. Also, they are in some sense open, ChatGPT is openly available and they're capped-profit.

Far, far more than 1% of people care. Sure, they are open in one sense: for business. But in the tech world, "open" specifically means showing us how you got your final product. It means releasing source code rather than just binaries (even free binaries!), or sharing protocols and standards rather than keeping them proprietary (looking at you Apple and HDMI). It doesn't matter if anyone can use ChatGPT, that has nothing to do with being open.

Not enough people care to make considering a name change worthwhile. The net benefit of changing their name is negative. If I were Sam Altman, I would keep the name, changing it would hurt the company.

Elon Musk (and several others) sued ClosedAI for this very reason. I agree with you that changing their name would hurt their company now, but I also want public sentiment to shift so not changing their name hurts even more.

It won't shift, the vast majority of people couldn't care less. And Elon is just butthurt about OpenAI, he would have made it closed if they allowed him to take over.

I think generally zero business damage in name. Only a vocal minority like to cry about it.

> Only a vocal minority like to cry about it.

A very vocal minority can often have quite some influence on the majority. See for example the Wikipedia article on "Minority influence":

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_influence

If you have evidence that’s happening in the case of OpenAI. Let me know. Wiki link is useless.

Would you feel the same about a kill shelter called "save the kittens inc"?

Will this ever die? It feels like every time a post is made about OpenAI that someone loves to mention it.

No, it will probably never die. It is reinforced by the dissonance between their name and early philosophy and their current actions.

It should though, it's a stupid way to phrase the argument.

OpenAI pivoted from non-profit to for-profit and it's fine to criticize them for that, if that's the argument you're making. But focusing on their name specifically doesn't make sense. I mean, what do you expect, that they rebrand to something else and lose a ton of brand recognition in the process? You can't possibly expect a company do that when they have no incentive to.

You also can't expect people to disregard the history of the company and the meaning of words because it has decided to change its direction. It seems to me that they made the choice to not rebrand and accept the fallout because it's less damaging to them than the loss of brand recognition. Why do you feel the need to defend them?

It will die when it stops being such blatant, in-your-face trolling by SamA.

It's worth mentioning during every conversation about this company

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