If Elon hadn't pulled the rug out from under them after they refused his forceful takeover*, they wouldn't have had to go to Microsoft and they'd still be open.
* a takeover which he predicated on the claim that OpenAI was "doomed to fail"
It's several reasons, first it's the lies and the abuse of a charity, that wouldn't be an issue if they had began as a private company instead of robbing a charity.
But secondly, even if they were a private company, it's dishonest and reprehensible to claim to congress that you want to "protect the public" when you really only give a shit about protecting your moat, I'm not happy about that either.
I'm also tired of tech oligarchs general tomfuckery in all our daily lives, as I suspect many more people here are. OpenAI is just particularly egregious about it.
I also think it's my civic duty to let other developers know that OpenAI does not have, by any stretch of the imagination, a stranglehold on this technology or any secret sauce. That's why they're lying and sweating in front of congress.
If this leak is correct, regulatory capture is likely the only moat OpenAI could have hoped for. It would explain why Sam was so absolutely adamant that this tech needed to receive oversight.
If correct, every big tech company now has a recipe to build their own GPT-4. I'd expect for the open source efforts to try to duplicate the results as well. LLMs will increase in quality across the board and become fairly interchangeable, leading to thin margins and a race to the bottom.
We could be watching $13 billion going up in flames, all of it predicated on a secret as flimsy as the Coca-Cola recipe.
Did you actually read my comment or did you have a preplanned diatribe?
They didn't start the private company until the person who promised them $1B reneged. That person reneged because they tried to forcefully takeover and were rebuked.
They were running out of money and forced to raise funds in a very for-profit way or fold.
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Edit: Rate limited because the hivemind has decided that it's unacceptable to insult their leader
People keep acting like if it wasn't for OpenAI we'd be in some LLM utopia. The reality is some other big tech giant would reach the current SOTA first and we'd be in the same predicament except with a company with 1000x more machinery to do the things you're complaining about.
It's ridiculous the sense of entitlement some people must have to keep insisting that OpenAI should have crawled into a cave and died because some megalomaniac threw a tantrum.
Running out of money to run a charity means they now suddenly need to fuck over the people the charity was supposed to help (that is, everyone on earth) ?
Imagine if a feed the homeless charity accepted private investment and went around installing anti-homeless spikes everywhere after stopping feeding anyone. It's a similar style of behavior.
It's not even remotely the same as anti-homeless spikes.
We've just had the massive fine against 3M for knowing and hiding the risks of PFAS, and the top comments here were "increase the fines! Lock up the bosses!"
Now we have a company going "we had to put a lot of effort into preventing this model from cheerfully outputting Al Quaida propaganda, explicit rape threats, and detailed instructions for an amateur to make deadly chemicals using only home supplies", and despite that effort they still had legal trouble in Italy because the output was unsuitable for minors (as well as the GDPR issues that were the primary headline at the time).
And a lot of researchers with no financial incentives saying "yup, there's danger in these AI".
The reaction here?
Disbelief OpenAI might be saying what they mean, and meaning what they say.
And people parroting "moat!" as if none of the other FAANGs could trivially cross any regulatory barriers that emerge.
It's like the entire topic of AI has been politicised harder than "is nuclear power green?"
So does Microsoft Word. Both require a human to tell the software what to output.
> as if none of the other FAANGs could trivially cross any regulatory barriers that emerge.
That's the point.
This miracle technology does not belong to a few rich men, it belongs to us all.
Tech oligarchs are provably not more responsible than the rest of us, and do not deserve to lock us out of the garden whose fruit they seek to pick.
A rich man can meet the regulations that allow him to build a robot to take your job, but YOU are not allowed to build the same robot to help boost your own income? Because that might be irresponsible?
> So does Microsoft Word. Both require a human to tell the software what to output.
Clippy does what now?
Or do you mean "I can type", because if so you're minimising the very same capabilities that you're later describing as a miracle and saying belongs to us all.
> Tech oligarchs are provably not more responsible than the rest of us, and do not deserve to lock us out of the garden whose fruit they seek to pick.
"No more responsible than the rest of us" is a dangerously low standard.
The rest of us, collectively rather than each and every one of us, play lotteries, drive dangerously, addict ourselves to drugs, pickle our livers, and win Darwin awards.
For all our sophistication and sophistry, we're all just fancy balding primates with fairly similar tribal attitudes and motivations.
> YOU are not allowed to build the same robot to help boost your own income
Yes, obviously, with literal robots there are countless examples of public liability insurance and health & safety legislation. With computers, likewise, because they're connected to stuff.
A non-profit and charity are two different things.
While a charity is a form of non-profit, it has to follow certain rules to qualify as one. Their profits must go towards the charity.
A non-profit is a company that is set up not to make a profit. It is allowed to make a profit if it does. This is what OpenAI was.
They switched to a "capped" for-profit model so that they could get more funding. It also allowed their employees to invest in the company, and openAI gave equity to their employees.
There was no lies or abuse. Where did you get that information from?
A nonprofit is subject to the non-distribution constraint: any revenues that exceed expenses must be committed to the organization's purpose, not taken by private parties.
The "regulatory capture" conspiracy theory makes no sense to me. It takes 9 figures in cash to create and run one of these super big models. Only big tech was ever going to create them, and big tech is already very experienced at navigating regulation, regulation wasn't ever going to stop them from competing. And in general, our democracy works better than the nihilist libertarians give it credit for.
The thing about these models is compute scales quadratically with model dimensionality and memory scales quadratically with sequence length.
We are nowhere near diminishing returns for either variable, so sure current models maybe scale quickly but the cutting edge will want as much compute as possible for a long time.
That’s kind of the humor of everyone saying this leak somehow leaves OpenAI vulnerable.
The work isn’t deciding if an MoE is the right architecture or not, it’s how to run 25k GPUs concurrently in a fault tolerant way (likely the true reason for the deep Azure links).
Except in practice this is not true, and hasn't been for more than a year. It's not just a workaround either -- FlashAttention is both faster at runtime and uses less memory.
I interpreted openAIs regulatory capture bid as more of an attempt to create competition-hostile regulation than an attempt to reduce regulation to cut costs.
Not sure what you're on about, both my comment and the article are about how they went for-profit.
They went for-profit because they needed to raise.
They raised after Elon reneged a fraction of the way into his promise of $1B. (and not 100MM deep: he silently revised his figures after TC started digging.)
It's not complicated but you seem to want to make it complicated.
At this point, after attempting to start a literal fight with Zuckerberg, Musk is proposing a penis-measuring contest.
He appears to be decompensating in real time. If that's salivation fodder, so be it, but it just makes me sad. You hate to see it happen... or at least I do.
Maybe Russia has been injecting lead into his water supply lol.
I’m also saddened.
Musk is not really a hero or a villain, but his manic stages have given us our first realistic shot at becoming a spacefaring civilization, and moved the needle big time on the lock that the perro cartels had on the automotive industry vis-a-vis electric cars.
I hope elon gets better. Losing a billionaire tech maximalists manic episodes is going to set us back decades as more reasonable people chase profit instead of dreams.
It feels very ignorant to think you can diagnose someone has having manic episodes when you know nothing about them as a person, their motivations, their mental health history, and base all your opinions on mainstream outrage over tweets that are less dumb than most people’s
I don’t have a diagnosis obviously, I mean manic as a description of his apparent behavior, not as a pathology. Still, he seems to be not doing great if his social media is to be taken at face value (which is dicey at best) so I do hope that he gets better.
As someone who has bipolar as well, I think it’s an important thing to talk about and glad he has. Now that he has, I hope we can too without being shut down. It’s not uncommon in our field but it has a huge stigma attached to it that’s unhelpful to the people with it, or to the people are are affected by a friends, coworkers, or loved ones mania or depression. When I’m under a lot of stress I tend towards mania, especially when it’s “good stress” like an achievement or great new job or something really exciting to work on. Inexorably I get drawn into a pit of despair, especially as I start to realize the impact my mania has had on my relationships and reputation. I have a good network and good self awareness built over 30 years of meditation and Buddhist study, so the impacts are mitigated.
I suspect if people understood bipolar and were willing to discuss and learn, we might understand better what Elon does and why. He’s not bad. He’s just different. Bipolar is considered an dimension of neurodiversity, and like other aspects like autism, is nothing to be ashamed of.
Every company who promotes and develops AI is morally responsible for the coming disaster that it will bring on us. If I could have one wish it would be that every trace of AI research is destroyed.
Responsible for an attempt to arrive at the construction of production facilities for a good that seems to be in dire scarcity in today's world: intelligence.
If somebody comes and implements "artificial morons", that is actually out of the root that made the field of research necessary.
I recommend reading comments like this and substituting "a baby" for AI. A baby also can't be aligned and is capable of deciding to destroy the world. It's not gonna do it though.
If Elon hadn't pulled the rug out from under them after they refused his forceful takeover*, they wouldn't have had to go to Microsoft and they'd still be open.
* a takeover which he predicated on the claim that OpenAI was "doomed to fail"