[uncomputation]

> they don't refute that they did betray it

They do. They say:

> Elon understood the mission did not imply open-sourcing AGI. As Ilya told Elon: “As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in openAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science...”

Whether you agree with this is a different matter but they do state that they did not betray their mission in their eyes.

[dkjaudyeqooe]

The benefit is the science, nothing else matters, and having OpenAI decide what matters for everyone is repugnant.

Of course they can give us nothing, but in that case they should start paying taxes and stop claiming they're a public benefit org.

My prediction is they'll produce little of value going forward. They're too distracted by their wet dreams about all the cash they're going to make to focus on the job at hand.

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I agree with your sentiment but the prediction is very silly. Basically every time openai releases something they beat the state of the art in that area by a large margin.

[ben_w]

> The benefit is the science, nothing else matters, and having OpenAI decide what matters for everyone is repugnant.

OpenAI gets to decide what it does with its intellectual property for the same reason that a whole bunch of people are suing it for using their intellectual property.

It only becomes repugnant to me if they're forcing their morals onto me, which they aren't, because (1) there are other roughly-equal-performance LLMs that aren't from OpenAI, and (2) the stuff it refuses do is a combination of stuff I don't want to exist and stuff I have a surfeit of anyway.

A side effect of (1) is that humanity will get the lowest common (moral and legal) denominator in content from GenAI from different providers, just like the prior experience of us all getting the lowest common (moral and legal) denominator in all types of media content due to internet access connecting us to other people all over the world.

[sumedh]

> The benefit is the science, nothing else matters

Even if that science helps not so friendly countries like Russia?

[mikkom]

They are totally closed now, not just keeping their models for themselves for profit purposes. They also don't disclose how their new models work at all.

They really need to change their name and another entity that actually works for open AI should be set up.

[carlossouza]

Their name is as brilliant as

“The Democratic People's Republic of Korea”

(AKA North Korea)

[andsoitis]

> everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science...

everyone... except scientists and the scientific community.

[bbor]

Well, the Manhattan project springs to mind. They truly thought they were laboring for the public good, and even if the government let them wouldn’t have wanted to publish their progress.

Personally I find the comparison of this whole saga (deepmind -> google —> openai —> anthropic —-> mistral —-> ?) to the Manhattan project very enlightening, both of this project and our society. Instead of a centralized government project, we have a loosely organized mad dash of global multinationals for research talent, all of which claim the exact same “they’ll do it first!” motivations as always. And of course it’s accompanied by all sorts of media rhetoric and posturing through memes, 60-Minutes interviews, and (apparently) gossipy slap back blog posts.

In this scenario, Oppenheimer is clearly Hinton, who’s deep into his act III. That would mean that the real Manhattan project of AI took place in roughly 2018-2022 rather than now, which I think also makes sense; ChatGPT was the surprise breakthrough (A-bomb), and now they’re just polishing that into the more effective fully-realized forms of the technology (H-bomb, ICBMs).

[usefulcat]

So.. "open" means "open at first, then not so much or not at all as we get closer to achieving AGI"?

As they become more successful, they (obviously) have a lot of motivation to not be "open" at all, and that's without even considering the so-called ethical arguments.

More generally, putting "open" in any name frequently ends up as a cheap marketing gimmick. If you end up going nowhere it doesn't matter, and if you're wildly successful (ahem) then it also won't matter whether or not you're de facto 'open' because success.

Maybe someone should start a betting pool on when (not if) they'll change their name.

[addicted]

OpenAI is literally not a word in the dictionary.

It’s a made up word.

So the Open in OpenAI means whatever OpenAI wants it to mean.

It’s a trademarked word.

The fact that Elon is suing them for their name when the guy has a feature “AutoPilot” which is not a made up word and had an actual well understood meaning which totally does not apply to how Tesla uses AutoPilot is hilarious.

[johnbellone]

OpenAI by Microsoft?

[smallnamespace]

Ilya may have said this to Elon but the public messaging of OpenAI certainly did not paint that picture.

I happen to think that open sourcing frontier models is a bad idea but OpenAI put themselves in the position where people thought they stood for one thing and then did something quite different. Even if you think such a move is ultimately justified, people are not usually going to trust organizations that are willing to strategically mislead.

[Jensson]

What they said there isn't their mission, that is their hidden agenda. Here is their real mission that they launched with, they completely betrayed this:

> As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

[boringg]

“Dont be evil” ring any bells?

[SeanLuke]

This claim is nonsense, as any visit to the Wayback Machine can attest.

In 2016, OpenAI's website said this right up front:

> We're hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We'll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

I don't know how this quote can possibly be squared with a claim that they "did not imply open-sourcing AGI".

[thinkingemote]

In that case they mean that their mission to ensure everyone benefits from AI has changed to be that only a few would benefit. But it would support them saying like "it was never about open data"

In a way this could be more closed than for profit.

[lewhoo]

> but it's totally OK to not share the science...

That passes for an explanation to you ? What exactly is the difference between openai and any company with a product then ? Hey, we made THIS and in order to make sure everyone can benefit we sell at a price of X.

[KoolKat23]

The serfs benefitted from the use of the landlord's tools.

This would mean it is fundamentally just a business with extra steps. At the very least, the "foundation" should be paying tax then.

[CuriouslyC]

So, open as in "we'll sell to anyone" except that at first they didn't want to sell to the military and they still don't sell to people deemed "terrorists." Riiiiiight. Pure bullshit.

Open could mean the science, the code/ip (which includes the science) or pure marketing drivel. Sadly it seems that it's the latter.

[shrimpx]

“The Open in openAI means that [insert generic mission statement that applies to every business on the planet].”