OpenAI Is Everything It Promised Not to Be ⇥ vice.com

Chloe Xiang, Vice:

This blog post and OpenAI’s recent actions — all happening at the peak of the ChatGPT hype cycle — is a reminder of how much OpenAI’s tone and mission have changed from its founding, when it was exclusively a nonprofit. While the firm has always looked toward a future where [Artificial General Intelligence] exists, it was founded on commitments including not seeking profits and even freely sharing code it develops, which today are nowhere to be seen.

[…]

Will this AI be shared responsibly, developed openly, and without a profit motive, as the company originally envisioned? Or will it be rolled out hastily, with numerous unsettling flaws, and for a big payday benefitting OpenAI primarily? Will OpenAI keep its sci-fi future closed-source?

This was published February 28, roughly two weeks before GPT-4 was launched.

Ben Schmidt, of Nomic AI, on Twitter:

I think we can call it shut on ‘Open’ AI: the 98 page paper introducing GPT-4 proudly declares that they’re disclosing *nothing* about the contents of their training set.

James Vincent, the Verge:

Speaking to The Verge in an interview, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder, expanded on this point. Sutskever said OpenAI’s reasons for not sharing more information about GPT-4 — fear of competition and fears over safety — were “self evident”:

“On the competitive landscape front — it’s competitive out there,” said Sutskever. “GPT-4 is not easy to develop. It took pretty much all of OpenAI working together for a very long time to produce this thing. And there are many many companies who want to do the same thing, so from a competitive side, you can see this as a maturation of the field.”

In addition to effort and competition, Sutskever also raises questions about what it would mean for safety if the company was more transparent — something Schmidt pushes back on — while Vincent documents potential legal liability. But are these not foreseeable complications, at least for competition and safety? Why maintain the artifice of the OpenAI non-profit and the suggestive name? A growing problem with things like these is questions about their trustworthiness; why not pick a new name that is not, you know, objectively incorrect?