[Moshe_Silnorin]

Technological advancement has been responsible for most of the increases in human welfare, most notably allowing us to (at least temporally) escape the Malthusian condition. It's not implausible that technical research likely to be neglected by markets and academia could be a better use of money than even the most efficient African charity. But I drink the AI-is-very-likely-to-change-everything-we-really-mean-it-this-time Koolaid, though.

[dilemma]

OpenAI still isn't open source, or open in any other sense of the word. It is a private organization that will own any technology developed.

Again, OpenAI isn't Open.

[aplaice]

I don't want to pick a side in this, but OpenAI does seem to have published some open source software projects on GitHub, all that I have checked under the MIT license. (https://github.com/openai?type=source ). This is not a high bar to cross, as even Microsoft or Facebook do that, but I have also not found any evidence, on their website, of projects that they have not released as free software. The fact that they are planning not to publish technologies, if there are "safety concerns", in the future, is a different matter, but then given their claims, that is exactly what they should be doing. Clearly, one could argue that in that potential future, OpenAI will become a misnomer (disregarding the issue of what actually should be done), but at the moment it appears that all of OpenAI still _is_ open source.

[idlewords]

Nor is it AI.

[rspeer]

I'm sure what they do falls within the rather broad field of AI. It's just not AGI, which is the thing they talk about to get people to give money to their AI projects.