[sailingparrot]

> so the tech giants can do unethical research

I know it's trendy (and partly justified) to look down on OpenAI, but can you actually give any basis for this claim?

What kind of research is OpenAI doing that all the other big AI players (Google/DeepMind, FB, Microsoft) aren't also invested in? And even if others are doing the same, what part of OpenAI's research do you consider unethical?

> It may just be a conspiracy theory

Yea, it very much looks like that to be honest.

[eggsnbacon1]

> What kind of research is OpenAI doing that all the other big AI players (Google/DeepMind, FB, Microsoft) aren't also invested in? And even if others are doing the same, what part of OpenAI's research do you consider unethical?

I believe all of them are doing unethical research, especially facial recognition. Notice the public backpedaling this week from all the big tech companies on this too. By directing their cash through OpenAI they can avoid whatever fallout comes from unleashing things like GPT3 on the world.

The most straightforward use case for GPT3 is generating fake but believable text. AKA spam. That's what it was designed to do. If you think fake news is a problem now, wait till someone is generating a dozen fake but believable news articles per minute by seeding GPT3 with a few words and hitting a button.

Its a conspiracy theory with some circumstantial evidence. We will probably never know either way, because who would admit to it if it was true.

[sailingparrot]

> I believe all of them are doing unethical research, especially facial recognition.

Yes all of them are doing facial recognition research, except... OpenAI, so how exactly is OpenAI used as a scapegoat to be able to do that kind of research without public backlash?

> By directing their cash through OpenAI they can avoid whatever fallout comes from unleashing things like GPT3 on the world.

GPT-3 si not unethical research. It is what you decide to with it and how you decide to release it that can potientially be unethical.

Also, OpenAI is just ahead of other labs because they have an insane compute budget and really talented people, but if you have been following a little bit the NLP news, you will see that your theory of OpenAI being a front for unethical research just makes no sense. OpenAI release GPT-2, 1.5B billions parameters, then NVIDIA realeased Megatron, 8B parameters, Google released T5 at 11B and recently Microsoft did turing-nlg at 17B. So they are clearly working on this in their own names and very much publicizing their work.

[wrsh07]

Interestingly, by serving gpt3 as an API like this, they can actually monitor to see if companies are using it to generate spam

[aivosha]

conspiracy hypothesis