[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.