[alert0]

A ton of negativity in the comments here. Greater availability of funding is awesome. I'm working on a project right now as a spinoff of a research contract that I'm going to land and apply with. Very exciting and very timely.

[natch]

OpenAI doesn’t have much goodwill in the community, I would venture to say. Many people here have been disappointed by the delta between the open vision first described and the closed reality now, and also by the fact that applying for API access just leads to silence.

[amelius]

It's just the old VC pattern of making a big pile of money and using it to outcompete everybody else, as opposed to creating an environment where everybody can thrive.

[Shindi]

Not true, just got access myself today. Applied a few months ago and super stoked to stay up late and play around tonight. Don't know anyone at OpenAI and didn't pay off any Microsoft officials or anything. Just have patience.

[sbierwagen]

>in the community

Which community?

There is an irreconcilable conflict between AI safety and AI openness. If you create a dangerous program, and you know it's dangerous, then it would be insane to release it.

This was widely pointed out when OpenAI was announced. They would need to pick one or the other, and they've picked safety.

I think it was the correct decision, though it does make their name sound rather stupid now.

[cma]

>There is an irreconcilable conflict between AI safety and AI openness. If you create a dangerous program, and you know it's dangerous, then it would be insane to release it.

>This was widely pointed out when OpenAI was announced. They would need to pick one or the other, and they've picked safety.

It is a bit strange that it just happened to correlate with huge amounts of money for everyone involved around the same time, if it was really just straightening out their philosophy around openness. It transitioned from non-profit to for-profit with a non-profit parent or something at the same time.

[akarma]

> There is an irreconcilable conflict between AI safety and AI openness. If you create a dangerous program, and you know it's dangerous, then it would be insane to release it.

If you remember OpenAI's creation, the whole idea was that AI safety comes from democratizing AI. Their idea of AI safety was AI openness.

It's like how some would describe the Second Amendment in the US — by democratizing these dangerous weapons, there may be more chaos but people will be safer from some overlord who holds all the dangerous weapons.

This isn't to say that I agree, but what you're suggesting as their mission is in fact antithetical to what they claimed to be their mission.

[ipsum2]

This argument doesn't hold water. Models like DALL-E, that can create cartoons using word phrases are not open sourced. That's probably not because of "AI safety".

[nexuist]

It can probably create more than cartoons, and even with cartoons there are plenty of very offensive and dangerous terms you could use to create dangerous and offensive cartoons. I mean, I would love to be able to type in anything I want into DALL-E, but the time from release to it sparking some kind of geopolitical incident could probably be measured in hours.

[natch]

So the fact that somewhere on earth there might exist some fanatical people who might be offended by something, becomes sufficient reason to shut down access to a cartoon generating capability?

Seems like you are setting a pretty low bar for what we will allow with AI on one end, and what will trigger an AI feature’s general availability to be cancelled, on the other end. Everything else in between these two is going to be even harder.

To make my point more clear, imagine a magic quadrant with two axes. On one axis it goes from capability - harsh to mild. Harsh would be like "it can physically burn and kill everything to ashes" and mild would be "it can temporarily distract someone."

The other axis would be who gets affected. That axis goes from "every living being in the known universe" on one end, to "nobody" on the other end, with "a very small handful of fanatics with extreme outlier beliefs" somewhere out there toward the "nobody" end.

In the graph, you are setting the bar way over on the "just a slight distraction" side, and way over toward the edge of the "nobody" side, and saying that this is sufficient reason to cancel AI access for the general public.

[ipsum2]

> but the time from release to it sparking some kind of geopolitical incident could probably be measured in hours.

This sounds like a huge exaggeration. At the resolution of DALL-E, anyone can photoshop or draw something of the same quality.

Also, this argument was unsuccessfully used when OpenAI claimed that releasing GPT-2 was going to cause massive societal strife. They released it later, and life continues on.

[A-Train]

Anyone can draw an offensive cartoon. They are withholding the solution for money. If a startup that is removing backgrounds from photos is worth close to $100M (remove.bg) imagine how much this is worth. This technology is worth billions and could replace illustrators in many cases in web design, content, etc.

[visarga]

What? You can do all of that with Photoshop or even a meme generator faster. Why restrict DALL-E for fear of unPC uses?

[mellosouls]

If you create a dangerous program, and you know it's dangerous, then it would be insane to release it.

Oh please. "Only we can control this terrible monster we have created."

Marketing guff.

[suyash]

The fund is no charity or like a typical VC investment, it clearly says they want to see your project leveraging their API, in other words you will be paying them back by using their API's. It's almost like how cloud vendors give free credits, no way it will help research or open source community.