[somenameforme]

Can you think of any non-weapons examples where centralization/gatekeeping of a tech meaningfully and causally benefited society or a technology itself?

Actually, thinking about my own question I'm even inclined to remove the non-weapons qualifier. The most knee jerk response, nuclear weapons, is perhaps the best example of unexpected benefit. The 'decentralization' of nuclear weapons is undoubtedly why the Cold War was the Cold War, and not World War 3. And similarly why we haven't* seen an open war between nations with nuclear weapons. One power to rule over all suddenly turned into "war with this country no longer has a win scenario" effectively ending open warfare between nuclear nations.

There's also the inevitability/optics argument. There are already viable open source alternatives [1], and should this tech ultimately prove viable/useful that will only be the beginning. So there certainly will be "ai" that will be open, it just won't come from OpenAI(tm)(c).

[1] - https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B

[albntomat0]

I agree with your view that nuclear weapons on both sides prevent war. However, they’ve only ever been developed by a small number of capable and motivated nations, with considerable resources involved. The later ones (North Korea, Pakistan) developed them while other nations tried to prevent them from doing so.

If ML models continue their exponential growth in size, a similar outcome is possible.

[avindroth]

I really don’t like the argument that you should make things free just because it makes the world better. What happened to ownership and respecting the effort it takes to create something?

I see a similar line of reasoning can be used to justify theft from the rich.

[somenameforme]

I'm not entirely sure whether to praise or condemn them for it, but OpenAI has chosen to keep their initial introduction/company plan publicly available on their site: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

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"OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

...

As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies."

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My mocking about OpenAI(tm)(c) was not just juvenile "Micro$oft" type nonsense. At some point they discovered they could make a buck, and their ideology suddenly shifted 180. I have no qualms whatsoever about businesses pursuing profit, but the entity currently known as OpenAI couldn't be much further from the principles and values OpenAI was founded on, and their name itself is rapidly trending towards becoming a "Don't Be Evil" type of sardonicism. If this was Microsoft, Google, or other such companies operating in this way - I wouldn't have any expectation of anything besides what OpenAI is doing.

Companies tend to get quite a lot of credit when claiming some socially motivated interest, probably much more than deserved. So when they turn against those ideals, it should be noted - loudly.

[msm_]

> What happened to ownership and respecting the effort it takes to create something?

Ironic taking into consideration that the current generation of AI are more or less copyright laundering for the big corporations. Github Copilot being an extreme example of using GPL projects to generate "proprietary" closed source code. What happened to ownership and respecting the effort it takes to create something?

[int_19h]

It sounds almost like a rehashing of Locke's labor theory of property wrt ownership of land that's very popular with classical liberals and libertarians. As that goes, land is initially nobody's, but when some person applies labor to improve or develop it somehow, that labor being "mixed in" makes the whole thing the property of the laborer.

Here, instead of common land, what we have is the common content. And they're saying that, by "developing" that content into a model that can do more useful things, the authors of the model are entitled to full private property rights on it.

I really hope that's not where we're going to end up, legally speaking.