[esperent]

It's kind of incredible how fast OpenAI (now also known as ClosedAI) is going through the enshittification process. Even Facebook took around a decade to reach this level.

OpenAI has an amazing core product, but in the span of six months:

* Went from an amazing and inspiring open company that even put "Open" in their name to a fully locked up commercial beast.

* Non-existent customers support and all kinds of borderline illegal billing practice. You guys are definitely aware that when there's a network error on the API or ChatGPT, the user still gets charged. And there's a lot of these errors. I get roughly one per hour or two.

* Frustratingly loose interpretation of EU data protection rules. For example, the setting to say "don't use my personal chat data" is connected to the setting to save conversations. So you can't disable it without losing all your chat history.

* Clearly nerfing the ChatGPT v4 products, at least according to hundreds or even thousands of commenters here and on reddit, while denying to have made any changes.

* Use of cheap human labor in developing countries through shady anonymous companies (look up the company Sama who pay Kenyan workers about $1.5 an hour).

* Not to mention the huge questions around the secret training dataset and whether large portions of it consist of illegally obtained private data (see the recent class court case in California)

[km3r]

> Use of cheap human labor in developing countries through shady anonymous companies (look up the company Sama who pay Kenyan workers about $1.5 an hour).

What is wrong about injecting millions into developing nations?

The rest I agree with, although I don't think it was ever really 'open' so its not getting shitty, it always was. Thankfully, "there is no moat" and other LLMs will be open, just a few months behind OpenAI

[esperent]

> What is wrong about injecting millions into developing nations?

Please don't try to reframe this to make exploitation a positive thing. See my other comment here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36625438

[km3r]

So you'd rather OpenAI crush all business in the area by outcompeting them for workers, ensuring local businesses struggle to hire?

[astrange]

> * Use of cheap human labor in developing countries through shady anonymous companies (look up the company Sama who pay Kenyan workers about $1.5 an hour).

If you pay a developing country developed country wages what you'll get is 1. inflation and 2. the government mad at you because all their essential workers/doctors/government officials are quitting to work for you.

[esperent]

This is a terrible excuse that I see trotted out far to often to justify going to developing countries and barely even paying workers that country's minimum wage. You absolutely can pay considerably more than minimum wage without disrupting the local economy. They're paying people as low as $1.32 per hour for an absolutely horrible job. I'm not expecting them to pay western wages. But even bumping that up to $2.50 or $3 an hour would make an incredible difference to the local workers lives. The fact that they don't do that is exploitation, pure and simple.

Note that I feel I have quite deep understanding of this issue, and feel strongly about it, because I live and work in a developing country and I see this happening a lot. Westerners come over here and treat local workers like shit, pay them peanuts for 80 hour weeks while making loads of money themselves and then justify it because "it's the local norm". It's sickening, frankly. We westerners doing business in developing countries are in a position of privilege and should be leading by example, not jumping on the first excuse to dump a hundred years worth of the fight for workers rights.

[hnfong]

I'm curious. When you buy a loaf of bread from the local market, are they cheaper than first world prices? If so, do you pay double the listed price and demand the shop pay double the price to hire workers so as to not exploit them? Are your expenses in said developing country lower than what you would have paid if you were in a richer country? Are you donating the difference to the local community?

Just curious.

[davedx]

Hi, I've been to Kenya and Tanzania, and while basic staples are cheaper than developed countries they're not that much cheaper these days. If you watch travelog videos where they ask locals how they're doing, many developing countries are struggling with massive inflation that's been partly caused by volatile energy prices (many people can no longer afford gas) and partly by food shortages from the Ukraine War.

[esperent]

It's weird how people always trot out phrases like "I'm just curious" or "I'm just asking questions here" when they try to justify exploitation. Is it so that you have plausible deniability when you inevitably get called on it? Because that doesn't work.

[hnfong]

I see that you have pretty extreme takes on what constitutes "exploitation". It's one thing to pretend that you're not part of it if you live on another part of the planet and pretend globalization doesn't exist, but I was wondering how you'd avoid participating in it if you lived in the same country and economic bubble as the ones you claim are exploited.

If you had a morally consistent way to live that life, you'd have my respect. But no, you had to deflect the topic to a phrase I wrote and make presumptions about what I really meant.

FYI, I'm morally at ease with myself, I don't need to justify anything to anyone.

[astrange]

OpenAI doesn't pay minimum wages, they pay around the median local wage IIRC. I wouldn't say that if it was minimum wage.

[tarruda]

The engineer is not part of the board which makes these decisions.

[lmm]

If they're taking their time to defend the company on the internet, they either have an ownership stake in it or they're a chump.

[SergeAx]

They may defend the product, not the company. It is normal for engineers to be emotionally invested in their products.

[esperent]

Or option 3, they're being paid to represent sneakily represent the company in a positive light.

[fragmede]

Not to nitpick, but if you're able to name the company employing Kenyans, Sama, who's homepage is at https://www.sama.com/, with a team page at https://www.sama.com/our-team/ , I'm not sure you can complain that they're being shady and anonymous.

[esperent]

It's pretty shady. They have been fully exposed at this stage but from what I understand they were trying to keep a very low profile, going to efforts to make sure the Kenyan workers didn't know they were working for a company called Sama but instead using sub companies to sign the worker contracts.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

[kossTKR]

Since chatGPT-4 is now useless for advanced coding because of their blackbox sudden nerfing, can anyone guess how long before i can run something similar to the orig version privately?

Is the newer 64B models up there? 1 year, 2 years? Can't wait until i get back the crazy quality of the orig model.

We need something open source fast. Thanks open-ai for giving us a glimpse of the crazy possibilities, too crazy for the public i guess.

[dontupvoteme]

They also no longer support data exports for many users (including myself) - at one point it worked but now it says you'll receive an email to download your data, which never arrives.