[LatticeAnimal]

> As we get closer to building AI, it will make sense to start being less open. The Open in OpenAI means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it's totally OK to not share the science (even though sharing everything is definitely the right strategy in the short and possibly medium term for recruitment purposes).

That is surprisingly greedy & selfish to be boasting about in their own blog.

[Jensson]

Yeah, they are basically saying that they called themselves OpenAI as a recruitment strategy but they never planned to be open after the initial hires.

[Spivak]

Why do tech people keep falling for this shtick? It's happened over and over and over with open source becoming open core becoming source available being becoming source available with closed source bits.

How society organizes property rights makes it damn near impossible to make anything commons in a way that can't in practice be reversed when folks see dollar signs. Owner is a non nullable field.

[sva_]

Because the people that got recruited on those terms suddenly see what kind of dough they will be making, I suppose.

[blackoil]

By believing that since they aren't "MBA", economics and human behaviour don't apply to them.

[8organicbits]

Thankfully the code as it was during the open source stage can be forked, maintained, and developed further if another party is interested.

[Aeolun]

They’re pretty open about that now though.

[davej]

I think you're misreading the intention here. The intention of closing it up as they approach AGI is to protect against dangerous applications of the technology.

That is how I read it anyway and I don't see a reason to interpret it in a nefarious way.

[_heimdall]

Two things that jump out at me here.

First, this assumes that they will know when they approach AGI. Meaning they'll be able to reliably predict it far enough out to change how the business and/or the open models are setup. I will be very surprised if a breakthrough that creates what most would consider AGI is that predictable. By their own definition, they would need to predict when a model will be economically equivalent to or better than humans in most tasks - how can you predict that?

Second, it seems fundamentally nefarious to say they want to build AGI for the good of all, but that the AGI will be walled off and controlled entirely by OpenAI. Effectively, it will benefit us all even though we'll be entirely at the mercy of what OpenAI allows us to use. We would always be at a disadvantage and will never know what the AGI is really capable of.

This whole idea also assumes that the greater good of an AGI breakthrough is using the AGI itself rather than the science behind how they got there. I'm not sure that makes sense. It would be like developing nukes and making sure the science behind them never leaks - claiming that we're all benefiting from the nukes produced even though we never get to modify the tech for something like nuclear power.

[davej]

Read the sentence before, it provides good context. I don't know if Ilya is correct, but it's a sincerely held belief.

> “a safe AI is harder to build than an unsafe one, then by opensorucing everything, we make it easy for someone unscrupulous with access to overwhelming amount of hardware to build an unsafe AI, which will experience a hard takeoff.”

[woopsn]

Many people consider what OpenAI is building to be the dangerous application. They don't seem nefarious to me per se, just full of hubris, and somewhat clueless about the consequences of Altman's relationship with Microsoft. That's all it takes though. The board had these concerns and now they're gone.

[sillysaurusx]

"Tools for me, but not for thee."

[nibab]

I think the fundamental conflict here is that OpenAI was started as a counter-balance to google AI and all other future resource-rich cos that decide to pursue AI BUT at the same time they needed a socially responsible / ethical vector to piggyback off of to be able to raise money and recruit talent as a non profit.

So, they cant release science that the googles of the world can use to their advantage BUT they kind of have to because that's their whole mission.

The whole thing was sort of dead on arrival and Ilya's email dating to 2016 (!!!!) only amplifies that.

[edanm]

When the tools are (believed to be) more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and the "thee" is potentially irresponsible and/or antagonists, then... yes? This is a valid (and moral) position.

[sillysaurusx]

If so, then they shouldn’t have started down that path by refusing to open source 1.5B for a long time while citing safety concerns. It’s obvious that it never posed any kind of threat, and to date no language model has. None have even been close to threatening.

The comparison to nuclear weapons has always been mistaken.

[edanm]

Oh I'm talking about the ideal, not what they're actually doing.

[sillysaurusx]

Sadly one can’t be separated from the other. I’d agree if it was true. But there’s no evidence it ever has been.

One thought experiment is to imagine someone developing software with a promise to open source the benign parts, then withholding most of it for business reasons while citing aliens as a concern.

[philosopher1234]

It makes people feel mistrusted (which they are, and in general should be.) it’s a bit challenging to overcome that.

[gyudin]

Sounds pretty much like any other corpo “Pay us bucks and benefit from our tech”