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by davely 809 days ago
Maybe I don’t understand this sentiment, but are people really that hung up on the name?

I see this sort of thing posted a lot (i.e., “it should be ClosedAI instead of OpenAI, lol”)

What if it just means “Open for Business” instead of “Open Access for All”? Or maybe they should just make it an acronym?

I’m sorry for the confusion on my part, but there’s just been a lot of words dedicated toward expressing frustration with the company because they chose to use “open” in their name.

Personally, I don’t find it frustrating that Apple doesn’t sell fruit and Intel doesn’t actually give intelligence data.
3 comments
phyzome 809 days ago
"What if it just means" -- I mean, we don't have to ask "what if". We can look at the original press release:

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

« We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. 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. »

They never give an explicit explanation for their name, but it's pretty obvious.

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rootusrootus 809 days ago
Is the frustration because of the name, or because open [access] was part of their ethos at the beginning, and people think they've abandoned it?
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startupsfail 809 days ago
OpenAI is supposed to be a nonprofit. But, when the nonprofit board tried to exercise control, it became very clear that the nonprofit arm is not, in fact in control any longer. The board was wiped out, nearly everyone in the company seemingly was willing to join Microsoft or Sam Altman or what not.

This doesn’t seem to be compatible with continuing loftily call themselves with the same name, as the initial nonprofit mission.

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woopsn 809 days ago
It's a gimmick. When the nonprofit was organized in 2015, the name certainly did not mean open for business. It meant (loftily) undertaking the quasi-religious quasi-humanist mission "in the spirit of liberty" to generate a new kind of super wealth as "broadly and evenly distributed as possible".

As in prepare for the end... THE END OF HIGH PRICES!

> to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return

- https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai

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