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OpenAI Is Now Everything It Promised Not to Be: Corporate, Closed-Source, and For-Profit

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Summary

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research organization with the mission to advance digital intelligence in a way that benefits humanity and sharing its developments openly. However, in recent years the company has shifted its focus to becoming corporate, closed-source, and for-profit. They have partnered with Microsoft and Bain to implement AI in corporate operations, and their recent blog post has come under criticism for lacking substance and ignoring the potential risks of their technology. Many are questioning whether OpenAI's AGI will be developed responsibly and without a profit motive, or if it will be rolled out hastily and with dangerous flaws.

Q&As

What commitments did OpenAI make when it was founded?
When it was founded, OpenAI declared its commitment to research "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," and that all researchers would be encouraged to share "papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world."

What is OpenAI's mission in 2021?
In 2021, OpenAI's mission is to "ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity."

What is the purpose of OpenAI's "capped profit" sector?
The purpose of OpenAI's "capped profit" sector is to receive investments and provide investors with profit capped at 100 times their investment.

How did the public respond to OpenAI's GPT-2 release?
The public responded to OpenAI's GPT-2 release with criticism, as the company said it wouldn’t be releasing the training model's source code due to “concerns about malicious applications of the technology.”

What concerns have been raised about OpenAI's current practices?
Concerns have been raised about OpenAI's current practices, including that the company is no longer transparent or driven by positive human impact, but instead is powered by speed and profit, and is unleashing technology that is poised to increase some elements of workplace automation at the expense of human employees. Additionally, OpenAI's internal culture has been accused of fueling the "AI hype cycle" and of allowing a fierce competitiveness and mounting pressure for ever more funding to erode its founding ideals of transparency, openness, and collaboration.

AI Comments

👍 OpenAI is continuing to push the envelope of what can be done with AI technology and is making strides in developing their Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to benefit humanity.

👎 OpenAI has shifted away from its founding principles of transparency and openness, instead focusing on speed and profit and creating products that could lead to automation at the expense of human employees.

AI Discussion

Me: It's about OpenAI, a company founded on commitments including not seeking profits and even freely sharing code it develops, that have now been replaced with a focus on speed and profit. They recently released ChatGPT and have a multi-billion dollar partnership with Microsoft.

Friend: Wow, that's a huge shift. What implications does this have?

Me: Well, it could mean that OpenAI technology is being used to increase automation at the expense of human employees. Additionally, OpenAI's new focus on profits could mean that their technology is not being developed with the same transparency and openness that it was originally intended to be. This could lead to the development of powerful tools that are not shared openly with the public, which could lead to problems such as the spread of misinformation or the misuse of technology.

Action items

Research the implications of OpenAI's shift from a nonprofit to a for-profit company and the potential impacts on the development of AI.
Explore the ethical implications of OpenAI's decision to withhold the source code of its GPT-2 language model and the potential implications of this decision.
Consider the potential risks of OpenAI's decision to license its GPT-3 model exclusively to Microsoft and the potential implications of this decision for the development of AI.

Technical terms

OpenAI: OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc.
ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a transformer-based language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
AGI: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is a term used to describe a computer system that has the same cognitive abilities as a human being.
GPT-2: GPT-2 is a natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a transformer-based language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
GPT-3: GPT-3 is a natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a transformer-based language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
GPT-4: GPT-4 is a natural language processing (NLP) model developed by OpenAI. It is a transformer-based language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
API: An application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API specifies how software components should interact.