OpenAI is reportedly going all-in as a for-profit company

RmDebArc_5@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 591 points –
OpenAI is reportedly going all-in as a for-profit company
mashable.com

Surprised pikachu face

109

So what exactly is open about their ai

It’s called OpenAI because they are open to stealing content to train their AI

"I made this!"

You made this?

...I made this!

Except in the AI version it has the wrong number of fingers, and the text is spelled wrong.

I͖ͭ̍̀̏͂̋̏͛ ͕͚̱̗̭͗͗͑ͥͨ̆ͥ͊ͅm̤̻͕̪̥͓͍̿̑̚a̜̝͖̯̰̦͐ͭ̄͋c̠̹̱̱̖ͦ̿̋͗̎l̝̭͚͇̎ͧe͙͕͂͆ ̳̩̦͙̯̮̙t̘̯̯ͣͧ̍ȉ̩̜́̏̂ͯ̉͑̄s̪͖̎ͬ̐͆

They put open in their name to get good talent, investments and so people would have a soft spot for them when they collect tons of data to build their product.

Their internal chats that were released in musk lawsuit reveals they knew they were gonna switch to for profit model (they here means the top brass). But they still lied to everybody about their intentions.

reminder, there are localy ran LLMs. Right now is a vital time for open source to fight against closed source in the AI arms race.

https://www.nomic.ai/gpt4all

Another good resource to help people find models https://llm.extractum.io

Or just straight up install https://ollama.com

I like Ollama, and recommend it to tinker, but I admit this "LLM Explorer" is quite neat thanks to sections like "LLMs Fit 16GB VRAM"

Ollama just works but it doesn't help to pick which model best fits your needs.

pick which model best fits your needs.

What is the need I have to put the effort in to install all this locally. Websites win in terms of convenience.

I want to work on my stuff in peace and in private without worrying about a company grabbing my stuff and using it for themselves and to give/sell it to other outfits, including the government. "If you have nothing to hide..." is bullshit and needs to die.

I don't think I understand your point, are you saying there is no benefit in running locally and that Websites or APIs are more convenient?

I already have stable diffusion on a local machine. I was trying to find motivation to install a LLM locally. You answered my question in a different response

use cases where customization helps while quality does matter much due to scale, i.e spam, then LLMs and related tools are amazing.

At the same time, the trouble with local LLMs is that they're very resource heavy. Your average household computer isn't going to be able to run one with much usability or speed.

Which, you know, is fine. Maybe if people had an idea of how much power is required to run them, they would think twice before using a gigawatt to output a poem about farts, and perhaps even wonder how OpenAI can offer that for free. Btw, a 7b model should run ok on any PC with at least 16GB of RAM and a modern processor/GPU.

Phi 3 can run on pretty low specs (requires 4gb RAM) and has relatively good output

it's a lot slower that chatgpt but on my integrated graphics i7 laptop it ran decent, def enough to be useable. Also there's different models to play around with, some are faster but worse and some are smarter but slower

Okay but what problem does that solve? Is the solution setting up our own spambots to fill forums with arguments counter to their bullshit spambots? I don't see how an LLM improves literally anything ever in any circumstance.

You seem unnecessarily hostile about this. If you don't like LLM just move on.

This is exactly why this sub about technology is better off without business news. You're just reacting to something you hate and directing that at others.

But answer the question maybe

Also, my "hate" was very clearly directed towards LLMs and not a "person".

FWIW I did try a lot (LLMs, code, generative AI for images, 3D models) in a lot of ways (CLI, Web based, chat bot) both locally and using APIs.

I don't use any on a daily basis. I find it exciting that we can theoretically do a lot "more" automatically but... so far the results have not been worth the efforts. Sadly some of the best use cases are exactly what you highlighted, i.e low effort engagement for spam. Overall I find that either working with a professional (script writer, 3D modeler, dev, designer, etc) is a lot more rewarding but also more efficient which itself makes it cheaper.

For use cases where customization helps while quality does matter much due to scale, i.e spam, then LLMs and related tools are amazing.

PS: I'd love to hear the opinion of a spammer actually, maybe they also think it's not that efficient either.

I have personally found generative-text LLMs quite good for creating titles. As an example, I have a few hundred tweets that I'm trying to put into a file, and I'll use an LLM to create a human-readable name for them. It's much better than a lot of the other summarisation mechanisms (like BERT) I've tried with it, but it's still not perfect, because the model tends to output the same thing in slightly different words each time, so repeat runs will often result in the same thing with a different title.

But, that is also a fairly limited use case.

Almost like Sam Altman is just another run of the mill tech bro scam guy.

I don't think he is a "tech bro scam guy", i think he is worse like he is smart and has a documented track record of lying. Unlike other tech bros, he actually knows the capability /limits of his products and he still lies and makes it out to be something it's not.

I hope OpenAI is going to serve as a radicalizing example to all the engineers, who fell for the "ethical guy/company" rhetoric, that the minority-controlled corporate structures they're used to cannot withstand the push for profit. I hope this will make more of them choose majority-controlled structures for their startups and demand unions in existing corpos.

I mean, I was already radicalized in that respect, but it’s definitely reaffirming that radicalization.

But also: I fuckin told you so. This progression was so blindingly obvious from the get-go.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they're skipping right past the "be good to users to get them to lock in" step. They can't even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn't deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I'm ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don't work now that the free money era has ended.

It will fall through much faster than that. I'm thinking two years, tops.

If your username is any prediction then it will be consumed by Lemmy... 🎶downtown🎶

The fact that Silicon Valley interests effortlessly shrugged off the non-profit board's attempt to hit the kill switch last year, and now are preparing to take the company commercial despite the deliberate design otherwise, becomes much more interesting when you consider the theory that corporations are a form of artificial superintelligence.

If the AI idealists can't stand up to basic forces of capitalism, how do they expect to control an actually dangerous AGI?

You give them far too much credit to assume this specific company will ever achieve anything even close to AGI.

We don't know what they aren't showing us. GPT was only one strand of research

If they had something better, don't you think they'd be putting it out front and center? This is akin to all those conspiracy theorists claiming they have proof to back their claims but they just can't show it to you right now but it's definitely coming at some indeterminate time in the future.

If they had something better, don't you think they'd be putting it out front and center?

Only when the product is ready. Look at open.ai/research and you'll see they do a lot more than just chatGPT.

If the AI idealists can't stand up to basic forces of capitalism, how do they expect to control an actually dangerous AGI?

My guess is they don't expect to. I guess that that is one of the reasons they seem to not care about out of control climate change; burn it all down before it all literally burns down.

Yeah, the people leading the "AGI will save us" are the same as super church pastors.
They don't believe it, they just want their bank account limitless before they go into oblivion.

I kinda liked the text you linked. Here’s a quote.

There are also structural changes that can be made to corporations to realign their values system with human welfare. Corporate charters can be amended to optimize for a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and financial outcomes (the so-called “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.)

This reminds me of what we are trying to do where I live. The hard thing is this requires a lot of work and it doesn’t just go against the corporate agenda; it goes against the normal lifestyle most everyone around us lives. It has made me want to quit sometimes.

But then again, true life is in true living among real people and real things, not in daydreaming of better days.

Hey, remember when you guys lined up to suck his dick when the board tried to keep OpenAI working for the good of humanity instead of the oligarchy?

I hate being right

Why do people keep being fooled by rich assholes

People have grown up reading comic books and watching movies about generous billionaire superhero saviors. They want to believe that exists because it's what they've been taught justice looks like.

Surprising, since Lex Luthor was often portrayed as a wealthy billionaire.

I feel like Luthor was a better counterexample for this before the model for his billionaire redesign was elected President of the USA.

Even so, Luthor hasn't had quite the same volume of appearances as Iron Man, Batman, Captain America and the other rich superhero tropes.

And yet the problem was never that he was a billionaire, and Lexcorp was never portrayed as anything but an industrial powerhouse whose existence was ultimately good.

Lexcorp was never portrayed as anything but an industrial powerhouse whose existence was ultimately good.

The largest international arms dealing firm that did Captain Planet Villain tier pollution, corruption, and financial scams was "ultimately good"?

Didn't Lexcorp literally clone an army of Doomsdays?

Obviously it's going to be the "villain" as Lex's plaything but it's also on that "job creator" cope.

https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/LexCorp

Employs literally 2/3 of Metropolis's population lol. Lex even handed it over Superman at one point and made him the CEO because he was on a "Earth needs Superman" arc while obviously CEOs are the real heroes and such, and what are you going to do, Superman? Unemploy a supermajority of Metropolis? It NEEDS Lexcorp, etc etc.

"How will we get by without all our financialized monopolies?!"

Idk, bro. Just keep doing what you're doing, minus the extraordinary rents to your bloated bourgeois landlords, maybe?

They do exist they just prefer to be anonymous in their altruism so nobody hears about them.

How convenient that a counterexample can't be named

Actually, this is part of Jewish society. Essentially, one is not supposed to do it for glory. I suspect that part of that is to avoid getting letters pleading for more money from those who they have helped or who knows that they helped someone. A lot of charities share/sell donor lists.

Yeah, that was a strange moment. Those in the company being for Altman, I can understand. They expected big returns of investment from keeping him around. But the outsiders on the internet cheering him on? Felt like Elon Musk in the beginning again. And yes I also fell for his engineer persona in the beginning. But I learned from that.

What was so obvious in that instance was the board members trying to push him out were calling out the lack of openness OpenAI was trending towards. They were literally calling him out for not upholding the vision of why the company was founded.

All the engineers clearly saw their payday slipping away and revolted for that reason. Can't say I blame them, but it was a scenario where the board was actually doing the right thing and everyone turned on them for profit.

3 more...

I don't remember this at all.

AI has looked like a scam since the Metaverse days when Facebook realized it couldn't push those shitty headsets on people and decided to pivot.

3 more...

Probably has to be renamed to "ClosedAI" then.

... To the surprise of absolutely nobody

Actually I have a question and I admit knowing nothing of the legal framework here but...

Isn't it absolutely ridiculous that a not-for-profit entity can exists solely for the purpose of developing a closed-source piece of software, demand to train it for free off copyrighted material, just to switch to a for-profit entity??

Sound 100% like tax avoidance. Like me registering a charity so I can throw a mega concert/party privately, secure preferencial treatment on supplies, get discounts on artists or even free performance and then switch to for profit as I start selling tickets

Originally all their work was supposed to be published and shared with the world, hence the "open" in OpenAI. However somewhere along the way they made a for-profit break off of the original company and started pulling everything in that direction.

Step 1. Make an AI that hoovers up content.

Step 2. When owners of content complain about privacy violations and copyright infringement, allay their fears. This AI is for the Good of Humanity.

Step 3. ???

Step 4. Profit.

Yet another example of doing crime at a big enough scale that you get rewarded for it. That's what this country was built on.

OpenAI: It's not fair to charge us to use copywriten works.

Also OpenAI: Also you have to pay us for using them.

That's why all human creative works done online need to be bean related. To fuck up the data stream and make it unintelligible for AIs and marketing algorithms.

How exactly does one “outgrow” “AGI for the benefit of all humanity?

OpenAI Charter https://openai.com/charter

Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

My favorite part of this image is the image corruption on the bottom lol. Hopefully that wasn't a local my side issue or I'm gonna look insane

Somewhere along the way my copy got janked. I liked it so I keep using it.

Just want to point out that it absolutely is possible to train an AI that will keep track of its sources for inspiration and can attribute those when it makes a response.

Meaning creators could be compensated for their parts of AI generated stuff, if anyone wanted to.

Doesn't Phind do this already? I haven't used it much but I remember it showing its sources for answers of code-related stuff

I use Phind solving computer problems. It does cite the sources it uses. At least for distro and general Linux issues. So far, it's been a very good resource when I've needed it.

Other than citing the entire training data set, how would this be possible?

The entire training set isn't used in each permutation. Your keywords are building the samples based on metadata tags tied back to the original images.

If you ask for "Iron Man in a cowboy hat", the toolset will reach for some catalog of Iron Man images and some catalog of cowboy hat images and some catalog of person-in-cowboy-hat images, when looking for a basis of comparison as it renders the image.

These would be the images attributed to the output.

Do you have a source for this? This sounds like fine-tuning a model, which doesn't prevent data from the original training set from influencing the output. The method you described would only work if the AI is trained from scratch on only images of iron man and cowboy hats. And I don't think that's how any of these models work.

I think that there are some people working on this, and a few groups that have claimed to do it, but I'm not aware of any that actually meet the description you gave. Can you cite a paper or give a link of some sort?

Wild for a company that's never made a profit

These companies do not make profit in paper but have already made millions for others.

It's all smoke and mirrors

I think their name goes against some consumer laws here in Europe.

Better call themselves ClosedAI

Surely they will be sued into oblivion if they tried right? Them being non profit was the main pillar holding up their defense for scraping the web into datasets.

How is this going to work while OpenAI currently burns through an absolute ocean of cash to keep improving its services? Alongside this, a good software engineer or applied scientist can make close to $1m a year. While I do think professionals should earn what their value is to an employer, OpenAI still loses a ton of money.

As someone that works in AI, I think most of us know it's full of people trying to make a quick buck while investors will stupidly throw money at it. OpenAI is ultimately the figurehead of this market though, because at least the big companies can prop their AI offerings with the money they make from shopping, cloud, ads, etc. The second OpenAI looks weak and needs money, the vultures will slice off a piece and we'll see the AI market reduce to a wimper - just enough for tech to focus on the next grift.

About the only AI company currently alive that I'm sure will survive is CivitAI. Huggingface probably, too. Both are, in the end, in the datacenter business. Huggingface has exposure to VC BS in their client base, they might be in trouble if a significant number suddenly go belly-up but if they have any sense they'll simply not overextend. And, well, they, too, can switch to cat pictures.

Yeah some of my team members use hf and it really does represent a convenience (basically a GitHub for models), but I'm sure to be clear we can't rely on them alone. I don't trust any company to exist or not be bought out and enshittified in 3 years.

........ They weren't before?

Yeah, they weren't as synergized. Now they're coordinating with key stakeholders to maximize the efficiency of their aggressive roadmap. Or something, I kinda suck at business jargon.

As long as the shareholders are happy.

The article could be from 2022 and I'd be as unsurprised as I am now.

I'm happy to pay for LLM but not at the prices OpenAI is charging for their models.