Remember the halcyon days of circa 2019, when OpenAI were too nervous to release GPT-2, yes, two, on an unsuspecting world?
…OpenAI said that it would only be publishing a “much smaller version” of the model due to concerns that it could be abused. The blog post fretted that it could be used to generate false news articles, impersonate people online, and generally flood the internet with spam and vitriol.
A lot changed in a few years.
2 generations of GPT later and now anyone who has $10 to spare can access the latest greatest GPT-4 - which has recently learned to ‘see, hear and speak’ in-between its only-increasing potential to ‘flood the internet with spam’ and ‘generate false news articles’, which it is indeed doing to at least some extent.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing. Well, except the spam and fake news parts - these days there exist several extremely low effort websites that have leveraged it for exactly that purpose. After all, rich companies hoarding rare resources is rarely the most obviously optimal way to benefit humanity as a whole.
Some in the machine learning community have accused OpenAI of exaggerating the risks of its algorithm for media attention and depriving academics, who may not have the resources to build such a model themselves, the opportunity to conduct research with GPT-2.
Perhaps slightly Ironically, they seemed a lot more about putting the Open into OpenAI back in those days, philosophically at least. What as far as I know is their original manifesto is still there on their site.
OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is 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. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
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
Now we have proprietary secrets - ‘OpenAI’s GPT-4 Is Closed Source and Shrouded in Secrecy’ says Motherboard - as well as exclusive deals with anyone who has a few billion dollars to throw their way.