[HN Gopher] OpenAI Sold its Soul for $1B
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OpenAI Sold its Soul for $1B
Author : andreyk
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-09-04 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onezero.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onezero.medium.com)
| ducktective wrote:
| Is the novelty of GPT-3 more about smart algorithms and
| experienced researchers or is it about beefy hardware/ASICs that
| do the number crunchings? Or maybe it-is-only-about(tm) gathering
| and labeling large amount of data for their trainings?
| hypothesis wrote:
| > OpenAI had decided to put emphasis on larger neural networks
| fueled by bigger computers and tons of data.
|
| So is the answer here both?
| nomel wrote:
| To make a system noticeably better, it's often easiest to
| make all components of the system slightly better.
| 317070 wrote:
| But that is not what GPT-3 is. You could say that is what
| they did _given GPT-2_, but that is underselling the
| complexity.
|
| Some scientist at OpenAI had the hypothesis "what if our
| algorithm is correct, but all we need is to scale it 3
| magnitudes larger" and made it happen. They figured out how
| to scale all the dimensions. How fast should x scale if I
| scale y? (That is very tricky, as modern machine learning
| is basically alchemy)
|
| And then they actually scaled it. That took a ton of
| engineering and hardware, for what was essentially still
| following a hunch.
|
| And then they actually noticed how good it was, and did a
| ton of tests with the surprising results we now all know.
| 317070 wrote:
| For GPT-3, they use the data everyone is using. Their cleaning
| is unique, but so is everyone's. They don't do anything
| special, but put in some more effort than most though.
|
| As far as I can tell, it is a combination of smart algorithms,
| good engineering, and the hardware to make it happen. And
| scientists that had the right hunch for which direction to push
| in.
| thesausageking wrote:
| It's mainly about their scale which is enabled by their
| hardware budget (355 GPU years to train it) and their budget
| for data acquisition / cleaning.
|
| GPT-3 has 175B parameters. The previous largest model was
| Microsoft's Turing-NLG which had 17B. GPT-2 had 1.5B.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Or maybe it-is-only-about(tm) gathering and labeling large
| amount of data for their trainings?
|
| Well, GPT-3 isn't a classifier and it isn't using labeled data.
|
| As an outsider it definitely appears that GPT-3 is an
| engineering advancement, as opposed to a scientific
| breakthrough. The difference is important because we need a non
| linear breakthrough.
|
| GPT-3 is a bigger GPT-2. As far as we know, there is no more
| magic. But I think it's a near certainty that larger models
| will not get us to AGI alone.
| ma2rten wrote:
| As someone in the deep learning community I disagree with
| your assessment that GPT-3 is a not scientific breakthrough.
| The GPT-3 paper won a best paper award at the most
| prestigious machine learning conferences after all. GPT-3
| didn't make any modeling advances, but it introduced a
| completely new paradigm with few-shot learning.
| mountainriver wrote:
| Agree, just because it took money and scale to do it
| doesn't mean it isn't a breakthrough.
| mikkel wrote:
| Bigger models might get us to AGI alone. I say that because
| of the graphs in this paper:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165v4.pdf
|
| Quality is increasing with parameters. Even now, interfacing
| with codex leads to unique and clever solutions to the
| problems I present it.
| Y_Y wrote:
| The same issue came up regarding Reddit recently. If you build
| something cool that becomes popular then big businesses will try
| to buy you. I think if you want to be taken seriously as a non-
| profit and have people contribute to your cause on that basis,
| then you should be able to guarantee that you will remain a non-
| profit, and free from external control.
| hypothesis wrote:
| I think that article does explain that it was basically a
| "sell" out of necessity:
|
| > OpenAI was an AI research laboratory. But its ambitions were
| simply out of reach for the resources it had access to.
| gcb0 wrote:
| That is the most distant definition from "necessity" i can
| think of.
| hypothesis wrote:
| According to the article they have decided that the way
| forward is by going with "bigger and better" models, which
| necessitated the need for more resources.
|
| I'm going to trust them on their reasoning, but with that
| premise what are the options here if they _lack_ required
| resources?
|
| If they to avoid what is dubbed a "sell" option to private
| money, the other option is to get some public funding or to
| be honest about the issue and close the shop.
| xpe wrote:
| > That is the most distant definition from "necessity" i
| can think of.
|
| It is a sign of the rapid transformation of our world that
| the above statement is simultaneously true and completely
| missing the context here.
|
| Why? Think about the context of OpenAI's founding. As I
| remember it, OpenAI wanted to offer an alternative locus of
| power compared to Google and Facebook around AI. They
| wanted to have the spotlight to talk about broader topics
| and share advancements more broadly.
|
| To accomplish _that_ mission, there are many hard
| compromises that have to be met.
|
| To be clear, I'm not assessing how well OpenAI did. I don't
| know the right answers.
|
| Rather, I'm pointing out the constraints in their space are
| substantial. I don't think anyone can dispute the upsides
| of having a large budget -- to hire in-demand experts and
| train expensive models. What are the best ways to acquire
| this funding? I think there are many thought experiments to
| conduct and cross-comparisons to make.
| RONROC wrote:
| I think one of the only second order effects of wokeism is the
| fact that many times it gets results.
|
| "Call out culture" runs the gamut from obvious to pendantic, and,
| more often than not, the result is a net positive.
|
| So, my question is: Why isn't there a concerted effort from
| [OpenAI's] like-minded contemporaries to call them out on their
| incredibly embarrassing name?
|
| To all the OpenAI engineers, investors, and onlookers: there is
| _nothing_ "open" about your platform. Am I stupid or are your
| efforts just _casually_ misleading?
| [deleted]
| nonameiguess wrote:
| There is, isn't there? You're responding to an article roasting
| OpenAI for not actually being open. They seem to get plenty of
| bad press. Is it just not enough is coming from other AI
| research labs for your liking?
| mrfusion wrote:
| I'm not seeing the connection?
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I often see people calling them out for being 'ClosedAI'
| instead of OpenAI, so I do think they are being/have been
| called out by the ML community.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Artificially Open Intelligence
| dataking wrote:
| Their mission of making AI available to a broad section of
| society vs concentrating power among a few special interests
| justifies the name as far as I'm concerned. The name open does
| not have to mean "everything is FOSS and available on GitHub"
| in my opinion.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I don't know what their mission used to be, but now their
| website says "Our mission is to ensure that artificial
| general intelligence benefits all of humanity." -- quite a
| bit difference than access!
| notahacker wrote:
| A black box model, a subscription fee for API access and an
| exclusive licensing deal with Microsoft doesn't sound very
| open
|
| I mean, you can make a better argument for _Windows_ being
| "open". Available to a much broader section of society, as an
| installable product not API privileges that can be withdrawn,
| and a lot more of what's under the hood is exposed,
| documented and moddable.
| amelius wrote:
| But they keep their models secret. How is that "making AI
| available to a broad section of society"?
| nomel wrote:
| "Through licensing!"
| jollybean wrote:
| The 'results' are more plain to see in callout culture, but the
| negative effects are usually systematic and hidden.
|
| In entertainment - we don't see all the scripts that were given
| a pass, the actors that were not considered because they were
| going to cause controversy by being the wrong ethnicity/gender,
| comedy writing rooms in particular are generally 'anything can
| be said unsafe spaces', which is an important part of the
| culture of good writing that has a questionable future.
|
| If you go and have a look at films made just between 2000-2015
| - you can see how many of them - even though they don't rise to
| the level of controversy today, and are probably not inherently
| controversial - would not get made today.
|
| 'The Last Samurai' with Tom Cruise - some could argue it's
| 'appropriation' I think many would argue that it's not, it's
| not really a 'White Saviour' film either. Though it shouldn't
| be objectively controversial per say, though maybe fodder for
| discussion, it probably would not get made because it just has
| the potentiality for ruin: there is just far, far too much risk
| in an escalating cascade of populist voices calling the film
| all sorts of things with or without legitimate grievance it
| won't matter - the mob rules.
|
| Tom Cruise has 10 projects on the drawing board, and he's
| getting pitches daily, so there's going to be 'a different
| film' without the risk profile to his personal brand.
|
| Studios (and BigCos) are risk averse and so what we see is a
| 'watering down' effect across the board.
|
| Conan O'Brien had Sean Penn as a guest on his podcast and has
| some thoughtful things to say about it.
|
| So does the analogy hold for capitalist control of Open AI?
| Possibly.
|
| MSFT might be able to push for some 'results' which are
| seemingly more obvious and public, but the systematic effect of
| 'closed' and 'proprietary' results in stifled innovation and
| opportunity otherwise.
|
| It's actually an interesting analogy but I think it's probably
| good for maybe reasons you might not suspect, and that is, the
| big part of the iceberg that never gets seen.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > I think one of the only second order effects of wokeism is
| the fact that many times it gets results.
|
| Wokeism gets drama, not results:
|
| - "defund the police" is destroying our communities, especially
| black communities
|
| - trans athletes are destroying women's sport
|
| - the BLM organization is corrupt to its core, with one founder
| buying 4 houses, and downstream organizations getting none of
| the funding.
|
| One thing that immature people don't realize is that different
| is not better - better is better.
| peripitea wrote:
| >The result was a "capped-profit" structure that would limit the
| return of investment at 100-fold the original sum. If you
| invested $10 million, at most you'd get $1 billion. Not exactly
| what I'd call capped.
|
| What on earth would you call it then?
| OnlineGladiator wrote:
| PR to make it seem like they're a non-profit while still making
| 100x returns legally possible. 100x returns are about as good
| as you can possibly get (and much, much, much better than
| normal or even great) so they're pretending to act like a non-
| profit while still being very much for-profit. They're
| unnecessarily complicating their legal structure just for some
| publicity brownie points, and they aren't really changing
| anything substantial. It's also an attempt to make it seem like
| "you're _only_ going to make as much as 100x on this supremely
| lucrative investment opportunity! " to dupe the gullible as the
| market is frothy and the hype is extraordinary.
|
| Better yet, I'd call it unnecessary bullshit.
| rlt wrote:
| > Not exactly what I'd call capped.
|
| In the context of a company trying to create an AGI, yes, this is
| capped.
| Kalanos wrote:
| Anything they do other than writing a morally-incentivized
| governance system for reinforcement models (aka pushing an API
| for a trillion param NLP model) is just fake.
| xkapastel wrote:
| Could you expand on this? I can't really parse it; the first
| thing that came to mind was a DAO where token holders could
| vote on...something related to parameters and fine tuning, but
| idk what.
| awal2 wrote:
| Ok, so there's a lot of tension here:
|
| 1. A lot of people want these systems to be open, and don't want
| the power that comes along with them to be locked up in the hands
| of a few rich people.
|
| 2. But some people also think these systems are powerful and
| don't want them in the hands of bad-faith actors (spammers,
| scammers, propagandists).
|
| 3. A lot of people also want these systems to be weakly safe and
| not have negative externalities when used in good faith (avoid
| spitting out racism when prompted with innocent questions). This
| is already hard.
|
| 4. Even better would be for the system to be strongly safe and be
| really hard to use for bad-faith purposes, but this seems
| unreasonably hard.
|
| 5. It's often easier to develop the "unsafe" version of something
| first and then figure out the details of safety once it's
| actually able to do something. This is basically where OpenAI is
| now.
|
| 6. The details around liability for the harms caused by this kind
| of thing are not clear at all.
|
| So OpenAI is in this position where it has built this thing that
| is not yet weakly safe. People have very different ideas about
| how potentially harmful this could be, ranging from very
| dismissive ("there's tons of racism on the internet already, who
| cares?") to the very not dismissive ("rich white tech people are
| exacerbating inequities by subjecting us to their evil racist AI
| systems!").
|
| What should OpenAI do with this thing? Keep it locked up so that
| it doesn't hurt anybody? Release it to the world and push
| accountability onto the end users? Brush aside the ethical
| questions and use the hype generated by the above tensions to get
| as rich as possible? So far their answer seems to be somewhere
| cautiously in the middle.
|
| My personal opinion is that these questions will be very
| important for real AGI, but this ain't it, so the issues may not
| be as bad as they seem. On the other hand, maybe this is a useful
| test case for how to deal with these problems for when we do
| actually get there? Also from past experience, it's probably not
| a good idea for them to allow open access to something that spits
| out unprompted racism. I would like to see OpenAI more open, but
| I also realize that it's very hard for them to make any decision
| in this space without making people unhappy and generating a lot
| of bad press and accusations.
| dcposch wrote:
| Freedom of speech is in a fragile place in our culture if we
| start seeing certain words or opinions (even bad ones!) as
| "unsafe".
|
| This is not a criticism, just an observation of where we're at
| and how dramatically attitudes have shifted.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| In related news, OpenAI Gym is one of the best collections of
| reinforcement learning environments available, and after years of
| neglect OpenAI has finally given a non-paid contributor
| permission to merge fixes and prepare new releases. So the
| library will continue under their name despite receive no support
| from the actual company whose name it bears.
|
| https://github.com/openai/gym/issues/2259
|
| For a pittance OpenAI could maintain OpenAI Gym, Spinning Up, and
| their other early projects that have been so helpful to students
| and amateurs like myself. They choose not to.
| kabes wrote:
| You say they've finally given permission for someone to merge
| fixes. But it's MIT licensed, so why wasn't it just cloned and
| continued under another name?
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Probably has been but I (and others) just don't realize it.
| kongin wrote:
| Because people have forgotten that forking is the response to
| not liking something in open source, not trying a hostile
| takeover of the original project.
|
| You have to be competent though, which is too high a bar for
| the majority of people who want to change things.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Centralised forges mean we can't really "just fork". That
| worked when you got code from your friends-of-friends, so
| they could just give you the fork instead of the
| "original", but now? How do you even _find_ the current
| latest fork?
| kongin wrote:
| >Centralised forges mean we can't really "just fork".
|
| How hard is it to make a public git repo?
|
| Packaging your software falls into the 'being competent'
| pile that's too hard.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Frankly, AI is going to have a hard time being open for several
| reasons:
|
| - The computing resources required to train models are not
| distributed
|
| - Training data will often contain licensed material
|
| - Our digital concept of 'open' revolves around transparency,
| which is not readily available with conventional AI
|
| That's not to say that we should give up on open efforts in the
| field, but we're still deep in the experimentation/research phase
| of artificial intelligence. Copilot has been an excellent
| demonstration of how poorly suited ML is for prime-time use, even
| by developers.
| toiletaccount wrote:
| does training data need a permissive license, or is sharing the
| training data the issue? honestly, im surprised there hasnt
| been a bigger fuss over data and who really owns it. maybe in
| 25-50 years we'll collectively bemoan how everyone was taken
| for a ride.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Indeed given these fundamental constraints, OpenAI is about as
| open as it can be short of simply giving away everything for
| free.
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