I think the article does a good job capturing the history of what happened.<p>OpenAI started out with the intention of being a non-profit, but realized over time that it made it difficult to compete in terms of salary and hardware, so pivoted to a 'capped' for-profit.<p>As for Microsoft, my guess is their investment was just another investment in a hot AI 'startup'. It was sheer luck, and being in the right place at the right time, that they hit a gold mine with that investment as ChatGPT took off, but otherwise this would have been just one of their many investments that disappeared into the ether.<p>The most surprising thing to me is how hard and fast Microsoft pivoted once they realized they had a golden goose on their hands, with the Bing / Edge and other integrations they are doing. Never though I would see them move that fast, kudos.
I thought it was so cool how a non-profit made one of the most game changing tech products in years. Then I was incredibly bummed when I realized they weren't a non profit anymore.
I think one should also acknowledge that OpenAI has been perhaps the leading provider of cutting edge AI to the public.
They let the public play against Dota Five, they provide their GPT playground and API, and they were the first to give something to the public with Dalle2 too. From the perspective of a developer this os mot very open, but from the perspective of the public it is quite open. But more "open access" or "open visibility" instead of "open source".<p>What they really don't want is that google or whatever develops an AGI secretly.
Question for someone who follows this space: are there any significant models/tech/etc that OpenAI <i>has</i> made open? Either before or after they changed business models. What they've kept private is well-known, but are there any checkboxes in the other column?
OpenAI are legends. They gave us fire. Until then we only heard about this tech from inside Google. It was always like "AI ethicists think this is too dangerous" and so we couldn't have it.<p>Each time, OpenAI made it happen. They were the driving force behind all of this stuff. Dall E changed the game entirely. ChatGPT changed the game again!<p>Lots of credit to Stability.AI - absolutely grand work by then. But OpenAI took what was once the tool of wizards in secret towers and gave it to all of us.<p>Then Stability and Meta gave us the means to build the tools. Who would have thought that Mark Zuckerberg would be crucial to the democratization of cutting edge tech. What a legend!
on the meaning of open, a tangential issue, let's have Sherman set the wayback machine to when the word "open" first started being used. "OK Mr Peabody"<p>open has a number of meanings that are useful, but have been overwhelmed by the concept of open source.<p>but open standards used to be the meaning. "ethernet is this, here's how you talk to it, but we're not going to write the code for you" (i'm not claiming that ethernet was originally an open standard, just using that as an example of what an open standard means)<p>and hardware manufacturers used to include blueprints/schematics (for repair, or for interconnection, for example) and commercial software vendors would show you the source code, but at the same time, you weren't being given intellectual property rights or licenses to anything, it was just part of what was required to encourage customers to stick with the product by making it easier to fit in where it was going.<p>And all of this was a really useful kind of openness. Just mentioning it because when people talk about how open OpenAI is, I'm never quite sure what they're expecting (I don't mind any expectation, not judging, I just don't know)
Perhaps worth noting that Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees after the funding from the Microsoft: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic</a>
It may not be 'Open' in sense of open-source or free, but it is open that I can access it and use it in my projects. Before this companies like Google/Facebook had such models but closed in sense that we can get some papers and blog posts but can't rely on them to build our startup.<p>Because of financial and people resources required, availability of data etc. rest always stayed. Now I can use ChatGPT, Gpt-3/4, Whisper etc. at a reasonable cost and it is forcing rest of the industry to also "Open" up.
When I was a teenager, there was a local chain of record stores over here named "free record store"<p>But guess what, you couldn't just walk in, grab some CDs and walk out without paying.
Now that it runs on our laptops a lot of the initial shock, mystique, and novelty has already worn off, just like with DALL-E before it.<p>What the leaks show is that the community can run circles around OpenAI and the others when it comes to optimizing these things and taking them in interesting directions on a shoe string budget.<p>For example of what one sesh of tinkering can produce:<p><a href="https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/blob/master/examples/llama.py#L264-L347">https://github.com/geohot/tinygrad/blob/master/examples/llam...</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nctqc8FBJ2U&t=4954s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nctqc8FBJ2U&t=4954s</a><p>The cat is out of the bag, you don't need a beowulf cluster of A100's and unlimited Azure credits. You do need a budget to train that is out of reach for hobbyists but the moat is not insurmountable and I don't think VC's will be scared off anymore as a lot of startup ideas are viable and a lot of outsiders can demonstrably make a real go of it.<p>Time for BasedAI. Game on.
Does it matter? Openai finally built something resembling ai. Big tech wasn’t innovating, I personally don’t care if employees at openai capture a ton of the upside