https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/24/column/
'When OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in late November 2022, no one expected much
from the new release. It was just a "research preview," explained Sandhini
Agarwal, an AI Policy researcher at OpenAI. "We didn't want to oversell it as a
big fundamental advance," added Liam Fedus, a scientist at the org.
Ha! That was then. This is now.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you know ChatGPT has since become the
hottest technology development this decade, heck, maybe this century. At least
Bill Gates – you remember him, right? – thinks it's the biggest thing since he
was introduced to the idea of a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1980. That
led to a product called Windows.
Amusingly enough, there was nothing all that new in ChatGPT 3.5. It used the
same large language model (LLM) as earlier versions. The key difference is that
you could now more easily ask questions in natural language instead of
accessing it via application programming interfaces (API) or API-driven
programs.
By making it easy to access ChatGPT, OpenAI, to its surprise, saw it become
wildly popular. And, oh, by the way, since Microsoft then invested $10 billion
into the business, it seems to have done just fine by the company.
So, great news for open source, too, right? I mean, the company's name is
OpenAI, yes? Yes, the name still has open in it, but the source code and the
services based on it haven't been open for some time.
While Google's newly released answer to ChatGPT, Bard, "thinks" that "the GPT-4
model and ChatGPT are both open source projects," it's wrong.
It was meant to be open source, said one of the company's co-founders, another
guy you may have heard of named Elon Musk. Musk noted: "OpenAI was created as
an open source (which is why I named it "Open" AI), non-profit company to serve
as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source,
maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended
at all."
What happened was Musk first left OpenAI, which was then a non-profit
corporation, in 2018, to focus on SpaceX and Tesla. The next year, seeing it
would need more money, OpenAI became, for all intents and purposes, a
for-profit company. As Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, subsequently tweeted, "we will
have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering."
I guess $10 billion only goes so far.
In other words, yet another company failed to figure out how to monetize its
open source work. Then, having used open source to build up to GPT-2, it closed
the doors on the code.'
Via Steven Vaughan-Nichols.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
