Elon Musk, Others, Criticize Microsoft's Exclusive License for OpenAI's GPT-3 (msn.com) 19
"It looks like Elon Musk is increasingly unhappy with OpenAI, the AI research firm he helped found five years ago," reports Business Insider:
Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it was exclusively licensing GPT-3, a natural language AI-powered tool made by OpenAI. The announcement was met with some dismay on Twitter from users who had thought OpenAI's mission statement was to make technologies like GPT-3 widely available. Elon Musk, who cofounded the company in 2015 as a non-profit AI research body, was among those who criticized the deal.
"This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft," he said...
Exactly how much exclusivity this license gives Microsoft is also unclear. In his blog post, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said OpenAI will continue to offer access to GPT-3 via its API. OpenAI reiterated this in its own blog post, saying "the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI's API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual."
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge the deal gives Microsoft exclusive access to GPT-3's underlying code.
GeekWire rounded up reactions from other AI pundits, noting that MIT's Technology Review complained OpenAI was "supposed to benefit humanity," and now "it's simply benefiting one of the richest companies in the world." And Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said "OpenAI should be renamed ClosedAI — for all intents and purposes they are a for-profit company.
But he added that GPT-3 "has remarkable capabilities and will lead to numerous applications and an even more vigorous mine-is-bigger-than-yours model arms race. I can't wait to see how Google and Amazon respond, and don't forget China."
"This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft," he said...
Exactly how much exclusivity this license gives Microsoft is also unclear. In his blog post, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said OpenAI will continue to offer access to GPT-3 via its API. OpenAI reiterated this in its own blog post, saying "the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI's API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual."
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge the deal gives Microsoft exclusive access to GPT-3's underlying code.
GeekWire rounded up reactions from other AI pundits, noting that MIT's Technology Review complained OpenAI was "supposed to benefit humanity," and now "it's simply benefiting one of the richest companies in the world." And Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said "OpenAI should be renamed ClosedAI — for all intents and purposes they are a for-profit company.
But he added that GPT-3 "has remarkable capabilities and will lead to numerous applications and an even more vigorous mine-is-bigger-than-yours model arms race. I can't wait to see how Google and Amazon respond, and don't forget China."
Too powerful to let just anybody have it, right? (Score:1)
Maybe there was some pressure, like the Tik-Tok thing to keep it in a strong box
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just for hyping up purposes sure.
just giving it to everyone would expose what it is actually though.
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To admit limited knowledge about one thing helps to frame what you have to say. It doesn't mean he should "shut the fuck up".
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"Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" at play? (Score:5, Insightful)
The business plan of extending intellectual property and shutting off other developers or companies when new features are created is the goal of many open source developers and business plans. Is it a surprise that the modified MIT license of OpenAI is being abused this way? Microsoft has previously extended MIT licensed software and proprietized it. It's precisely why the GPL is so cautious about preserving access and licenses to use modifications by others.
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In this case, because the code is MIT-licensed, possession of it is king. Presented as a downside, look again. Anyone with the code, anywhere, can do whatever the fuck they want with it. This isnt a "closed source" move, its a "keep our copy secret from now on" move. The source continues to be open.
Re: "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" at play? (Score:1)
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So Microsoft gets to benefit from open source dev but wont contribute? MIT should just start charging a large fee to those who use but don't contribute
If you haven't licensed your code under the GPL (vest v3) then that's very hard to do. If the code is already released under the MIT license then your competitors can just take it and do what they want. That's why, if you want to start a F/OSS project it's best to start with the most aggressive license (typically the AGPLv3) and then downgrade to less protected licenses later only when there is a commercial benefit which outwieghs the losses. In the meantime you can offer other companies that want them
Someone should start a FreeAI based around the GPL (Score:3)
Perhaps this is the right time for someone to create a similar community based more around FSF-like principles than OSI-like ones.
You can't get access (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said OpenAI will continue to offer access to GPT-3 via its API. OpenAI reiterated this in its own blog post, saying "the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI's API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual."
I've been trying to get access to the API since it was released: you can't get it. And I'm even willing to pay for it. Only a very few lucky people have gotten access to the API.
Their statement is extremely deceptive, because it is equivalent to "not open".
They basically switched to for-profit in Mar 2019 (Score:5, Insightful)
So this shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Given the people involved, it would seem “open” was mainly a buzzword from the get-go.
Musk could have chosen not to resign from the board in 2018. He could have remained involved in the decision-making. But he probably didn’t want to deal with the dissonance between advocating for open AI development while simultaneously keeping Tesla’s AI work closed - “do as I say, not as I do”.
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Not really a conflict of interest since the AI being developed for cars isn't trying to create new algorithms or break boundaries, just navigate better and better for commercial interests. Likewise, you wouldn't expect him to open source the landing control algorithms for the falcon - as much "AI" as anything else shown so far.
need a crowdsourced reallyopenai (Score:1)
OpenAI was able to generate it's amazing NN by adding millions of parameters in it's training. The only reason it's closed is that it costs a ton of money to process this much data. ....
If a crowdsourced version of reallyopenai were developed, where individual computers could help with the training the cost of this can be brought down drastically.
Other possible names is "notfakeopenai", 'publicAI',
I think OpenAI should change it's name as it's now ClosedAI
MS is embracing 'open'. (Score:1)