OpenAI Becomes ClosedAI

I think the "ClosedAI" jokes have been pretty boring since before the first person even made them. Every comment thread has at least 4 people making it

Breza• 3 years ago

All the better for Vice to take advantage of it

kundi• 3 years ago

At least they finally became transparent about their true intentions

jalino23• 3 years ago

fooled me vice!!

yazzku4• 3 years ago

I thought OpenFraud would have been more fitting. They are a fraud, and openly so about it. Possibly the only thing they are open about.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

Can you go into why?

poopbutt7• 3 years ago

It's just people typing quickly.

yazzku4• 3 years ago

Well, they betrayed themselves and became everything they stated they would not become.

rom-antics• 3 years ago

The word "fraud" has really lost its punch these last couple years. OpenAI has actual, working products that people think are valuable enough to pay for. The name is misleading, sure, but that doesn't make them a fraudulent company.

Is there a word for the opposite of the euphemism treadmill, where people call ordinary things by worse and worse names trying to get an emotional reaction out of people?

yazzku4• 3 years ago

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fraud

a person who makes deceitful pretenses; sham; poseur.

Is it not a deceitful pretense to call your "non-profit" OpenAI, make grandiose statements about openness and accessibility, only to do the complete opposite and surrender yourself to the first corporation that throws the big bucks at you?

It's a fraud.

the_pwner224• 3 years ago

I've read that the founders did honestly want to make an Open AI company when they started OpenAI, but that business model didn't work out (wow, what a surprise) so they were forced to switch to being not-Open. Regardless of whether you believe that, the "Open" part of their name has been extremely misleading for a long time. But the average person doesn't know that; they see that the company is called OpenAI and don't question the Open part.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't know what the law allows regulators to do, but I wouldn't mind if the government forced ClosedAI to change its name under some sort of truth in advertising law.

More importantly, we tech folks have specialized knowledge and it's our responsibility to not propagate harmful, deceptive propaganda like the OpenAI name. Especially for something as widely known and culturally relevant as ClosedAI. I've personally been calling it ClosedAI for a while now. When people ask I give them a quick 5 second explanation.

Another example, much less bad than ClosedAI, is "iPhone." It's not your phone, you don't control it. Apple can run and inject whatever code they want onto your ("i") Phone, and you can't make the phone run software which isn't approved by Apple. I personally refer to it as an ApplePhone (and ApplePad, Apple Mobile OS instead of iOS, etc.). I'll admit this is a pretty weak example; the name clearly has non-nefarious origins. But in the modern day, at a subtle psychological level, it's still misleading in an Orwellian sort of way. And it brings up a good opportunity to give "normal" people a quick 15-second intro to software freedom.

sebastiansm• 3 years ago

The apple store don’t sell apples. Time to go to the court.

kgwgk• 3 years ago

Another example, much less bad than OpenAI, is "iPhone." It's not your phone, you don't control it. Apple can run and inject whatever code they want onto your ("i") Phone

To the extent that the “i” means anything at all it does stand for “internet”.

sebastiennight2• 3 years ago

Aha, I've also resorted to replacing the syllable "smart" with "spy" in the names of devices (since the difference between a "normal/dumb" device and a "smart" device is always that the "smart" device's business model is being subsidized by grabbing your data).

But it's a lost battle, isn't it? :) We're tilting at windmills.

btown• 3 years ago

In a way, the damage done to the word "open" is even more egregious - because OpenAI allowed people to access a SaaS product, for free, many people will now see the Open prefix as "you're allowed to play on my land."

The entire notion of "open source" will start to blur with "source-available" and even with "freemium SaaS" in the minds of an entire generation using a closed product called OpenAI to do their homework. How does OpenOffice distinguish itself from Google Docs when the word "open" means nothing? (Yes, LibreOffice, I see you there, but sadly your "fetch" is not going to happen in the English speaking world!)

One might say, "non-programmers don't need to know this" - but of course they do. They should know that a product that is truly open is guaranteed to be available so long as a community wants it to be - not at the whims of a corporation that could take away a freemium tier or revoke someone's ability to build code derived from a source-available license at will. And I fear this will take at least some wind out of the sails of a lot of incredible projects.

leidenfrost• 3 years ago

We're all partly responsible for that.

Every time any open source project tries to make money, people quickly fork the project into a similar free-as-beer one: "OpenSomething wants my money? I'll fork it into LibreSomething then"

At this point, the point made by RMS that people can make money selling FOSS software just fine is naive at best.

AndrewHart• 3 years ago

Fun at parties.

randyrand• 3 years ago

My sarcasm detector is usually better than most, but there is no way a sarcasm seeking person can tell if this is fact or fiction. Renaming OpenAI to ClosedAI actually makes sense, given they are not open.

If this is parody, I think there is a good chance it's libel.

Edit: I now see every link on the page redirects to the vice article.

talos2110• 3 years ago

A the end:

“Acknowledgments This piece of satire was possible with the help of ChatGPT.”

sebastiennight2• 3 years ago

That is a smart troll website and SEO/marketing strategy.

I think the underlying challenge is not going to be easily solved.

If the ChatGPT API is indeed more powerful than `text-davinci-003`, then the predatory pricing creates a ton of incentives towards trust monopoly territory. Why would our apps struggle to put up a BLOOM or GPT-NeoX instance if it ends up more expensive?

This is possibly going to be one of the most egregious, hard-to-resist traps of our time.

usr1106• 3 years ago

Becomes? It has always be a horrible branding. Like if Shell or competitors called themselves carbonfree. An insult to everyone working on open software.

But of course the page is fake/parody, so the misattribution continues. Well, it fits well to the Microsoft we knew 10-20 years ago.

tracker1• 3 years ago

Don't poke fun at my CarbonFreeChainGPT initiative... we're using AI and blockchain to push the boundaries of AI for the use of proven reduction of carbon emissions and spreading the good works of ESG globally. We're hoping to receive $2B in initial funding.

Edit: note, we're also using our own technology to point out and apply for patents that include the combined usage of our exclusive technology in order to protect our creative investments.

slowmovintarget• 3 years ago

I for one welcome our new block-chat-fungible-chain overlords.

I asked ChatGPT what it thought and it wrote this:

----

Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wanted to combine all of the latest buzzwords in technology into one confusing and completely unnecessary product? Well, look no further than our new SaaS offering, "BlockChatGeniusTok!"

With BlockChatGeniusTok, you can chat with your friends using a large language model chat system that analyzes your conversation and generates unique non-fungible tokens for every message you send. Because, who doesn't love a good NFT these days?

But that's not all! We've also incorporated image generation systems that automatically create custom memes and GIFs based on your conversations. And of course, we couldn't forget about the latest trend in social media filters, so we've thrown in Tik Tok AI filters to make sure your conversations are as aesthetically pleasing as possible.

But wait, there's more! The cherry on top of this technological mess is blockchain integration. All of your conversations, images, and NFTs will be stored securely on the blockchain, because who doesn't love the idea of their private conversations being permanently recorded on a public ledger?

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for BlockChatGeniusTok today and join the elite group of people who can say they use the most needlessly complicated and convoluted chat system on the market!

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

Like if Shell or competitors called themselves carbonfree.

BP officially rebranded to "beyond petroleum".

UberFly• 3 years ago

Once money rolls in, good intentions roll out. Tale as old as time.

Laaas• 3 years ago

dang: Might want to note it's satire in the title.

Mindey2• 3 years ago

The idea of founding "OpenAI" was: Make AI an extension of human wills in the spirit of liberty, as broadly and evenly distributed as is possible safely. The idea was that if we empower people evenly, any evil people powered by AI would not be able to do a 51% attack on the people empowered by AIs collectively.

Now, suppose you "Open" the OpenAI, by giving the information about the model and data, all of that -- the only ones who would empower by that kind of openness -- is the very large corporations and the governments of powerful countries rather than people evenly.

So, while distributing the AI power evenly in the society ("democratize AI") was the original motivation of OpenAI group, and founding it as a non-profit may have motivated researchers and capable engineers join the effort, the reason why it isn't staying "open" is simply, because they had not yet figured out how to "Empower people evenly", rather than empower large governments and corporations through such openness.

Mindey2• 3 years ago

Additionally, Microsoft has for a long time been embraced by the world's governments as a solution to dealing with the official matters, most of the world's governments are users of it with access to the source code (Government Security Program (GSP)), and trust Microsoft to a high degree. Such trust may be important as a kind of justification for the world's governments that this AI is safe hands, however, obviously, every larger government is strategizing in their back-offices the implications of such AI to their security... and when AI becomes a strategic weapon, you bet it can't easily be open.

akagusu• 3 years ago

This is the expected outcome, it only happened before people were expecting.

super_linear• 3 years ago

https://github.com/closedai

This organization has no public repositories.

A nice touch

tectonic• 3 years ago

OpenAI, the clean coal of machine learning.

OpenAI Becomes ClosedAI

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