Sam Altman: OpenAI Has Been On the 'Wrong Side of History' Concerning Open Source (techcrunch.com) 62
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI the company finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It's battling the perception that it's ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges might've stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history. Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI's lead in AI, and he also said he believes OpenAI has been "on the wrong side of history" when it comes to open-sourcing its technologies. While OpenAI has open-sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed-source development approach.
"[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said. "Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority [] We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years." In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open-sourcing older models that aren't state-of-the-art anymore. "We'll definitely think about doing more of this," he said, without going into greater detail.
"[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said. "Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority [] We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years." In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open-sourcing older models that aren't state-of-the-art anymore. "We'll definitely think about doing more of this," he said, without going into greater detail.
Me too! Me too! (Score:5, Insightful)
The comment subject pretty much says it all. Seeming to be considering climbing on the Open Source bandwagon by issuing vague and meaningless ponderings. Expressing awareness that OpenAI needs to say something, but really has nothing to say.
It's possible that Altman is serious about some kind of give and take between open-source and closed source that would be beneficial for all, but I'm betting that it's pure PR bullshit.
Re:Me too! Me too! (Score:5, Interesting)
But the open source community doesn't want "old models". If we can't have top-end frontier models, at least give us a small distill of them. A lot of open development targets models that can run on normal gaming GPUs, so having access to giant models with hundreds of billions of parameters - while great - isn't a priority for most. But big, maximum-capability models are a priority for the commercial model providers like OpenAI. So if they want to support OSS, give us small models. They won't compete with your main offerings.
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Nah the mistake made, repeatedly with the AI ecosystem:
- Not releasing working source code to both train and inference the model
- Not releasing the model used to reproduce the results
Instead almost everyone releases a paper with the math and diagrams, in which case third parties need merely duplicate the described effort, and thus now there are 20 "clones" of the technique, but nothing compatible with each other. Open source works when everyone commits to working on the same project and only forks things fo
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Re: Me too! Me too! (Score:2)
But I think open ai is a bit obnoxious, especially Altman. That's why they are getting this much backlash. He tends to speak in a very self centered way. On the wrong side of history? He found a gold mine, built big walls around it, got rich and important and now someone else has found a second gold mine. They are giving the gold away for free... History may forget the role open ai played here
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That's a fundamental misunderstanding of what the open source community is capable of and has achieved for 30 years already, in all areas of computing.
The machine learning models are invented in universities, and will continue to do so. The open source community already includes the universities, it always has, and doesn't need hand me downs, and emphatically doesn
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There is plenty of public data for open model training.
What we lack, by contrast, is tens of millions of dollars in compute time.
Re:Me too! Me too! (Score:5, Insightful)
Altman cares about exactly one thing. Cashing in on this, and cashing in big. Everything he has done and said in at least the last year has been designed to keep the hype up around OpenAI until he can change the company so he can get his billions out of it.
Nothing else matters to him. He doesn't care about open source, or about any actual correctness or utility of the products he pawns, other than as far as it serves him getting his billions.
This has been obvious for some time now. He does damage control and tries to build hype. And the amount of people who lick that up is frightening.
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Altman speaks with the same false authority as any flea market remedy salesman today, or in a past time, the snake oil salesman. He, and only he, can save us all with the new remedy. Please ignore those other remedies that seem to be the equal or better than his remedy, they won't lead directly to his profits, er, um, won't be as remedy-ee as his.
Not a fan of Altman (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't hope China wins, but other than that, yes.
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"OpenAI" is open in the sense in which it was used for Unix advertising back in the nineties, meaning documented and interoperable.
It's not open in the sense of source code, or training data.
That Altman is paying lip service to open source while trying to secure a new funding round is very interesting. Capital usually sees openness as a weakness, but maybe the open source buzzword is sufficiently popular now that it's become a strength.
In general I think that it can be for software, but where so much of the
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Altman is in a bind. He needs to show progress and profitability within a year or so. Remember that last year OpenAI was in the red 5 billion due to (effectively) operating costs, and only about 200 million in revenue (they claimed). Then they got 6 billion in [reuters.com]
Re:Not a fan of Altman (Score:5, Informative)
he lost already, we all won. thanks to a small chinese startup and opensource, llm as a paid for commodity are pretty much done. that was 70%-90% of openai's income and the reason for billions of investment pouring in (and many more expected in near future), to recoup which they will now have to find another business model, and i would be very humored if they don't. (don't worry, sam will get to keep his share of those billions).
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I don't believe this is true...yet, but I believe this is true. Current events have rattled the AI community but not transformed it. There will be more, though.
Within the last year we had news that ternary data types were sufficient for many computations during inferencing, and that this could result in radical improvements in computational efficiency. The fact is, technology experts in AI don't really know much about what they are doing and that goes double for frauds like Sam Altman. This latest news
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To be fair, actual meaningful and transformative advances to LLMs are currently far, far out of reach. Far enough that it is not even clear they are possible.
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You just seem to have a fairly poor understanding of machine learning. Doesn't make you an idiot, just misinformed.
What about Open Source? (Score:3)
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I wouldn't be surprised if Altman is saying this in order to pave the way for that. Far more money has already been invested in this than will ever be recovered While there are uses for these models, and value will be gained from them in the future, the bulk of the money invested so far will need to be written off first. There is a big crash coming. These Companies are heading for a serious devaluation in the near to medium future. Probably the near future, as the big players in it seem to be selling off th
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If brown people did it, then yes. OSS is just DEI, part of deregulating to become great again is regulating the enemy.
Deepseek stole OpenAI's IP (Score:4, Insightful)
Is the dictionary definition of the pot calling the kettle black.
All for the masters of mankind and all the work us (Score:2)
Open Source is about license, not dev model (Score:2)
Very few companies have open sourced anything relating to Generative Machine Learning. Many companies have lied about being Opensource, like Facebook.
When you see a claim, look at the license, and yell at them if they're calling something opensource when it has restrictions on whether you can train other models with its outputs, or if you need a different license for commercial use or over a certain number of uses, or some social responsibility clause.
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"When you see a claim, look at the license, and yell at them if they're calling something opensource when it has restrictions on whether you can train other models with its outputs, or if you need a different license for commercial use or over a certain number of uses, or some social responsibility clause."
Or constraints on the hardware it runs on? Or is that OK because it's a self-serving limitation? Or restrictions on how the user uses the software like the AGPL has?
It seems your definition of open sour
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AGPL does not in any way restrict how the user uses the software. On the contrary, it allows the user full access to the source code of the software they use.
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AGPL is approved by OSI and FSF.
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Are you really this unaware of the normal meaning of the term opensource? Look into it; it has a pretty clear, generally accepted definition.
The only side Altman is ever on... (Score:1)
...is the one that benefits Altman. It's almost funny it's so transparent now.
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Well, at least it's gratifying that it took less time for bros to see it with Altman than it took with Musk. And it's not clear that the world yet realizes that both are posers.
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Well, at least it's gratifying that it took less time for bros to see it with Altman than it took with Musk. And it's not clear that the world yet realizes that both are posers.
Indeed. Despite it being blatantly obvious.
The Race, is what is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea how good or bad a product Sam Altman is capable of making. Don’t really care how open, closed, or some half-ass in between the end product ends up being.
What I do care about, is continuing to theme every-fucking-thing about AI as some kind of damn race. The nuclear armsrace, got us within 30 minutes of a nuclear wasteland for the last few decades of fearmongering taxpayer-fed profit, with a sitting US President warning us about that shit over half a century ago. No one listened.
On top of that, kills me that anyone can convince anyone else that their particular “AI” toddler mind LLM is winning anything right now. AI is “winning” about as well as Charlie Sheen on a tiger blood bender. And when it finally does “win”, far too many humans will lose a job. Not just unemployed. Unemployable. With Greed marketing to Gen Fucked that UBI isn’t at all like being on welfare. You know, because they’ll pay with $hitcoin and Government cheese that’s extra sharp.
Greed, is not prepared for a 25% unemployment rate. You will have blood before you have profit. We’re racing, and have no fucking idea why we’re even running. Not like this win is for humans. It’s for Greed.
Re:The Race, is what is wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans are, and always have been, competitive. It's no surprise that AI (or any technology) is a race. As soon as one person is successful in AI (or anything) somebody else will want in, and will one-up the original. That's human nature, its not going to change.
There is zero evidence that AI will put massive umbers of people out of work. None. As a case study, Waymo can't even put Uber drivers out of business in a single city, even Phoenix, where they started. AI is to white collar work, what Waymo is to Uber drivers. We have been automating things for many decades, but yet we still have an unemployment rate around 4%. Why should we think AI can put massive number of people out of work?
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There is zero evidence that AI will put massive numbers of people out of work. None.
Well, yes for LLMs. Because they will never amount to anything. If any AI tech ever achieves what the false LLM promises claim, that massive job loss is inevitable though. There really is no way to not see it except being deeply caught in a false and completely unfounded belief.
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So are driverless cars a false promise? Driverless Waymo taxis do exist, and take people for real rides in real cities. Theoretically, each one puts one Uber driver out of work. But there are still plenty of Uber drivers in cities where Waymo operates.
You haven't explained why LLMs or AI are any different, even if they DO fulfill their promises.
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Why would I take somebody as dumb as you seriously enough to add further explanations?
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Hmmm I don't know, I'm pretty dumb! Just ask my kids!
You said in one breath that LLMs will never amount to anything, but in the next breath that they will cause massive job losses. That makes no sense. The first statement would lead to the conclusion that they *won't* cause job losses, or anything else! Your logic doesn't follow.
The real-life example of self-driving cars (which depend on another type of AI) not being able to impact the availability of jobs, is a powerful counter-example.
Your claim has no su
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Because AI will eventually be good enough to replace a LOT of good enough humans who are barely good enough themselves at doing the job. Ignorant humans assume the AI race needs to end at perfection. Hardly.
Once AI is good enough, it only has to be cheaper than you. And it will be. Every time.
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I agree partially. Yes, AI is already better than humans at a lot of stuff, and will become better in many more areas as it improves.
But that's not the end of the need for humans. Automation has gotten better than humans in many, many areas already.
Automation and mechanization has removed the need for
- 99% of all human blacksmiths
- 95% of all human farm laborers, just in the last 100 years.
- 90% of factory workers, just in the last 50 years.
- 90% of secretaries, just in the last 50 years.
And yet, with all t
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Automation has both destroyed and created jobs no doubt. And we have had many Revolutions over the centuries. Industrial and otherwise. But nothing, and I do mean nothing in history will compare to the AI Revolution. The Revolution that targets and ultimately replaces all perceived value derived from the human mind.
Put bluntly, the fuck else you gonna offer greed but your intelligence? Humans can’t even compete with dumb automation that works 24/7/365 and doesn’t bitch about time off, sick
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nothing in history will compare to the AI Revolution
There is no evidence for this. None. You are basically saying that a pattern that has held true throughout history, will not be repeated *this* time because *this* time is different. No it's not, not in the least.
Even if this time *is* different, you have no historical precedent to assume that suddenly, nobody will have anything to do for a living. Supposing that it will, is nothing more than hand-waving a doomsday scenario. People who do this should go work for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and hel
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nothing in history will compare to the AI Revolution
There is no evidence for this. None. You are basically saying that a pattern that has held true throughout history, will not be repeated *this* time because *this* time is different. No it's not, not in the least.
Even if this time *is* different, you have no historical precedent to assume that suddenly, nobody will have anything to do for a living. Supposing that it will, is nothing more than hand-waving a doomsday scenario. People who do this should go work for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and help set the Doomsday Clock.
When a previous Revolution has made a humans job obsolete by way of Progress, the answer for the species that has deemed employment so necessary as to equate it to self-worth, has always been go get an education.
Now tell me exactly what you think that reduces human employment down to. And I’ll tell you exactly what Greed is targeting with automation and AI, and will not stop until success is found. Which will then allow Greed to get rid of most of that cancer on the payroll.
Do you dare ask a CEO st
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There are a few things we agree on. Greed is rampant. Companies want to reduce cost. Global trade exists to reduce cost.
Where we disagree, is on the level of success these greedy motivations will achieve. You see a monster that will gobble up the whole world. I see another iteration of progress, not unlike the other iterations of progress, starting with the transition from the stone age to the bronze age, and all the other technological revolutions since. Each revolution eliminated entire lines of work. Eac
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I agree. Stupid runs very deep in the human race and so does ignorant. That is why massive scams like this one become possible: People to not get it and believe the promises even after decades of having been lied to.
Open Source is Meaningless as Used in this Post (Score:3)
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Alas nobody will ever release the training set unless it's Wikipedia or something similar. Most training sets are built upon proprietary data they don't own (and are often using without explicit permission.) Even the "legal" stuff OpenAI does, such as basing their content on Reddit posts, is due to licensing - if they release the training set for you to use, you could only use it illegally.
That said, Taiwan is probably jumping the gun on the Deeplinks stuff. The training set might tell a Taiwanese person so
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DeepSeek is a term used for three different things:
1) The company
2) The model developed by the company
2) A webservice similar to ChatGPT using the model developed by the company.
It is reasonable to distrust 3) even though there is no problem with 2). They are a chinese company and even when they have the best interest of all of their users in mind, the government will by now have its interests and they will have to do what they are told. Don't tell me you believe ChatGPT would not give your data to the NSA,
not only that (Score:1)
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"Open" as used by The Open Group means documented and interoperable. That's how the word has "always" been used in relation to Unix-land. Open Systems, for example. Or even SCO Open Desktop, which was based on fairly open standards like Motif. Yeah, Motif was and is commercial, but when you bought a license, you got the sources. Caldera Network Desktop (which was basically a new version of SCO ODT, but on Linux - it was a very similar Motif-based desktop) was Redhat with AccelX and Motif, and you got the Mo
poor noobs (Score:2)
They don't know anything, so they have to lash out at people who do
Stolen IP? Sorry Sam (Score:1)
That's just business.
Comeuppance for "Open" AI (Score:1)
"Wrong side of history," Altman says, after locking down his AI garden and charging rent. Suddenly open source looks good when someone else is eating your lunch. Cry me a river, Sam. By making their model open source and free, DeepSeek out-"OpenAI-ed" Altman.
The rest of the world isn't shedding tears for OpenAI's lost lead. In fact, a lot of people are probably popping champagne corks. There's a global appetite to see the US tech giants humbled, and DeepSeek is serving up a delicious dish of comeuppance. En
AI is being used to steal everything, anyhow (Score:2)
Who really needs OpenAI or Ai ?? (Score:2)