
Dear OpenAI: Please Open Source Your Language Model - hughzhang
https://thegradient.pub/openai-please-open-source-your-language-model/
======
pmichaud
I really strongly disagree with this. I don't have much time to write, but:

1\. Photo manipulation has been extremely destructive in a variety of ways.
People "know" that photoshop is a thing, yet fake pictures abound at all
levels of publications, and unrealistic standards propagate at full speed
nonetheless. The effects are wide spread and insidious.

A way to automate the production of median-literacy shitposts on the internet
tuned to whatever you want to propagandize would be a devastating blow. People
"knowing" that it was possible would do precious little to stop the onslaught,
and it all but destroy online discourse in any open channels. I'm certain
there would be other consequences that I can't fathom right now because I
don't grok the potential scale or nth order effects.

2\. There is no fire alarm for AGI[1]. Is this thing the key to really
dangerous AI? Will the next thing be? No one knows. It's better to be
conservative.

[1] [https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-
alarm/](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/)

~~~
Bartweiss
> _2\. There is no fire alarm for AGI[1]. Is this thing the key to really
> dangerous AI? Will the next thing be? No one knows. It 's better to be
> conservative._

This is certainly a point worth discussing, but it's odd for OpenAI to
suddenly stand on principle about this specific result.

OpenAI was founded on the idea that public access to AI tools and research
would improve and democratize them. Their website and founders make statements
like _" Are we really willing to let our society be infiltrated by autonomous
software and hardware agents whose details of operation are known only to a
select few? Of course not."_ and _"...empower as many people as possible to
have AI. If everyone has AI powers, then there's not any one person or a small
set of individuals who can have AI superpower."_ Meanwhile, their view on AGI
risk seems to be that more access will improve scrutiny and oversight. Since
day one, they've taken flak from people like Nick Bostrom and Scott Alexander
([https://futureoflife.org/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-
open](https://futureoflife.org/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open)) who argued that
their stance amounted to publicly sharing untested, hazardous tools.

And now they balked because... they built an essay generator that's not quite
good enough to compete with cheap troll farms that governments can already
afford? I don't think they're necessarily wrong to not share this, and I know
Sam Altman said a while back that they might not release all their source
code. But I don't think this should be looked at in isolation.

If the people going to bat for democratized access to AI suddenly decided that
the public can't be trusted with access to AI tools, that's worth talking
about.

~~~
fossuser
I think they did change their mind on this after considering the AGI risk more
and getting a better understanding of it.

I'm not sure where I read a discussion about this, but I do think it was
something they've talked about before.

~~~
goatlover
Is OpenAI anywhere near AGI such that it would warrant such concerns?

~~~
fossuser
It's hard to know what near is and what the timeline is.

This article digs into some historical evidence of this:
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s-
no...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BEtzRE2M5m9YEAQpX/there-s-no-fire-
alarm-for-artificial-general-intelligence)

From the post:

"Two: History shows that for the general public, and even for scientists not
in a key inner circle, and even for scientists in that key circle, it is very
often the case that key technological developments still seem decades away,
five years before they show up.

In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer,
Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.

In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain
reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that
it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I
believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the
denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then
granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for
this I neglected to keep the citation.

And of course if you're not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be
even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a
thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed
intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air
flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then."

Maybe it's hundreds of years out, but maybe it's not. Since it's hard to know
probably better to try and work on the safety aspects now.

~~~
dannyw
Of course, I'm sure you can find plenty of examples where things that are
decades away, are described as decades away.

~~~
fossuser
Sure - this isn’t to imply that that can’t happen or even that that isn’t the
more common case.

It’s only to say that just because something may seem far away it may not be -
even if you’re the person that will invent it only two years later (and
therefore are probably in the best position to know).

Given the high stakes of unsafe AGI and this uncertainty it’s probably worth
some people working on goal alignment.

This is somewhat unrelated to the recent release though.

------
minimaxir
It's worth noting that there's a surprising difference between the full model
(1542M hyperparameters) and the released smaller model in the repo (117M): the
full model can account for narrative structure much better
([https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097652984316481537](https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097652984316481537)),
while the smaller model tends to go on trainwrecks, especially if you give it
a bespoke grammatical structure
([https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097656934180696064](https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1097656934180696064))

The arguments OpenAI have given about people using the model to create fake
news are IMO not good; bad actors will still create fake news anyways (or with
the paper/repo, they might even create more bespoke models trained on a
specific type of dataset for even better fake news). With the open model, we
would know how to better fight such attacks.

~~~
make3
plus they have opened source the code, and the training cost of the full model
is evaluated at 45k$, which is not much for a state actor or a serious org of
any kind

~~~
buboard
what would they do with it? It is a text decorator, it can't make sense of
itself. maybe they can make 1000 fake facebook accounts that post a lot.
still, i doubt facebook uses text to detect bots, its easier to use ip/network
patterns.

~~~
make3
it's not a text decorator, it's a text generator

~~~
buboard
i mean, it is not some sentient AI. it takes some text and decorates it with
100 other sentences. most of the time it doesnt make any sense and it doesnt
have intent.

------
boltzmannbrain
Req'd reading: "OpenAI Trains Language Model, Mass Hysteria Ensues" by CMU
Professor Zachary Lipton, [http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai-
trains-lan...](http://approximatelycorrect.com/2019/02/17/openai-trains-
language-model-mass-hysteria-ensues/)

A salient quote from the article:

> However, what makes OpenAI’s decision puzzling is that it seems to presume
> that OpenAI is somehow special—that their technology is somehow different
> than what everyone else in the entire NLP community is doing—otherwise, what
> is achieved by withholding it? However, from reading the paper, it appears
> that this work is straight down the middle of the mainstream NLP research.
> To be clear, it is good work and could likely be published, but it is
> precisely the sort of science-as-usual step forward that you would expect to
> see in a month or two, from any of tens of equally strong NLP labs.

~~~
eanzenberg
Suffice to say, most of what comes out of OpenAI is vanilla type work that I
haven't seen go beyond academic research labs. They do spend a lot of time on
PR and making stuff look pretty, I guess.

~~~
tedivm
To be fair they've also released some useful tools, such as the AI Gym.

~~~
ipsum2
To be fair, all of their useful tools have been deprecated or in 'maintenance
mode'. See [https://github.com/openai/gym](https://github.com/openai/gym)

------
akyu
My conspiracy theory on this: This entire fiasco is actually an experiment to
gauge public reaction to this kind of release strategy. Eventually the point
will come where the choice of releasing a model may have real ethical
considerations, so they are test driving the possibilities with a relatively
harmless model.

Given the, in my opinion, huge overreaction to all of this, I fear this may
only encourage AI research groups to be more secretive with their work.

~~~
tomphoolery
OpenAI is just trying to make a buck. Just like most other programmers, they
don't give a damn about how damaging their code is going to be.

~~~
minimaxir
OpenAI is literally a non-profit.

~~~
nightski
Not saying I agree with the parent but while OpenAI is non-profit it's owned
by billionaires whose companies directly benefit from their research.

~~~
sterlind
Perhaps they kept it closed source because they sold it to one of those
companies? Non-profits are allowed to sell things, after all.

------
mark_l_watson
I like the work OpenAI has done in the past, so please take my complaints as
gentle complaints:

\- a very small percentage of generated samples ‘read well’

\- I Don’t see any evidence of ‘understanding’, at least in the sense that
BERT can identify original nouns that pronouns refer to (anaphora resolution):
amazing to get state of the art results

\- the ‘we aren’t going to share code and results’ thing reminds me of the
movie The Wizard of Oz: trust them that they developed cool technology

\- in 6 months, high school students might be getting similar results, given
how fast our field is moving forward: this makes the danger concern less
important in my opinion

This whole thing seems like a throwback to how science was conducted 10 years
ago - ancient times in our fast moving tech world.

~~~
msla
> the ‘we aren’t going to share code and results’ thing reminds me of the
> movie The Wizard of Oz: trust them that they developed cool technology

And this is where it stands: They claim to have something.

They won't release it.

If they had _nothing_ but a somewhat creative streak to make up the results,
the world would look exactly the same as it would if they had something.

Them lying is the least hypothesis here.

~~~
unimpressive
Given that experts in the field seem to think this is an incremental step
forward, OpenAI has already demonstrated a track record of doing things
probably more impressive than this, and the massive loss of credibility that
would come with being caught in a lie here, on priors we should expect they're
not lying.

------
fossuser
I thought this blog post response was pretty good:

OpenAI’s GPT-2: the model, the hype, and the controversy
[https://towardsdatascience.com/openais-gpt-2-the-model-
the-h...](https://towardsdatascience.com/openais-gpt-2-the-model-the-hype-and-
the-controversy-1109f4bfd5e8)

I think this is a better response than the article submitted here. There are
ethical concerns and risk with these releases and it's probably a good idea to
start considering them. What they did release seems reasonable in context.

I find the argument that making the technology as open as possible leading to
people taking a skeptical look at things not very convincing. Recent election
interference, disinformation campaigns, and the general inability for the
public to disambiguate fact from fiction seems like decent evidence that just
because people know something can be faked doesn't lead to critical thinking -
confirmation bias is strong.

~~~
buboard
as an FOSSuser you should know that many parts of opensource software used to
be outright illegal (e.g. pgp). opensource democratized all of them

------
jayantj
I strongly disagree with OP's logic when he says - Photoshop hasn't negatively
affected the world "precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop." \- the
crux of his argument. IMO the main reason Photoshop hasn't affected the world
negatively is because it is HARD to make convincing fakes - precisely what
OpenAI are ensuring by not releasing the model.

Notice that this reasoning doesn't take into account whether or not GPT-2 can
actually negatively impact the world. It says as long as people are aware that
the text they are reading could be fake/AI-generated, we'll be fine. I think
people are already aware of that. I don't see how releasing the pre-trained
model will help with that.

------
doublekill
Another thing that has not been discussed yet: OpenAI does not want to be
responsible for the output of this model. Can you imagine the headlines?
"OpenAI released a text generating AI and it is racist as hell". People should
have learned their lesson after the Tay fiasco.

I am ambiguous on the issue of release vs. non-release, but the mockery and
derision they faced makes me ashamed to contribute to this field. No good
faith is assumed, but projection of PR-blitzes and academic penis envy.

Perhaps AI researchers are simply not the best for dealing with ethical and
societal issues. Look at how long it took to get decent research into
fairness, and its current low focus in industry. If you were in predictive
modeling 10 years ago, it is likely you contributed to promoting and
institutionalizing bias and racism. Do you want these same people deciding on
responsible disclosure standards? Does the head of Facebook AI or those that
OK'd project Dragonfly or Maven have any real authority on the responsible
ethical use of new technology?

I am not too sure about the impact of a human-level text generating tool. It
may throw us back to the old days of email spam (before Bayesian spam
filters). It is always easier to troll and derail than it is to employ such
techniques for good. Scaling up disinformation campaigns is a real threat to
our democracies (or maybe this decade-old technique is already in use at scale
by militaries, and this work is merely showing what the AI community's love
for military funding looks like).

I am sure that the impact of the NIPS abbreviation is an order of magnitude
lower than that of this technology, yet companies like NVIDIA used Neurips in
their marketing PR before it was officially introduced (made them look like
the good guys for a profit). How is that for malaligning ML research for PR
purposes? Would the current vitriol displayed in online discussons be
appreciated when there was a name change proposal for the betterment of
society?

Disclaimer: this comment in favor of OpenAI was written by a real human. Could
you tell for sure now you know the current state of the art? What would these
comment sections look like if one person controls 20% of the accounts here?

~~~
jstarfish
> It is always easier to troll and derail than it is to employ such techniques
> for good.

Curious-- what possible good comes with the ability to generate grammatically
correct text devoid of actual meaning?

Sure, you could generate an arbitrary essay, but it's less an essay _about_
anything and more just an arrangement of words that happen to statistically
relate to each other. Markov chains already do this and while the output looks
technically correct, you're not going to learn or interpret anything from it.

Same goes with things like autocomplete. You could generate an entire passage
just accepting its suggestions. It would pass a grammar test but doesn't
_mean_ anything.

Chatbots are an obvious application, but how is that "good," or any different
than the Harlow experiment performed on humans? Fooling people into developing
social relationships with an algorithm (however short or trivial) is cruel and
unethical beyond belief.

A photoshopped image might be pleasant or stimulating to look at, and does
have known problems in terms of normalizing a fictitious reality. But fake
text? What non-malicious use can there possibly be?

~~~
princeofwands
Current application: Better character - and token completion helps make it
easier for people with physical disabilities to interact with computers.
[http://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/papers/uist2000.pdf](http://www.inference.org.uk/djw30/papers/uist2000.pdf)
(pdf)

Research progress: Better compression measures the progress to general
intelligence.
[http://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/rationale.html)

Future application: Meaningful completion of questions, leading to
personalized learning material for students all over the world. If only there
was an OpenQuora.

------
nisten
I don't understand why the choice of opensourcing seems to be so binary for
some. It feels as if it's either:

A-Leave everything open and hope that the global interoperability and
cathartic flow of information creates a magic utopia for humanity.

B-Everyone incorporates into the soviet-union/chinese-firewall for protection.

There are manageable, more analogue alternatives too, like reducing the risk
and probability of a disaster by trusting a human's judgement to limit access
to potentially malicious code; which is exactly what they're doing in this
case.

------
ForrestN
I’m agnostic about the short term effects of OpenAI’s decision, but I wonder
if and hope that the eventual equilibrium will look more like things did
before the internet.

In, say, the 1960’s, if someone stood on a street corner with a sign saying
“The End Is Nigh,” most people would react with a shrug. They’d know that if
the world were ending they’d probably hear about it from a trusted source like
a newspaper or broadcaster.

I’m not worried about being tricked by fakes because I know that the NYT will
be doing infinitely more than I ever could to verify hugely important facts,
and won’t overreact to random bits of media. If you’re not someone I know
personally, and you’re not a trusted source of public information, you may as
well be holding a sign on a street corner, no matter how realistic the image
or text on your sign.

I think there may be vast unintended consequences that have to do with scale,
but intuitively it doesn’t feel like the “who to trust” problem is more than a
matter of cultural behaviors around trust adjusting to the internet age.

~~~
jpttsn
Yeah, if this tech was the WMD that OpenAI says it is, the NYT would know
about it.

------
yongjik
I don't buy the argument that open-sourcing would allow citizens to better
fight this. Let's be realistic. If the full model is published, for every one
person who studies the model to understand how to fight false propaganda,
there will be 5,000 who use it to shitposting for lulz.

Also, as everyone's pointing out, the cat's out of the bag. Whatever OpenAI
does, the same ability will be in the hands of state actors, and large
corporations, and soon not-too-large corporations and dedicated individuals,
probably in a few years. So basically whatever OpenAI does today doesn't
really matter.

We might as well think about totally different ways of building online
communities when everyone has shitpointing sockpuppet engines powered by
AWS/Azure DeepLearningToolKit Trial Version.

~~~
dannyw
Or a neural net for detecting fake text.

How insane would it be if the birth of AGI comes from GANs of fake news?

------
kogir
Everything important is open sourced already.

The article cites replication as important and then paradoxically argues for
releasing the model in lieu of replicating the training and verifying the
result.

This is the AI equivalent of a pharmaceutical company releasing all their
research and patents and then taking heat for not providing reagents and doing
the organic synthesis for everyone too.

~~~
minimaxir
The difference is a pharmaceutical company is for-profit, while OpenAI's (a
non-profit) mission ([https://openai.com/about/](https://openai.com/about/))
is "to build safe AGI, and ensure AGI's benefits are _as widely and evenly
distributed as possible_." (emphasis mine)

~~~
kogir
I don’t see how corporate structure changes anything. It’s a huge gift of tons
of work, which is far and away the hard part. They’ve enabled literally anyone
who wants to to train their own model on whatever source material they want.

------
Gatsky
The argument in the article is unconvincing, and shows a distinct failure to
think on a societal level or on time lines beyond a few weeks. The calculus
seems simple to me. The potential harms from not open sourcing the model
completely - minimal. Potential harms from open sourcing it completely -
greater than minimal. Hence their decision.

OpenAI should be lauded for making this decision. If you think about the sort
of people who would choose to work at OpenAI, it is clear this was a very
tough choice for them.

------
bllguo
To me it feels like everything about OpenAI's media strategy is calculated and
specifically designed to maximize good PR with the public. It leaves a sour
taste in my mouth.

~~~
wrsh07
It's very weird to me that a team of researchers who are credibly doing good
work and are making an effort to clearly explain their research garners such
suspicion.

Are you similarly skeptical of Deepmind, Distill, or Two Minute Papers?

Honestly, the norm of providing two versions of your research (arxiv and blog
post) makes ML easier to follow and is something I would like more academics
to attempt

------
namuol
Here's the most thoughtful piece I've been able to find on the controversial
topic so far: [https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai-
gp2/](https://www.fast.ai/2019/02/15/openai-gp2/)

------
gambler
Fortunately, we have outstanding and trustworthy corporate citizens like
Google, Facebook, Uber and others that will continue AI research safely,
ethically and responsibly without the risk of such technologies falling into
the unsteady hands of the public.

------
bitL
Sooner or later we will have tools for e.g. Reddit where one specifies a
desired outcome of a discussion and lets bots paired up with some optimization
algorithm figure out how to get popularity majority based on comments so far
in individual threads and drive discussion towards stated goal. Later the same
will be used in elections or other public "theaters" that won't matter any
longer as humanity will be "cracked", i.e. modeled sufficiently enough to
predict/influence average humans with just tiny remains of feelings that
something might be wrong which only complete societal outcasts would pursue.

------
psandersen
I'm honestly pretty conflicted here and the best thing that is coming out of
this is some healthy debate.

IMHO the strongest argument against publishing it is because its built from
Reddit it includes a lot of toxicity... VinayPrabhu originally made that
argument here [https://medium.com/@VinayPrabhu/reddit-a-one-word-reason-
why...](https://medium.com/@VinayPrabhu/reddit-a-one-word-reason-why-i-
support-openais-gpt-2-decision-56b82912443c)

Can't blame them for not opening up that can of PR worms. It could be like a
version of Microsoft Tay that can form coherent paragraphs.

The bigger picture is this could be used for some very effective social media
manipulation. A bit of clever infrastructure, maybe another generation of
improvement and some understanding of human psychology (overton window etc)
and managing 100,000 believable human accounts on something like reddit that
subtly move debate becomes very doable.

Then again its going to happen anyway so better focus on the defensive
techniques now...

------
angel_j
They did release the model [0]. A smaller-scale version of it. If you want the
big one, all you have to do is scrape 45M web pages, and increase the
parameters to scale.

What they didn't release is the training corpus and the trained filters. By
not releasing these, and focusing on ethics, they are trying to avert
attention from the mistake of training a massive cyclops on unfiltered
internet text. They probably read a lot of embarrassing text they didn't
share, imagine that.

0\. [https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/)

------
rippeltippel
<quote>Precisely because everyone knows about Photoshop.</quote> Everyone?!
All the non-digital-aware people on this planet, which I assume is the
majority, may have never heard about Photoshop, or know what can be done with
it. Out of the remaining _digital-aware_ human beings who may well know about
Photoshop, how many think about it when seeing a photo. I bet it's a very tiny
percentage.

------
baron_harkonnen
Why is there so much focus on just the language generation aspect of this
model? The language generation examples are to show how well the model
generalized the language it's trained on, but the whole point of releasing the
pretrained model is that this model also:

>achieves state-of-the-art performance on many language modeling benchmarks,
and performs rudimentary reading comprehension, machine translation, question
answering, and summarization — all without task-specific training

Every comment I see here and else where is strictly about automatically
generating comments, but the real loss of having this model kept private is
that it would allow anyone to create very, very good NLP projects right away.

The big problem in ML/"AI" now and going forward is that there is an extreme
asymmetry emerging in tech. The start of the last major tech boom was because
of "disruption". Any clever hacker with a laptop and developer skills could
create a product that would topple a giant. Likewise anyone could learn to do
anything that needed to be done on their own computer in their own time. Now
that's changing, to even play with these new tools you need special access and
corporate support.

Releasing the pretrained model to the public would allow a range of groups
that cannot afford to build a model such as this to experiment on their own
and achieve state of the art NLP results, not just in language generation but
in classification, translation, summarization etc. Some kid in the middle of
know where could download this and start messing with ideas about building a
chat bot.

The threat is not that some rogue actor will create evil spam bots, but that
some small scrappy startup would leverage the same, currently exclusive tools,
of large technology companies.

The reason why democratizing AI is important is not because we can better
fight off some vague threat, but so that, at least for the near term,
individuals and small groups can still reasonably compete with major players
in the ML space. And of course the fact that someone who claims openness and
that they exist to "ensure AGI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed
as possible." Can arbitrarily choose not to do go the other direction just
shows that tech is moving in a direction where "disruption" is going to become
increasingly less possible, and the future of the industry is going to be
controlled by a handful of major players.

------
robrenaud
What's extremely bad for research is that they didn't even release their train
and test sets. It's not hard to grab 40GB of text from the web that comes from
links with at least +3 votes on reddit. But even if you do that, you won't get
the same train/test set, and the same split. So impossible to know if a model
is outperforming their model.

~~~
sanxiyn
They tested against standard language modeling benchmarks like PTB and
WikiText, so it's entirely possible to compare.

------
PaulHoule
Network architectures and trainers are improving quickly so it won't be long
before others can create a similar model.

Their ace is having a huge clean dataset of grammatically correct text. This
is not about the fine points of grammar, but that the content of the average
web page is practically word salad.

------
darklycan51
The fact that this thread is in the site is scary, seems like there are
parties interested in a public outcry to make some potentially very harmful
tools be released to the public... the question is, why?

------
peterwwillis

      A little learning is a dangerous thing; 
      drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: 
      there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, 
      and drinking largely sobers us again.

------
sytelus
This is very nice summary of lot of social media discussion that has been
happening. Very thoughtful arguments from people who actually work on this
stuff.

------
buboard
The author doesnt mention the FUD that is being spread through tech media. "AI
company is so afraid of its creation, it won't release its source code". Good
job helping people understand their AI future. This is a PR stunt. Come on, a
little extra spam is not shocking news, and whatever can be used to spread
"fake news" can also be used to spread "correct news". Whatever the PR stunt
they tried to pull, it is creating a bad narrative for AI.

------
wodenokoto
Not releasing the model seems to me to be entirely a PR stunt, and has made me
lose a lot of respect for OpenAI.

------
dchichkov
@OpenAI - please, research reputations systems and authorship identification,
not fake news generators.

------
paulsutter
Are they planning to change their name to ClosedAI?

------
cartercole
release the code! you cant stop the signal

~~~
minimaxir
The _code_ is out
([https://github.com/openai/gpt-2](https://github.com/openai/gpt-2)), just not
the larger model itself.

~~~
gwern
Saying 'the code is out' is a little misleading. It's some supporting code for
working with a trained model, and a model definition of what is already a
standard and widely-implemented architecture. It doesn't include the dataset,
the code used to construct the dataset, or perhaps most importantly of all,
the code to train a model on a fleet of TPUv3s.

------
new_guy
This is the best publicity they could ever have and it didn't cost them a
penny.

There's probably 10 year olds in their bedrooms light years ahead of these
guys, certainly from we've seen it's definitely nothing to write home about,
but it's all about the marketing and hype, convincing the mass media they've
invented the next Terminator.

~~~
newen
> There's probably [amateurs] light years ahead of these guys

This is not an 80s hacker movie and amateur hackers can get into the DoD
computers using a public phone or whatever. This is actual research funded
with millions of dollars done by people with years of experience in the field.
I find this whole meme in the programming world of some random programmer
being able to work miracles and be super advanced kind of dumb.

~~~
carapace
Is it a meme in the programming world? I've only encountered it in Hollywood
and TV. It's like how every on-screen computer beeps and boops on every
interaction: it's a dramatic device. No one does that IRL because it would
drive you bananas in like ten seconds.

Cf. Glyph's "The Television Writer's Guide to Cryptography"
[https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/01/television-writer-
gu...](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2009/01/television-writer-guide-to-
cryptography.html)

~~~
newen
Yeah, I've had a few CS friends and internet people say things like that, like
there is probably some programmer who solved the NP problem but no one knows
it and of course there's the elite hacker who can do anything he wants thing;
not really seriously but enough that it seems to be a meme in the CS world.

------
n1231231231234
1) What really bothered me personally about GPT2 is that they made it look
sciency by putting out a paper that looks like other scientific papers -- but
then they undermine a key aspect of science: reproducability/verifiability. I
struggle to believe 'science' that cannot be verified/replicated.

2) In addition to this, they stand on the shoulder of giants and profit from a
long tradition of researchers and even companies making their data and tools
available. but "open"AI chose to go down a different path.

3) which makes me wonder what they are trying to add to the discussion? the
discussion about the dangers of AI is fully ongoing. by not releasing
background info also means that openAI is not contributing to how dangerous AI
can be approached. openAI might or might not have a model that is closer to
some worrisome threshold. but we don't know for sure. so imv, what openAI
primarily brought to the discussion are some vague fears against technological
progress -- which doesn't help anyone.

~~~
sanxiyn
Re 1: GPT2 is no different from most stuffs by DeepMind. DeepMind, in general,
does not release code, data, or model. DeepMind does not seem to get
reproducibility complaints, supposedly "key aspect of science".

