No good will come from the business model offered by "Open"AI. It is not like the personal computer revolution that created tremendous wealth and opportunity. These companies are not developing "tools" like the personal PC. The models are closed, trained on closed data and cost a fortune to train. All they will ever offer is a paid prompt.
A famous ~$50 millionaire+ programmer who is basically retired and no longer has a strong commercial connection to his original source code, of course can release his code for the public good without much risk. But that's a very different thing that whatever OP is talking about.
Again this has very little real connection to a commercial company in its prime releasing OSS and sacrificing massive income.
All you've shown me is a programmer who got wealthy releasing the closed source games via big name publishers, strategically making their own company, then later released the source code for a well-past-its-commerical-prime game at minimal personal risk, in an industry at the time where old games die. Even remastering old IP games wasn't a thing yet.
Meanwhile releasing his engine brought him and his team much personal reputation, showing his amazing programming techniques and talent which helped the industry... even though no one cared to use his old out-of-date open source engine (aka little commercial risk)... which yes was novel at the time and respectable.
What does this have to do with OpenAI exactly? Or top end talent spending their prime at a commercial software company?
And I despise the heavily policed OpenAI approach to models so I have no skin in the game to defend them.
I'm not personally too chuffed about corporate hypocrisy, but the more you believe in OpenAI's name and stated mission the more likely you are to be upset with them (and, by extension, this news).
It was news at the time because he was already famous. He had a series of videos on YouTube from his course CS231n at Stanford. He also wrote the popular char-rnn article in 2015 and was a founding member of the research group at OpenAI before joining Tesla.
Manhattan project was awesome, and thanks to nuclear arms race we actually have an energy source that solves all of our renewable energy needs, human vices and misinformation notwithstanding.
It's just sad. The Manhattan project was necessary and it was successful. It also developed the technology for clean nuclear energy. But at the end of the day the reality of this world is that technology is a two edge knife. US government promptly bombed Japan, and other countries rightfully rushed to develop their own bombs.
I feel the same with AI. Most people struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile our brightest minds are developing AI and will hand it over to people who don't care about the rest of us. Models will be closed, data will be closed. Why? You get my point?
Re Manhattan project, somebody else would have figured it out, is there a side you'd rather had got there first? The cat was already out of the bag.
More to the point, openAI makes chatbots that use matrix multiplication to provide believable sentences, and a few similar things. This isn't and never will be nuclear power. Nobody is working or, or close to, any sentient or dangerous AI (dangerous in a way that a regular computer program couldn't be). The applications in contemplation here are better searching, low end copywriting, some kind of smart assistant.
(On a technical level, there's very cool stuff going on, but there is not societal risk, other than the fallout from s big hype bubble)
Looking forward to this aging like milk. Virtually everyone in the industry believes AGI will happen, and virtually everyone agrees that it is going to permanently change humanity like we've never seen before.
This just a classical false dichotomy. Because we spend resources on one thing doesn't mean we can't spend resources on another, and it doesn't mean resources for one thing are being taken away from another. It's not a zero sum game.
One would expect that bright people would know better, specially after the Manhattan project.