We saw this OpenAI demo: https://player.vimeo.com/video/427943452
and were just blown away. Very cool!!
I guess a spreadsheet is never too old [1] to learn new tricks :)
[1] Founder of https://mintdata.com here, so a bit biased (& opinionated about) spreadsheets, take the above with a pound or 10 of salt.
[2] I've sent them this example how we'd invoke their APIs, hopefully they'll let us into the beta, fingers crossed :) https://mintdata.com/docs/learn/core-mechanics/work-with-dat...
Imagine MS saying they "democratised" operating systems because, hey, you can buy their binaries, so everyone can use their operating system. Compare that kind of "democratisation" with open source oSs.
No, the truth is that as more and more resources are necessary to wring the last few drops of performance out of the current generation of deep neural net models it is only large, well-funded companies that have the resources to innovate - and everyone else is forced to follow in their wake. Any expectations that progress would lead to "democratisation" of deep neural networks research has gone out the window.
To clarify: MS windows is closed source, but you can't very well train a large GPT model unless you're someone with the resources of OpenAI. So you're stuck with whatever they choose to train and make available to you.
[1] Cf second paragraph of https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/
For instance, if the original model is trained on English text exclusively and you want to fine-tune it on Greek text you are S.O.L.
The essence of open source is that the resources are made available to you (without warranty). That isn’t the case here.
Bloomberg reports the API is based on GPT-3 and “other language models”.
If that’s true, this is a big deal, and it epitomizes OpenAI’s namesake. The largest NLP models require vast corporate resources to train, let alone put into production. Offering the largest model ever trained (with near-Turing results for some tasks) is a democratization of technology that would otherwise have been restricted to well-funded organizations.
Although the devil will be in the details of pricing and performance, this is a step worthy of respect. And it bodes well for the future.