Elites for democracy! With their elite studies and abilities they will democratise AI by teaching it what is right and wrong. They already know better than regular people and AI.

And being so open they first lock the model up and charge a fee, so anyone can pay. Just spreading democracy through paid API calls. /s

I was a bit mean, they did kick the field in the butt and pushed us ahead even with all the stubbornness and secrecy. But now they are just holding us back.

It's in their interest to posture that way publicly while controlling scarcity of access where there's financial upside to

Exclusively licensing GPT-3 to Microsoft seems like a clear example of this.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-i...

That's the thing, once the cat is out of the bag, it's out. Once someone develops AGI, it now exists. You can choose to either share it, or sell it.

You might think that the nuclear bomb is a good analogy to use here, but it is not, because once the field has advanced to the point in which one group can develop AGI, it is now possible for other groups to develop it with relative ease, unless you actively take over the world first and deny those other groups the compute resources necessary to train/run AGI.

The point is, once these algorithms are upon us, you must be willing to accept what impacts they will have, even if it destroys entire industries. The alternative being that you destroy the industry slowly rather than quickly, while simultaneously widening the gap between the elites and everyone else.

The mistake is thinking that people can't adapt to the times, which is only true if you are actively holding them back.

If someone developed AGI today, the best thing to do would be to instantly throw up a torrent of it and spread it as fast as possible, because if a sole entity is able to get it first and kick the ladder away, we are most likely screwed.

I've never understood what exactly the "open" in OpenAI is supposed to imply. They produce proprietary, gated models - not open in any meaningful sense.