I am soooooooooo glad this happened. OpenAI has defaulted on their promise of openness and it seems a lot of models are gatekept by profiteering and paternalistic moralism

All it takes is one good, actually open project to sidestep all of their chicanery.

Yes, and the end of the world they predicted if text-to-image technology got into the hands of bigots or if celebrities/politicians were deep-faked into odd situations, etc ... just has not materialized. I really think (and always thought) that the whole ethical reason for withholding access was bullshit! Same with generative text from prompts.

> ... just has not materialized.

I don't think we comfortably know that yet.

For one, software takes a bit to diffuse into the public usage, secondly if you were the victim of blackmail or some other such criminal activity that was perpetrated with the use of such a system you wouldn't raise your hand immediately -- you'd get clear of the problem -- and then afterwards depending on how embarassing the situation is you'd speak out publicly. Many victims will never identify the methods used, and most will never speak out publicly.

In other words, systems like this could be being used to harass people and it'd take a bit of time before 'the public' was ever very aware of it being an ongoing problem.

I'm pretty sure we haven't seen the deepfakes we are expecting yet. Give it a couple months for grainy photos of Clinton in the basement of a pizza parlor with handcuffs in the background.

Or actual photos of Clinton at a certain island that are real but called deep fakes?

I thought of a Scifi series years ago where puppeteers could force politicians say anything they wanted just by the threat of a deep fake.

Don't worry, these AI models can't draw faces and hands properly yet, I'd give it some more time

I think those ethical concerns are very real. It's just inevitable that this technology will be used for nefarious purposes. But withholding access to the tech, can't do anything to avoid the inevitable.

Well there's also the problem that if technology is possible but kept proprietary, then it is not expected that it will be used. This increases its power.

A world where deep fakes are well known and accessible technology undermines their nefarious utility (the opposite of course also being a problem: actual video evidence now potentially being undermined).

There are some people making images that almost anyone would find offensive. But I haven't noticed those images having any impact at all, at least not yet.

It begs the question: Did they believe there would be no competition?

That's usually how innovation stagnation happens. Tons of examples all around. Intel and AMD were fighting, at one point Intel got a solid lead on AMD but eventually they became to overconfident and became lazy. Same will probably happen with AMD eventually, just a matter of how long the cycles are.

ActuallyOpenAI

the paternalistic moralism has nothing to do with safety, but absolutely more with creating the hype and keeping it proprietary ofc

OpenAI decided keep it for themselves, their tech was impressive but they didn't have a killer app and they tried to prevent the inevitable by restricting the use of their machine.

StableDiffusion might be inferior to DALL-E in some aspects but they build a community with full access to the tooling and that community is much more likely to find a killer app for this impressive tech.

It's kind of ironic that OpenAI is losing out due their closed ways and desire for control.

This is like bitkeeper vs git all over again. DALL-E is the early innovator but stable diffusion is going to clean the table.

The people who first originated the clip guided diffusion approach (rivershavewings around this time last year) are now working for stable diffusion so it's somewhat arguable that dalle wasn't actually first (just first to make a user friendly saas for it).

OpenAI announced and released CLIP on GitHub on January 5, 2021: https://github.com/openai/CLIP

You need CLIP to have CLIP guided diffusion. So the current situation seems to trace back to OpenAI and the MIT-licensed code they released the day DALL-E was announced. I would love to be corrected if I've misunderstood the situation.

You're totally right, OpenAI released CLIP in january. But I mean CLIP isn't an image generator, it's just a classifer. If we restrict the question to actual text to image generators (ignoring deep dream or some of the 'kinda cool but far from the coherency of post-2021 generators') then clip guided diffusion is kinda the first.

This has happened so many times in the past 50 years in tech: one company creates a superior technology that has small sales compared to the bigger company that commodifies it at scale either through marketing or capex dollars, and thus squashes the smaller inventing company into irrelevance (or out of existence).

BetaMax > VHS

Xerox Park > [ Mac > Windows ]

PS2 Bus > ISA Bus

AltaVista > Google

I'm curious to see if Tesla is hit by this now that the big automakers finally woke up and realized there's a colossal market for low-cost EVs.

""Open""

""AI""

OpenAI is planning to release an API for DALL-E. Once they do, you will see more applications being built with it.

https://help.openai.com/en/articles/6402865-is-dall-e-availa...

Whatever API they release is going to be way more restrictive than what people can do with Stable Diffusion. I doubt we’ll see anywhere near the same amount of integrations unless OpenAI just lets you download the weights and run Dalle locally.

We haven't seen any integrations but that doesn't mean we have any idea how many users DALL-E has. Stuff showing up on Hacker News isn't a good proxy for this.

Stable Diffusion easily has 100x more active users that Dall-e; this based on stats OpenAI released and private sources I been able to dig up. Rumored that Stability AI is in process of raising additional funding at over a billion dollar valuation. Unless OpenAI rapidly changes course, only matter of time before they are footnote in history of AI in my opinion, since Stability will likely rapidly go after every single current offering they have, including GPT3/CoPilot.

Well, I guess it's fortunate that OpenAI the company is owned by a nonprofit that's devoted to research. As long as they get funding they can keep doing research.

My understanding from Wikipedia is that in 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit.

That said, also quickly found what appears to be 990s for a non-profit OpenAI here, but they end in 2020:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/810...

Quick set of Google searches found nothing currently on their site — anyone have any additional information?

From the about page [1]:

> OpenAI LP is governed by the board of the OpenAI nonprofit, comprised of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & President), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Shivon Zilis.

> Our investors include Microsoft, Reid Hoffman’s charitable foundation, and Khosla Ventures.

Also, [2] is interesting reading. It's not official (the author writes "views expressed are my own"), but it's written by a researcher at OpenAI and was reviewed by people on the board of directors.

[1] https://openai.com/about/

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3S4nyoNEEuvNsbXt8/common-mis...

Thanks, no idea how I missed reviewing the about page — and the recent post on LessWrong was interesting too; in fact, resubmitted it on HN, since I am curious what others make of it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32906726

If you want anything to take over the world, give it away.

This is a known recipe, worked well in a huge number of places.

If you want a great ROI, create a superior product and charge a premium for it. Also worked well for a number of companies, from Porsche to Apple.

OpenAI's strategy can still result in a business success, if executed well.