OpenAI should now change their name to ClosedAI
Someone asked for a more nuanced perspective, so here we go.<p>For a lot of AI researchers, OpenAI has been a huge disappointment. We had hope that OpenAI would be the company to democratize AI with good open source work, transparency, no PR bullshit (aka DeepMind), and evangelism. That they would develop in the open, and perhaps even do research in the open. You know, kind of like the name says.<p>It all started out okay with their release of OpenAI Gym, tutorials, leaderboards, and competitions around that. That was when Karpathy was still there. Over time, many projects have become abandoned, poorly maintained, or just disappeared [1]. And many projects they promised never happened [2]. OpenAI became just another research lab obsessed with publishing papers in closed (!) journals, indistinguishable from Google AI, DeepMind, FAIR, MSR, and the many others.<p>There is nothing open or different about them. Most paper code is not published, and even when it is, it's just the typical poorly written and unmaintained research code that you see from other labs. None of their infrastructure is open source either, because it's needed to maintain their competitive advantage to train models and publish research papers. GPT-3 being offered as a paid API to a select number of people is latest joke in a long series of other jokes. All of this would be fine, if it was not for the name and branding of being a transparent and good-willed nonprofit company. It is just misleading and that rubs many people the wrong way, as if the whole "open" thing was just a PR stunt.<p>HuggingFace [0] these days is pretty much what OpenAI should have been, but only time will tell what happens.<p>[0] <a href="https://huggingface.co/" rel="nofollow">https://huggingface.co/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/discussion_openai_should_now_change_their_name_to/egl03jv/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/aqwcyx/dis...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/openai/roboschool/issues/159" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openai/roboschool/issues/159</a>