Caution: A Quick Note on GPT-3

25 July 2020

The web has been flooded with GPT-3 fan fare.

Let's step back for a second.

• "Open"AI is not open at all. In fact, everything is closed source and proprietary.
• The ramifications of this blackbox API processing these kinds of queries is enormous.
• Do we want to centralise the worlds AI decision making on a single service/company?

commercializing the technology helps us pay for our ongoing AI research, safety, and policy efforts.

They recognise that open-sourcing the data means they have no leverage.

many of the models underlying the API are very large, taking a lot of expertise to develop and deploy and making them very expensive to run.

Bullshit. You can open-source AND run the infrastructure to make it "more accessible" at the same time.

the API model allows us to more easily respond to misuse of the technology ... harassment, intentional deception, radicalization, astroturfing, or spam ...

This is a losing battle. Other models will come along shortly. By being actually open, they will be infinitely more socially and technically scalable.

Information (and technology) wants to be free.