As we’ve all seen, ChatGPT has been in the spotlight for its outstanding ability to generate natural language. It’s a great leap in language models (at least those we can actually test). However, the openness from OpenAI has been lacking for quite a while, and this is a whole other stage of that issue. There has been little to no detail given on ChatGPT and no research paper. I was completely willing to accept this and wait, but I was extremely concerned when I saw that ChatGPT was coming as an API soon. We have been and are currently witnessing the complete commercialization of machine learning from a supposed research organization. This movement from research to product can have devastating effects if it continues. Without collaboration of all companies, universities and others, all of AI progress could collapse and come to a halt.

I genuinely hope I’m completely wrong, but we’ll see I guess. Perhaps the details of ChatGPT are so lacking of novelty it doesn’t need a paper, but I doubt that. Anyway, have a good evening everyone.

Comments

AsheyDS t1_j4okrwn wrote on January 17, 2023 at 4:02 AM

It doesn't matter if they're a company, research lab, non-profit, or whatever... research and development costs money. And of course their funding is going to come with strings attached.

Also, ChatGPT is, from my understanding, just a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 (GPT-3.5?) and nothing radically new in and of itself. If they write a paper on it, it'll likely be after it's been through thorough public testing so they can include new insights.

banned_mainaccount t1_j4p4sjd wrote on January 17, 2023 at 7:19 AM

i agree. it's to early to make any conclusions

turnip_burrito t1_j4pe9vm wrote on January 17, 2023 at 9:24 AM

Why don't we have more publically funded research groups like the private OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta research making cutting edge progress? Seems naïvely like a easy to solve this problem, to me.

AsheyDS t1_j4qgigy wrote on January 17, 2023 at 3:36 PM

I wish... but public funding from where? AI enthusiasts? The general public at large who barely even knows what chatGPT is, let alone any other progress in the field? I've considered crowd-funding for my own work, but I would not get the amounts I need. Even just looking at this sub, there are too many differing opinions that are all over the map, so while I may get a few small donations here and there, it's just not going to amount to anything helpful. It would be nice if there were more alternatives than pairing up with big investors though.

gelukuMLG t1_j4s074b wrote on January 17, 2023 at 9:21 PM

EleutherAi is a company that released a lot of open source models, which are the neo models and pythia ones and some are quite big 20-60B parameters. The models are downloadable from huggingface.

turnip_burrito t1_j4rwf9n wrote on January 17, 2023 at 8:58 PM

Taxes, I mean.

The US for example has national labs paying scientists to do research, so it's not unheard of.

AsheyDS t1_j4rysoq wrote on January 17, 2023 at 9:12 PM

In the US, there's already this.. https://seedfund.nsf.gov/

Not the easiest thing to get into though, and still capitalist-minded. And actually it's easier to start and maintain a for-profit company for research than it is a non-profit organization, so if you're going to have a for-profit company anyway then you might as well seek a variety of funding sources, which do include strings attached leading to monetization. It's just how the system is unfortunately...

turnip_burrito t1_j4s0yqx wrote on January 17, 2023 at 9:26 PM

That's just sad. :(

Thanks for the answer though.

Baturinsky t1_j4q76ec wrote on January 17, 2023 at 2:31 PM

Would be awesome. The slower AI developes, the better will be the end result, the smoother it's integration into humanity and integration of humanity into AI, the less catastrophes from AI misuse, the better understanding of all other nuances, the more preparedness against danger both directly from AI misuse, and from any other research which can be accelerated by AI.