THE STATE OF OPENAI: OpenAI has devolved from being an altruistic
non profit to being a big tech cesspool.
Virtually everyone from Microsoft and Google to Apple and Samsung want to create their
own version of ChatGPT or even buy out ChatGPT itself.
This really isn’t that surprising given the roaring launch of ChatGPT.
Despite being out for just a few months, ChatGPT is already pulling in as much search interest
as Google Drive and 6 times more search interest than Siri.
But, while these numbers are impressive, they’re also quite worrisome especially when you consider
the waning morals and ethics behind this technology.
You see, it’s not just big tech that been tainting the wholesome ambitions of OpenAI.
OpenAI themselves, have slowly trended in the direction of profit and corporate greed
as opposed to research and innovation.
In fact, this is one of the main reasons that Elon Musk, one of the firm’s founders and
earliest advocates quit the company 5 years ago actually.
His parting message was that he didn’t agree with what the firm wanted to do.
More recently, he has doubled down on this stance.
He says that the entire vision of OpenAI was to create a nonprofit opensource competitor
to Google, hence the name, OpenAI.
But now, OpenAI has become a closed source, maximum-profit company that’s effectively
controlled by Microsoft.
Despite this, the general public has embraced ChatGPT with open arms.
It’s ability to write school essays and Google level code has seemingly overshadowed
it’s moral and ethical shortcomings.
At this rate, it’s just a matter of time until AI based search becomes a necessity
as opposed to a luxury which will simply give big tech companies and new AI superstars even
more control over our daily lives and society at large.
This becomes even more sketchy when you consider that certain companies, Neuralink and Elon
Musk, want to put AI powered chips directly into our brains.
So, here’s the story of how OpenAI lost their moral compass in record time and it’s
frightening implications for the future of AI.
ALTRUISTIC BEGINNINGS: Taking a look back, OpenAI didn’t just start
with good intentions, they started with altruistic intentions.
Back in the mid 2010s, AI was an open frontier with little competition.
The best AI had to offer was voice assistants that struggled to answer even the most basic
questions.
But, a couple of influential people wanted to change this.
They wanted to create a new platform that was focused on AI research and development.
And unlike the existing options, they wanted this platform to not be motivated by money.
Ironically, all of the people behind this effort were already extraordinarily rich.
This included the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman.
There were also a few institutions involved including Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and
Y Combinator Research.
But, at the same time, these people and entities being rich was kind of a good thing.
For one, given their extreme wealth, you would think that they wouldn’t need more, so they
could stick to keeping OpenAI non-profit.
And two, they could contribute large sums of money to actually make this endeavor well
funded and viable.
Looking back, we can confirm that they did atleast stick to the second point.
The company itself was founded with $1 billion worth of funding.
And according to OpenAI’s own blog, they only expected spend a tiny fraction of this
over the next few years.
But, let’s just say that it didn’t take long for things to get out of hand.
Since then, OpenAI has managed to raise a total of $11 billion.
For perspective, OpenAI’s funding alone is nearly worth the entire market cap of Domino’s
Pizza.
One of the first problems that the OpenAI team faced was actually attracting talent.
For decades, Elon had relied on recruiting truly passionate engineers to drive forward
Tesla and SpaceX.
These engineers joined his companies out of passion as opposed to the money, but Elon
couldn’t just use these same tactics with OpenAI.
Here’s the thing, when it comes to rockets and space, engineers have a very limited number
of choices.
They can either join Nasa, defense contracters, or SpaceX, so convincing them to join SpaceX
wasn’t exactly difficult.
But, with AI, engineers had the option to join basically any big tech company that they
wanted.
So, they weren’t exactly jumping up and down with excitement trying to join a non
profit.
It was actually quite the opposite.
Sure, OpenAI might’ve had nice intentions, but they were by no means the only ones with
cool projects.
So, there was no need for these highly talented engineers to settle for a substantially lower
salary just to work at OpenAI.
If anything, OpenAI had to outpay Google, Amazon, and Apple to get engineers to ditch
the safety and stability of these companies.
And this was much easier said than done.
The primary reason that these companies are able to pay so much is because much of their
compensation packages are derived from stock.
But, OpenAI’s stock, well that was useless, they were a nonprofit.
So, OpenAI had to pull a Netflix and offer all cash compensations, but this depleted
the funding quite rapidly.
You see, we’re not talking about salaries of $200,000 or even $300,000.
We’re talking about a median compensation of $900,000 for software engineers.
At that rate, just 100 engineers would burn $90 million every single year.
OpenAI was quickly becoming a full on charity as they lost money hand over first, and it
was just matter of time until they had to do something.
BECOMING FOR PROFIT: It wasn’t just payroll that was weighing
down OpenAI either.
It turns out that AI research in general is just extraordinarily expensive.
OpenAI would figure this out first hand as they dove head first into AI development.
Their first project was called OpenAI Gym and this was a relatively tame endeavor.
Essentially, they had created a playground for AI enthusiasts around to world to compete
on.
These enthusiasts had to develop AI algorithms that could beat Atari games, board games,
and other 2d and 3d simulations.
And these enthusiasts would be ranked on a leaderboard based on how versatile and robust
their algorithms were.
Essentially, OpenAI was leveraging the competitive side of engineers to research and develop
AI for free.
Their second project, Universe, very much relied on the same idea.
Instead of developing the AI themselves, OpenAI opted to develop a platform that could let
anyone, or atleast anyone with advanced coding knowledge, to test algorithms on the most
popular games and websites, but they couldn’t rely on external sources forever.
Eventually, they had to start developing their own AI, but this was accompanied by insane
expenses almost instantaneously.
Here’s the thing, how do you train AI?
Well, the answer is by processing a ridiculuous amount of possibilites and outcomes which
requires a ludicrous amount of infrastructure.
Take OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot for example.
To train this bot, OpenAI had to let the AI play against itself for a simulated 10,000
years.
To simulate this many years, OpenAI had to use 256 Nvidia GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores
which they ironically rented from Google.
But, even all of that was only able to simulate a 180 years worth of gameplay every day meaning
that they had to run this setup for 56 days just to complete initial training of the bot.
At this rate, I don’t think you’d be surprised to hear that OpenAI’s cloud computing expenses
alone would end up being $7.9 million in 2017.
It was becoming abundantly clear that this whole nonprofit benefit humanity thing just
wasn't gonna work.
Company insiders were starting to propose the idea of making OpenAI a for-profit endeavor.
Being for profit and advancing humanity weren’t mutually exclusive right?
They could still stick to their altruistic intentions but leverage all of the financial
benefits that come from the world of busines and especially venture capital.
While this sounded good in theory, Elon Musk knew that this would never play out in the
way that the team was hoping.
The second that profit incentive was introduced, it was just a matter of time until the company
became a soulless organization.
Elon already had plenty of for profit AI endeavors in his portfolio.
OpenAI was designed to be something different.
But, now that it too was becoming the same thing, Elon decided that it was time to step
away.
Atleast, now, he wouldn’t have to compete against himself for AI talent.
Shortly after his departure, OpenAI would complete the transition to becoming a for
profit company.
BIG TECH INVOLVEMENT: Technically, OpenAI isn’t a full on for
profit company.
It’s actually a capped for profit company, but this doesn’t really mean much.
Capped profit simply means that no investor is allowed to profit more than 100X which
is an insanely generous limit.
Even if you had invested in Apple right when the iPhone was announced back in 2007, you’d
only have been up 40X even at the peak.
So, it’s safe to say that investors won’t have to worry about OpenAI’s profit cap
anytime soon.
Almost immediately after OpenAI transitioned to being for profit, Microsoft got involved.
Microsoft initially invested $1 billion into OpenAI in mid 2019, and unsurprisingly, OpenAI
would announce their new commercial intentions in the same press release.
But, if they wanted to pursue the commercial avenue, they first needed a commercially viable
product leading them to revisit one of their old research papers: “Improving Language
Understanding by Generative Pre-Training” or GPT.
Initially, this was just a relatively small project that was fueled by the contents of
7000 books.
But over time, they had improved the system to rely on 8 million websites with 1.5 billion
parameters.
This was actually years ago, but the reason that you probably didn’t know about this
was because OpenAI decided to not release GPT to the public.
They felt that the system could easily be used for nefarious purposes like writing scam
emails and generating fake news.
But, this worries quickly evaporated away once Microsoft got involved.
From Microsoft’s perspective, this was their big shot at taking on Google, and they weren’t
gonna let a couple of fake emails get in their way.
So, they gave the greenlight for developing a commercially viable version of GPT and gave
OpenAI resources that they could previously only dream of.
They gave them access to a super computer with 285,000 cpu cores and 10,000 gpus.
This was the fifth most powerful computer in the entire world.
You can’t just get access to these computers by paying.
To get access to such computers, you need these megacorporations to be on your side,
and Microsoft was square on OpenAI’s side.
OpenAI was able to use this computer to process 45TB of text data which translated to a whopping
175 billion parameters.
OpenAI would go ahead and develop a chatbox that could communicate with this GPT-3 AI
and this led to the creation of ChatGPT as we know it today.
But, that’s nothing in comparison to what OpenAI is working on right now.
You know how GPT-3 was based on 175 billion parameters?
Well, GPT-4 is speculated to based on 100 trillion parameters and it may be launched
by the end of this year.
As you can see, OpenAI is just getting started, but big tech already has a tight grip on the
company, and you can be sure that they will monetize anything and everything that this
company will ever be.
THE FUTURE OF OPENAI: In the end, it’s easy to see why OpenAI
turned to the darkside.
They tried to go the opensource route and advance AI research and development, but the
reality is that even with the richest people in the world can’t fund this project.
This vision can only be funded by a corporate level wealth in the hundreds billions.
But, don’t be fooled though, these companies aren’t investing hundreds of billions of
the goodness of their hearts.
They’re well aware that the next frontier is AI and machine learning, and they want
to maximize the chances that they’re the winners of that frontier as well.
And while it may seem like we’re getting all of these cool products for free, it’s
just a matter of time until there’s a catch whether that be simple data collection or
control over our entire lives.
Either way though, it’s just a matter of time until we see OpenAI become the villain,
but that’s just what I think.
Are you excited or scared for the future of AI?
Comment that down below.
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