From Elon’s mind to Bill Gate’s wallet: How GPT-3 ended up on Azure
File under: Schrodinger’s Partnership
Once upon a time
There was an engineer, developer, and entrepreneur named Elon Musk. He partnered with an investor and entrepreneur named Sam Altman – the former president of Y Combinator.
They lead a group of investors in raising a billion dollars to form a non-profit organization dedicated to creating an artificial general intelligence.
The concern was that any AI capable of human-level intelligence would need to be harnessedfor the good of all people, not just a single corporation or government.
At the time, most experts considered OpenAI a direct competitor to DeepMind. And, because DeepMind had been gobbled up by Google, it appeared as though Musk and Altman were trying to build a buffer against the kind of terrifying future usually only mentioned in movies about killer robots.
Unfortunately for OpenAI, developing an AGI is expensive. First off, there’s the fact that nobody knows how.
Not only do people quibble over whether it’s even possible to create an AGI using modern technology, but there arestrident disagreementsbetween world-renowned AI experts on which approach is the best to even start with.
Secondly, you can’t sell “developing an AGI” as a service or product.
So what’s a non-profit that needs about a billion more dollars to keep the lights on supposed to do? Use its initial funding to create a text generator, sell access to that text generator on an invitation-only basis to the public, and then sell access tothat accessto Microsoft.
Exit Elon, stage left
Musk absolved himself of all association with OpenAI before Microsoft got involved. In the time since, it’s become apparent that GPT-3 isn’t any closer to being an AGI than Cortana is.
In fact, GPT-3 is essentially useless without a series of hard filters in place. That’s why both OpenAI and Microsoft are forced to offer provisional access on an invite-only basis.
GPT-3 is incredibly biased. Without those hard filters in place it has a tendency togenerate hate-speech and potentially-harmful misinformation.
And the ethical concerns over GPT-3 access via Azure don’t end at issues of bias.
OpenAI started as a non-profit, quietly transformed into a for-profit under the claim it needed to raise funds to continue developing AGI, and ended up creating a turn-key code generation business for Microsoft.
Business ethics
It would have been impossible for a good-faith investor to know that OpenAI was not only going to be a closed-source for-profitcompany, but that it would end up exclusively partnered with Microsoft.
Just because a company claims it’s serving the greater good of humankind doesn’t mean it should get a pass when it flips the “for profit” switch on and off like a neon “vacancy” sign outside a cheap hotel.
The weird part is that Azure is one of the few places where GPT-3’s parlor tricks really makes sense. It can do some genuine good there.
But it’s hard to believe OpenAI went from Elon’s best intentions to building Azure add-ons without leaving some investors and supporters feeling duped.
Story byTristan Greene
Tristan is a futurist covering human-centric artificial intelligence advances, quantum computing, STEM, physics, and space stuff. Pronouns:(show all)Tristan is a futurist covering human-centric artificial intelligence advances, quantum computing, STEM, physics, and space stuff. Pronouns: He/him
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