the_bear_paw t1_j2crbqu wrote on December 31, 2022 at 7:27 AM

Genuine question as I'm confused: I tried chatgpt the other day and it is free to use and just required a log in, and I could use it on my phone... What benefit is there to an open source version when the original version is free?

kraybaybay t1_j2csych wrote on December 31, 2022 at 7:48 AM

Original won't be free for long, and there are many reasons to train the model on a different set of data.

ImposterSyndrome53 t1_j2cx57m wrote on December 31, 2022 at 8:42 AM

I haven’t followed incredibly closely, so might be wrong but chatgpt uses their gpt-3 model and there is only free, non-commercial access to the model. So no other companies are able to leverage it in a service. This would enable others to use it in commercial means and profit from it.

Edit: I haven’t looked actually but open source doesn’t mean “able to be used commercially with no limitations “ either. There might be stipulations even on this new derivative one.

11fingerfreak t1_j2ee9ef wrote on December 31, 2022 at 5:23 PM

You can feed this one your own training materials. That means you can teach it to “speak” the way you want it to. Hypothetically, you could feed it every text you’ve ever composed and it would eventually generate text that sounds like you instead of a combination of every random person from the internet or whatever authors they “borrowed” content from.

the_bear_paw t1_j2ehjwn wrote on December 31, 2022 at 5:45 PM

Cool thanks for clarifying, this makes more sense now. I was thinking about this only from the consumers perspective and generally, open source just means free to filthy casuals like me, so I didn't understand why anyone cared since chatgpt is currently free.

Also, after posting I thought about it and asked chatgpt hypothetically how would a German civilian with 100,000 net worth effectively go about assassinating Vladimir Putin without getting caught and it gave me a lame answer about not being used to assist violent political acts, which I found kinda dumb. So I assume feeding it different information and setting different parameters on what the thing can reply to would be helpful.

11fingerfreak t1_j2em9ck wrote on December 31, 2022 at 6:16 PM

There’s some drawbacks that make it challenging for us plebs to use it, of course. The amount of hardware needed for training isn’t something we’re likely to have at hands. Renting it from AWS appears to be around $87k / year. Though I guess we could just feed it text and wait the couple of years for it to be trained 😬

Still gonna try it. I’m used to waiting for R to finish its work so…

This is a big benefit to any organization that has a reasonable budget for using Azure or AWS, though.

EDIT: we can probably still make use of it despite the hardware demands. It just means it will take us longer to train as non-corporate entities.

peolorat t1_j2dcmta wrote on December 31, 2022 at 12:13 PM

More specialization would be a benefit.

Qss t1_j2e87o2 wrote on December 31, 2022 at 4:42 PM

OpenAI likely won’t leave it free forever, not to mention ChatGPT is severely restricted in its application, very much so a walled garden.

There are other open source projects, one that comes to mind is Stability AI, that are rumored to be developing a model that will run natively on your phone hardware, no web access required.

Open source will also allow people to train these models on more specific data sets, maybe focused around coding or essay writing or social media posting in particular, instead of a one size fits all solution.

OpenSource will also mean the tech can evolve at a breakneck pace, as the stable diffusion Text to image generator has shown - giving a wide open toolset to the general public results in explosive growth in tech compared to giving them the front end UI only.

It also democratizes the information. AI will monumentally shift our social and economic landscape, and leaving that power in the hands of an “elite few” will only serve to widen power gulfs and classist demarcations.