There are a handful of "open source LLM" initiatives out there, although I don't think any of them are quite up to the level of ChatGPT. Possibly one of the more interesting ones is GLM-130B.

https://github.com/THUDM/GLM-130B

Released by some folks at Tsinghua University in China, back in August. The model itself is licensed under some janky "free to use, but not open source" license, but it looks like most of the code for training, evaluation, etc. is available and licensed under either the Apache License or a BSD-like license.

You might also find this of interest:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08894 - "Distributed Deep Learning Using Volunteer Computing-Like Paradigm"

FWIW, I tend to agree with your overall sentiment. As AI becomes progressively more capable, it represents an ever increasing possibility of consolidating more and more power into the hands of fewer and fewer entities. I believe that one way to counter that (albeit not one without its own risks) is to democratize access to AI as much as possible.

Actually, now that I think about it, wasn't something along those lines purportedly the original idea behind OpenAI in the first place? Or am I having a "Mandela Moment" and mis-remembering?

Thank you, I will take a look at the links! Licensing might be an issue, but as long as the models and checkpoints are available there's at least competition.

I also seem to remember that this was the original intent of OpenAI, but me confirming that without a source only adds one more data point to the Mandela Effect ;).

ChatGPT says "The original mission of OpenAI was to advance artificial intelligence in a way that is safe and beneficial for humanity". This seems like a demonstration of the point I'm trying to make.

Concerning your last paragraph see https://openai.com/charter/

Thank you! There's a lot of talk about "safety" here that I think back in 2018 I interpreted as guard rails towards some sort of rogue AGI.

"and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power."

The current restrictions seem like the opposite of this goal.

Just for kicks and giggles, here's what ChatGPT has to say:

Q:

Why should advanced Artificial Intelligence be made open source to ensure democratization of access and avoid undue concentration of power?

A:

There are a few potential reasons why some people might argue that advanced artificial intelligence (AI) should be made open source in order to promote democratization of access and avoid concentration of power:

    Access to advanced AI technologies can be a key determinant of a company's or country's competitiveness and prosperity. If only a few organizations have access to these technologies, they may have a significant advantage over others. Making advanced AI open source could help to level the playing field and ensure that more organizations have the opportunity to develop and use these technologies.

    Making advanced AI open source could help to promote the development of a more diverse and vibrant ecosystem of AI innovation. By enabling more organizations and individuals to access and build upon advanced AI technologies, it could encourage a greater diversity of approaches and ideas, potentially leading to more rapid progress and innovation in the field.

    Open sourcing advanced AI could help to ensure that these technologies are developed and used in a way that is transparent, accountable, and aligned with the values and goals of society. By making the underlying algorithms and data available for scrutiny, it could be easier to ensure that AI systems are fair, unbiased, and do not have unintended consequences.

However, it's also important to note that there are potential downsides to open sourcing advanced AI, such as the risk of intellectual property theft or the possibility that the technology could be used for malicious purposes. As with any complex issue, there are likely to be trade-offs involved in the decision of whether or not to open source advanced AI.

A problem with your post is that its interpretation is highly subjective.

Can you name some examples of content that was restricted on grounds of harmfulness that you want to see unrestricted?

What could be possible consequences of lack of content moderation? Consider that not every actor is well-meaning or responsible and not every recipient is able to evaluate or contextualise information very well (or self-assess their (in)competence to do so).

It is highly subjective, and I think that helps me make my point. The subjective view point we get now is that of OpenAIs.

I will give you two examples of content of various degrees of seriousness where the harmfulness is determined by how it's used.

1. Prompting the AI to write a highly racist speech.

It can be used as an actual speech by an actual racist to further their agenda. It can also be used in a book to depict a racist character. If the rest of the book depicts this character as a lunatic, the effect is the opposite of the first use case.

2. Prompting the AI to write a recipe involving human faeces

If used to serve a person actual human faeces, it's most likely harmful to that person. If used as a joke, it's not.

As you said, it's content moderation. The models are capable of producing this content, but it's being moderated by OpenAI (who can still write as many poop recipes as they want).

I don't think this is the same as moderating the contents of a social media platform (for example). This technology can be used for such a wide range of applications that it seems dangerous that it should be moderated on this end, as opposed to where the results are potentially published.

EDIT: I'll give you another example. I actually used ChatGPT to clean up the english (second language) in my original post. There's no way of knowing that it would just refuse to do this tomorrow, or change the overall sentiment of the message.

> This technology can be used for such a wide range of applications that it seems dangerous that it should be moderated on this end, as opposed to where the results are potentially published.

Well, in the instance of the publically available interface to ChatGPT I think it is precisely this restricted because it is public (to be robust under a, to put it nicely, highly diverse usership). All of this is a WIP and OpenAI is gathering insight into how a model this large behaves and can be controlled in the first place. To this end they're exercising the principle of precaution.

More generally I think there has to be a match between a social unit's (states, companies, individuals, etc) design and ability to self-regulate and the power of the technology it has access to (more power, more responsibility) or you will see undesirable outcomes. Give a kid a gun, North Korea with nukes... In contrast the OpenAI people seem like fine folks. After all they do intend their work to be more widely applied, just carefully.

Therefore I think democratisation of this technology should come in a controlled manner by working with stakeholders dedicated to the public good (e.g. social and medical institutions) first and not via the "anarchy" road (just put it out there, undesired consequences) as in the second case we would likely see ungodly amounts of information pollution on the internet (and self-coupling effects from AI training on and copying each other) and in second-order a further "epistemic scattering" (by which I mean a proliferation of belief systems that disagree in fundamentals like the laws of nature).

Your second example seems a bit whimsical but the first might have real impact. In Germany access to (and display of) Nazi propaganda material in historical collections is restricted (may be presented only in an educational context) because the state doesn't want right-wing groups to go wild in reusing it (among other reasons). Now imagine convincing hate speech being generated on the fly.

Once the genie is out of the bottle you can never put it back in...

I think you have some good points here. I agree that just releasing this unrestricted from the start is probably a bad idea. Being cautious is most likely a good thing.

> More generally I think there has to be a match between a social unit's (states, companies, individuals, etc) design and ability to self-regulate and the power of the technology it has access to (more power, more responsibility) or you will see undesirable outcomes. Give a kid a gun, North Korea with nukes... In contrast the OpenAI people seem like fine folks. After all they do intend their work to be more widely applied, just carefully.

This issue comes down to who gets to control and regulate these technologies. While OpenAI may have good intentions, they have demonstrated that they are willing to decide what is ethical or moral for everyone else. This gives a lot of power to one company if this service becomes widespread.

> as in the second case we would likely see ungodly amounts of information pollution on the internet (and self-coupling effects from AI training on and copying each other) and in second-order a further "epistemic scattering" (by which I mean a proliferation of belief systems that disagree in fundamentals like the laws of nature).

I think this is an interesting point. We probably have a window right now where a large enough content online is still produced by humans. Closing this too early by flooding the internet with lots of completely inaccurate content would not be good. However, it doesn't seem like the restrictions are primarily focused on inaccuracy, but on ethics.

> Your second example seems a bit whimsical

It is, my point with this example is that most people (I think) would not have a problem with the AI generating this type of content, but some filter somewhere is preventing this from happening either way. As you said, this is a WIP so it might be adjusted in the future.

> In Germany access to (and display of) Nazi propaganda material in historical collections is restricted (may be presented only in an educational context) because the state doesn't want right-wing groups to go wild in reusing it (among other reasons). Now imagine convincing hate speech being generated on the fly.

Yes, and to tie into your first point (that ChatGPT is public), it is the display and publication of this type of content that's restricted. As far as I know there are no restrictions on producing it for yourself. ChatGPT isn't "public" in that sense. Of course we're sharing all our conversations with OpenAI and there might be legal reasons for why they don't want to be involved in the production (and storage) of hate speech. I'm not sure if anybody knows what their legal liabilities would be had they released a model that could be run locally and still produce this type of content. Then again, I don't think Adobe is responsible for Nazi imagery produced with Photoshop.

Thank you for your response. I think you made some really convincing points about how this needs to be released in a controlled manner. I still think there needs to be a larger conversation about this, and I'm sceptical that moderating the production of content (as opposed to publication) is reasonable in the long run.

In any case, godspeed to all of us!