by Joey Bertschler of HackerNoon, May 2nd, 2024
OpenAI is in a high-stakes legal battle with Elon Musk, who is suing the company to open source its groundbreaking AI models like GPT-4. While OpenAI may have the law on its side, I believe the ethical path forward is clear—it’s time for the company to fully embrace the open-source ethos it was founded upon.
As a former AI Specialist at OpenAI, I know OpenAI’s stated mission has always been to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company’s charter explicitly prioritizes this goal above generating financial returns. With the rapid rise of AI and the very real prospect of widespread job displacement, now is the time for OpenAI to double down on this mission through radical collaboration and transparency.
Elon Musk helped found OpenAI precisely to keep advanced AI out of the exclusive control of a few tech giants or governments. The fear was that highly centralized, opaque AI development could lead to biased systems that disempower people and exacerbate inequality. Making frontier models like GPT-4 open source would accelerate innovation across the field and give everyone a stake in steering this transformative technology in a positive direction.
Instead, OpenAI and its partner Microsoft now boast that “we are waiting for the competition to arrive. It will arrive, I’m sure, but the fact [is] that we have the … leading LLM out there.” Their most powerful models, including GPT-4, DALL-E, and now Sora, are all closed-source and gated. Entire countries like China and Russia are restricted from using OpenAI’s technologies.
