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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

This is cool but I'm hesitant to invest any real amount of time building something on this. How do I know that if I build something massively successful they wont shut off my access and build a competitor?

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Considering OpenAI's notorious history of apparently pivoting 180 to Closed (see HN references ad nauseum), you might be wise to be hesitant.

This is perhaps an organisation with more fame than trust.

>OpenAI's notorious history of apparently pivoting 180 to Closed

would you mind providing discussion on HN about this?

You mean references to previous comments? Here's one search result:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Freaking platform risk!! I lost 8 months of my life on 2 projects. One was using robinhood's unofficial API and the other one was Discord's.

So now my whole goal is to built stuff from the ground up.

Ouch

Don't build serious stuff on other people's API if it's a single point of failure. If you can afford to throw it away easily, then it's fine for fun experiments.

They could probably build a competitor even if you had your own model running.

Or change their TOS to effectively ban your product, as they did with AI Dungeon.

That's horrible! Why would anyone build anything with OpenAI when they can shut you down so wantonly?

Is there a writeup on this?

Dunno about a write up, but out of the ashes of AI Dungeon, NovelAI was born. The model isn’t as good as GPT-3, but the UI and options are better, and unlike AI Dungeon, the company never reads your stories; they can’t, because they’re encrypted, and by default they aren’t even stored in the cloud IIRC.

https://novelai.net/#/

https://www.reddit.com/r/NovelAi/

How is an encrypted string supposed to be fed to a transformer network?

I suppose the parent might mean that the stories are encrypted while at rest, but not that their generation itself is encrypted, which indeed would be rather difficult.

It’s only encrypted locally right before being sent to the cloud to be saved.

While that does mean it’s unencrypted locally, if it was still being transmitted unencrypted I think someone would’ve noticed by now.

Wait, what happened to AI Dungeon? It seems to still be working. Are they using some other model instead of GPT now?

They implemented some really heavy handed content filters that (un)intentionally gimped their AI even more than it already was (while also announcing that they were retroactively banning anybody who had violated the filters that didn't exist to that point, as well as stealthily removing all privacy guarantees they had previously made). The rationale was to prevent non-corporate-friendly content like underage sexual content, harmful slurs, and extreme violence.

In practice it actually made those things more common somehow, and prevented mention of ANY children, any number between 6 and 18, the words "boy" or "girl", watermelons (no really), among other things. And...it didn't just filter them out, it actually locked you out of the story if you got caught in the filter so you could no longer continue it until it was reviewed by a human, though there were some annoying workarounds to this. The quality of the AI in general went down drastically.

Keep in mind: the vast majority of the userbase, especially the subscription-paying users, used AI Dungeon for erotica. A data leak (oh yeah, that also happened, they never notified anybody that there was a vulnerability that allowed anybody to read your private stories) actually showed that something like 60% of stories were NSFW, and most were caught by the filter for some reason or another (it was a terrible filter and entire otherwise unobjectionable topics were caught by it).

I haven't checked in a while but last I heard the filters are still active, because they were imposed by OpenAI in the first place. Virtually the entire community jumped ship, and within a month volunteers had stood up a functional replacement for AI Dungeon using the open source models (that's NovelAI). That's not even 10% of the story either, AI Dungeon is a legendary clusterfuck of mismanagement, accidental success, incompetence, drama, hacks, inter-community conflict, etc.

? I'm using it right now and it's fine

This is why it makes no sense in the long term to build and entire business on top of someone else's API, only for them to shut it down or ban it if they want to.

The best outcome if one was going to do that is to sell the business off immediately.

if you build something massively successful (with recurring revenue), you should be able to switch to one of the similar open-source models and even host it yourself.

GPT-Neo and GPT-J may not be as large as GPT-3, but I think GPT-Jurassic rivals it (I'm not sure if the jurassic model is released to the public, maybe someone else with more knowledge can comment)

> similar open-source models and even host it yourself.

Do you have any idea what kind of hardware resources (cores, ram and disk) are necessary for that?

Wondering how can one build something massively successful which has GPT as the core engine. Will be ridiculously easy for anyone else to copy, if its trained on similar data as the use case

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