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Comment by colinsane | Hacker News Reader

did the "Open" in OpenAI not originally refer to open in the academic or open source manner? i only learned about OpenAI in the GPT-2 days, when they released it openly and it was still small enough that i ran it on my laptop: i just assumed they had always acted according to their literal name up through that point.

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This has been a common misinterpretation since very early in OpenAI's history (and a somewhat convenient one for OpenAI).

From a 2016 New Yorker article:

> Dario Amodei said, "[People in the field] are saying that the goal of OpenAI is to build a friendly A.I. and then release its source code into the world.”

> “We don’t plan to release all of our source code,” Altman said. “But let’s please not try to correct that. That usually only makes it worse.”

source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...

I'm not sure this is a correct characterization. Lex Fridman interviewed Elon Musk recently where Musk says that the "open" was supposed to stand for "open source".

To be fair, Fridman grilled Musk on his views today, also in the context of xAI, and he was less clear cut there, talking about the problem that there's actually very little source code, it's mostly about the data.

Altman appears to be in the driving seat, so it doesn't matter what other people are saying, the point is "Open" is not being used here to the open source context _but_ they definitely dont try to correct anyone who thinks they're providing open source products.

Except that view point fell even earlier when they refused to release their models after GPT-2.

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