Open source is great, especially on how it enables a community to come together to work on, enhance and shared code. The biggest problem with open source and the people that put a lot of effort into making the code viable is that you don’t make any money out of it, which is why so many projects built around open source technology are then packaged and sold to other companies because people need to eat. Or buy new gaming consoles.
And now OpenAI, the non-profit that set itself the goal of creating workable open source AI solutions with the goal of mitigating it’s potential harms has announced its first commercial product: an AI text-generation system that the outfit previously warned was too dangerous to share.
OpenAI’s text generation work has been pretty impressive, with the project making great advances in the field. It’s GPT-2 text generator allows users to input any text prompt a few lines of a song, a short story, even a scientific paper — and the software will continue writing, matching the style and content to some degree. It’s essentially any writer’s worst nightmare or best friend, depending on whether their superiors find out about it.
The company did release the code for the project in full but did warn that it was quite dangerous given how it can easily be used for malicious purposes like fake news and spam. However, it has apparently made massive enhancements and is now release GPT-3 as a commercial product.
Pricing is not quite clear yet, though the company believes that it’s API can easily be used for chatbots or creating interactive gaming experiences on the fly. It could easily be used for a whole lot more over time, but hopefully will never get to the point where talented writers start to lose their jobs.
Last Updated: June 17, 2020
NotBatpanda
June 16, 2020 at 08:25
This article was not written by an OpenAI program.