Friendly reminder that ChatGPT and most other text-generation neural networks literally just guess as to what words should come next.
A question I’ve thought a few times: Why is OpenAI’s ChatGPT free to use?
As the name might suggest, OpenAI was founded with the goal of doing open research into AI. But somewhere along the road, they shifted from a non-profit to a for-profit. I’ve also read that the OpenAI operating environment has become increasingly hostile, stressing the definition of “open.”
This organization, one that has (allegedly) shied heavily from its original goal, is now offering free access to a powerful text generation (read: guessing) neural network. That does not bode well with me.
I have a few ideas as to why they would do this:
- It’s an attempt to save face, or to just promote their products and get a lot of publicity.
- They plan to shift it to pay-to-use eventually.
- If you want to be especially pessimistic, then you’d think that they’d do it around when students are having finals to get some sales out of desperation.
- They’re giving you a taste of what it’s like before rug-pulling and forcing you onto a subscription.
- They’re sourcing user-submitted text as training data. You’d likely be able to figure this out by looking at their legal documents (privacy policy, terms of service).
When something is provided for free, it’s not always a bad thing. For example, open source contribution is done by people, for people, primarily out of altruism. I’m just not confident that OpenAI is doing this out of good will.