The article also highlights the exploitation of the "open" narrative by the AI industry to resist regulation, arguing that the "open" projects that lawmakers value do not deliver a level playing field, competition, innovation, and democratization. The author suggests that "open AI" is best understood as "free product development" for large AI companies, conducted by developers who are unable to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses. The author concludes by suggesting that truly open AI projects, such as those by EleutherAI and some academic institutions, are overshadowed by the dominant industry players.
Key takeaways:
- The term "Open AI" is often misleading, as it is used by large AI companies to evade regulation and neutralize critics, while their products are neither "open," "artificial," nor "intelligent."
- Openwashing is a new kind of -washing, where capital cloaks itself in liberatory, progressive values, while still serving as a force for extraction, exploitation, and political corruption.
- Open AI is often used as a wordgame that exploits the malleability of "open," but also the ambiguity of the term "AI".
- Open AI is best understood as "free product development" for large, well-capitalized AI companies, conducted by tinkerers who will not be able to escape these giants' proprietary compute silos and opaque training corpuses.