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OpenAI API
- alphagrep12345 6y agoInteresting to see this. Is this similar to Google and Azure's ML apis?
- ericlewis 6y agoExciting!
- m_ke 6y agoI guess Sama plans on manufacturing growth metrics by forcing YC companies to pretend that they're using this. Generic machine learning APIs are a shitty business to get into unless you plan on hiring a huge sales team and selling to dinosaurs or doing a ton of custom consulting work, which doesn't scale the way VCs like it to. Anybody who will have enough know how to use their API properly can jus grab an open source model and tune it on their own data. If they plan on commercializing things they should focus on building real products.
- wildermuthn 6y agoI imagine they’re considering offering GPT-3, which would be cost prohibitive to fine-tune for most people. I also I heard inference was too slow to be practical. Perhaps they have some FPGA magic up their Microsoft sleeves.
- m_ke 6y agoNobody is putting these huge models in production, even the smaller transformer models are still too expensive to run for most use cases. With the way the field is moving, GPT-3 will be old news in a month, when more advances are made and open sourced.
- wildermuthn 6y agoPrecisely my point. If they could put a model as large as GPT-3 into production (at a reasonable price to the consumer), wouldn’t that be a 10x improvement?
- krallistic 6y agoGPT-3 isn't a 10X improvement. (At least from everything we know so far.)
- wildermuthn 6y agoIf the OP is right that nobody is putting the largest models into production (which I think is in inaccurate statement), then GPT-3 in production would be a 10x (ok, 5x?) improvement over the small GPT-2s and BERTS in production? So 10x in practice, if the hypothesis is correct? Which like I said, I don’t believe to be the case.
- fongitosous 6y agoi don't understand. if they run it for you and you apply transfer learning and fine tuning on your specific use case that would reduce drastically the costs hence why their offer make sense
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- antris 6y agoNot everyone wants to be an admin to their infrastructure. Real existing services like Heroku and Squarespace exist as useful services because even though you might know how to design and build a website from scratch, sometimes you just need something done quickly without too much worrying about details of the system that do not matter for your project at this point. I really don't see how this wouldn't apply to AI projects as well. I could make a much better site coding my own website from scratch and setting up servers myself, but for some projects I wouldn't even think about it that way, because using Heroku or Squarespace I can save a LOT of time and get the results I need much quicker.
- m_ke 6y agoThat's true, but machine learning models are not twilio or sendgrid, you have to tune them for your use case, monitor their performance and handle the uncertainty of their outputs. Doing that well requires a data scientist and if you have one they will be much more productive iterating on their own models instead of depending on a 3rd party black box.
- Grimm1 6y agoExcept the point of these larger transformer models is they generalize well over a wide range of domains or only require a small amount of transfer learning for really specific domains. I'd say they're perfect candidates for the API as a service model.
- zoopdewoop 6y agoI'm pretty sure people said the exact same thing about Algolia when it was getting started (you have to tune search for your use case! How could you possibly use a search provider?!?) Truth about the situation: - Transformers generalize well and don't need much fine tuning - OpenAI can probably fine tune for your use case better than you can - Getting new models into production takes 6 months to a year at companies of this size, if you did have Data Scientists in house, it might just be better to go with a solution like this for velocity - Not every company has the talent to make an in house ML program successful.
- 6y ago
- dang 6y ago> I guess Sama plans on manufacturing growth metrics by forcing YC companies to pretend that they're using this. That's wrong in almost too many ways to list. Sam left YC over a year ago, nor would he do such a thing. Nor does YC have that kind of power over companies, nor would it use it that way if it did. That would be wrong and also dumb.
- m_ke 6y agoSorry, that was supposed to be sarcastic. What I meant to say is that Sam has a huge network and is a phone call away from pitching any CEO in the valley. One of the biggest benefits of YC these days is the huge network of companies in your portfolio, which makes getting intros and pilots a lot easier, leading to "traction" and more VC dollars.
- lerax 6y agoNatural Language Shell seems fun
- owenshen24 6y agoSeems potentially more simple to get up and running then the Azure and Google Cloud alternatives which seemed involved when I last tried them.
- andyljones 6y agoConcrete numbers from the various pullouts: > They saw ratings hover around 60% with their original, in-house tech — this improved by 7-8% with GPT-2 — and is now in the 80-90% range with the API. > The F1 score of its crisis classifier went up from .76 to .86, and the accuracy went up to 96%. > With OpenAI, Algolia was able to answer complex natural language questions accurately 4x as often as it was using BERT. I think the most informative are the first two, but the most _important_ is the final comparison with BERT (a Google model). I am, uh, a little worried about how fast things will progress if language models go from a fun lil research problem to a killer app for your cloud platform. $10m per training run isn't much in the face of a $100bn gigatech R&D budget.
- grogenaut 6y ago$10m per training run gets me a lot of engineering time to build our own version of this system and lease it to other customers. Just skip one training run and I've got a pretty good team.
- ganstyles 6y agoPutting aside the question of whether it would ever be a choice between spending $10M on a training run and hiring a team for $10M, GPT transformers were the end result of decades of language research and innovations. You’re making it sound as though you can build the next iteration past GPT-3 for $10M, which I don’t think is the case.
- grogenaut 6y agono but poach the right resource and it puts you quickly on par with the competitors. What's that poaching cost?
- brainless 6y agoThis is what I submitted for beta list: I want to create a software that can generate new code given business case hints, by studying existing open source code and their documentation. I know this is vague, but sounds like what we eventually want for ourselves right?
- mrmonkeyman 6y agoIf said AI will also maintain it.
- anaganisk 6y agoRemember how Microsoft trained their bot from reddit comments and it went anti human? Well I guess I have to start dropping hints for the skynet in all my repos.
- historyremade 6y ago"Powered by Azure" -- Elon clearly distrust Amazon.
- jfoster 6y agoElon is no longer part of OpenAI. Microsoft invested $1b. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI
- benatkin 6y agoDoes this mean Microsoft isn't going to sue their customers for patent infringement?
- google234123 6y agoWhy would you say this?
- jfoster 6y agoI presume it's reference to OpenAI's patent pledge: > Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. I'm not sure if it's ever been publicly elaborated on. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/ https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
- google234123 6y agoStill seems like a low effort, bad hot-take.
- jfoster 6y agoMicrosoft's stake in OpenAI doesn't seem to be publicly known. > Exactly what terms Microsoft and OpenAI have agreed on with this $1 billion investment isn’t clear. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20703578/microsoft-openai-investment-partnership-1-billion-azure-artificial-general-intelligence-agi https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/22/20703578/microsoft-openai...
- Grimm1 6y agoAwesome! Just signed onto the wait list.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoLooks like OpenAI is going head to head with huggingface. This makes a lot of sense and it seems they are telegraphing to monetize what they have been doing. It also seems like this is why they don't release their models in a timely manner.
- minimaxir 6y agoThe notable difference is that the base Huggingface library is open source, so you could in theory build something similar or more custom to the OpenAI API internally (which then falls into the typical cost/benefit analysis of doing so).
- zitterbewegung 6y agoSo its like Github vs Gitlab which makes more sense. I can see huggingface have a hosted version because now you can share your models on their platform.
- zitterbewegung 6y agoWow I actually used your code to do experiments to synthesize tweets. I didn't realize you responded to my comment!
- mcemilg 6y agoFrom AGI to money machine...
- gumby 6y agoI miss the opposite: the old openAI gym and other testbeds. I still don’t know why they shut those down. What alternatives do people like?
- mcrider 6y agoWhoa -- Speech to bash commands? That's a pretty novel idea to me with my limited awareness of NLP. I could see this same idea in a lot of technical applications -- Provisioning cloud infrastructure, creating a database query.. Very cool!
- nickswalker 6y agoCool indeed! While language-to-code (where code is a regular, general-purpose language) has only recently started to be workable, text-to-SQL has been a long running application/research area for semantic parsing. Some interesting papers and datasets: NL2Bash: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08979 https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08979 Spider: https://yale-lily.github.io/spider https://yale-lily.github.io/spider
- jorgemf 6y agoIt is not a novel idea and I don't think it is practical. If the natural language was practical for bash we would already have already "list directory" instead of "ls" and so on. "ls" is just 3 keystrokes while the natural language option is 15, 5 times more.
- chabad360 6y agoIt could be useful for learning tho (but at that point it could also become a crutch).
- kredd 6y agoI was imagining more of a "list of files that contain word "hello" in them at least 5 times". Would be useful to easily write longer and pipe-chained commands, especially for people that don't use bash-like scripting on a daily basis.
- dreamer7 6y agoBut the character length would matter less when you can move to the speech domain. ls is 2 syllables list dir is also 2 syllables with more meaning. Ultimately, with natural language, the effectiveness seems to be when it is coupled with speech-to-text
- sytse 6y agoAn API that will try to answer any natural language question is a mind blowing idea. This is a universal thinking interface more than an application programming one.
- typon 6y agoThis is incredible. I can't tell how much this is cherry-picked examples vs. revolutionary new tech.
- spookyuser 6y agoYeah I can't tell exactly which ones but I really feel like some of the OpenAI demos of products could be potentially huge if fleshed out.
- gdb 6y agoSign up for the beta if you'd like to be the one to flesh them out :)!
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoI definitely did immediately after seeing this. Being neither an academic nor representing a recognizable name brand company, I don’t know if I should have my hopes up too high for getting access soon, but I certainly hope so. I’d love to play around with this and push its limits for some creative hackathon-style side projects! Just wanted to add: It’s amazing all the negativity in this discussion. Whatever happened to the creative tech community who loves to push boundaries? Isn’t that still part of the hacker ethos, isn’t this still hacker news? Just because a tool has the potential to be used for bad doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be excited to find new ways to use it for good.
- agakshat 6y agoIt’s been a long time coming, but I am curious to see how OpenAI’s research output is directed and impacted by market forces.
- minimaxir 6y agoSince the demos on this page use zero-shot learning and the used model has a 2020-05-03 timestamp, that implies this API is using some form of GPT-3: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23345379 (EDIT: the accompanying blog post confirms that: https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ ) Recently, OpenAI set the GPT-3 GitHub repo to read-only: https://github.com/openai/gpt-3 https://github.com/openai/gpt-3 Taken together, this seems to imply that GPT-3 was more intended for a SaaS such as this, and it's less likely that it will be open-sourced like GPT-2 was.
- wildermuthn 6y agoBut since the resources required for training such a model are only available to well-funded entities, it seems like offering the model as an API while releasing the original source-code is the best practical method of getting the model into the hands of people who would otherwise not have access?
- minimaxir 6y agoThat depends on which GPT-3 model they're using, and from both the API and the blog page, it's unclear. Easy access to the 175B model would indeed be valuable, but it's entirely possible they're using a smaller variant for this API.
- gwern 6y agoIt's worth noting that at least one of the demos is not few-shot: the code completion one notes it was trained on Github.
- wildermuthn 6y agoIn one of their examples, they note “They saw ratings hover around 60% with their original, in-house tech — this improved by 7-8% with GPT-2 — and is now in the 80-90% range with the API.” Bloomberg reports the API is based on GPT-3 and “other language models”. If that’s true, this is a big deal, and it epitomizes OpenAI’s namesake. The largest NLP models require vast corporate resources to train, let alone put into production. Offering the largest model ever trained (with near-Turing results for some tasks) is a democratization of technology that would otherwise have been restricted to well-funded organizations. Although the devil will be in the details of pricing and performance, this is a step worthy of respect. And it bodes well for the future.
- azinman2 6y agoIt's only Open™️ if I can run the API on my own machines.
- sudosysgen 6y agoIndeed. I really don't understand how proprietary SaaS is "Open". It's just as locked down as IBM Watson and even moreso than Google's WaveNet-aaS.
- madcowd 6y agoIf big LM's are the future then even if you had the model you couldn't run it on your own machines without having a DGX or two laying around.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurusx 6y agoSome of us do. And we can’t run OpenAI’s model, so it’s not open. The essence of open source is that the resources are made available to you (without warranty). That isn’t the case here.
- cercatrova 6y ago
- krallistic 6y agoI wonder if there are any legal complications in the transition from a non-profit to a regular company (especially from a tax perspective)
- LockAndLol 6y agoIt'd be great if OpenAI also introduced CAPTCHA. I'd be much more willing and understanding to resolve those than anything Google makes.
- dmvaldman 6y agoAGI in text is < 3yrs away.
- Barrin92 6y agothere's zero understanding in any of this. This is still just superficial text parsing essentially. Show me progress on Winograd schema and I'd be impressed. It hasn't got anything to do with AGI, this is application of ML to very traditional NLP problems.
- dmvaldman 6y agoi think you are assuming that what is happening under the hood is that a human-inputted sentence is being parsed into a grammar. it is not.
- Barrin92 6y agoI know that it isn't. That's part of the problem. There is no attempt to generate some sort of structure that can be interpreted semantically and reasoned about by the model. The model just operates on the input superficially and statistically. That's why there has been virtually no progress on trivial tasks such as answering: "I took the water bottle out of the backpack so that it would be [lighter/handy]" What is lighter and what is handy? No amount of stochastic language manipulation gets you the answer, you need to understand some rudimentary physics to answer the question, and as a precondition, you need a grammar or ontology.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoHave you tried feeding this to GPT and seeing if it continues it in a way that reveals understanding? It sounds like you're saying "It doesn't work because it can't work", but you haven't actually shown that it doesn't work.
- Barrin92 6y ago
- eggsnbacon1 6y agoOpenAI started as a non-profit, went for-profit. Still owned by the big players.... Something isn't right. Is OpenAI just a submarine so the tech giants can do unethical research without taking blame??? Its textbook misdirection, nonprofit and "Open" in the name, hero-esque mission statement. How do you make the mental leap from "we're non-profit and we won't release things too dangerous" to "JK we're for-profit and now that GPT is good enough to use its for sale!!". You don't. This was the plan the whole time. GPT and facial recognition used for shady shit? Blame OpenAI. Not the consortium of tech giants that directly own it. It may just be a conspiracy theory but something smells very rotten to me. Like OpenAI is a simple front so big names can dodge culpability for their research.
- gobengo 6y agoIt looks like a similar organizational structure as Mozilla Foundation + Mozilla Corporation.
- eggsnbacon1 6y agoThey redefined the org from non-profit to "capped profit", whatever that means. They're directly selling GPT 3 even though they originally said they wouldn't release it because of potential bad uses. They paid MS a ton of money for hardware and got a huge equity investment from them. And lets be honest here, the easiest and most straight-forward use of GPT3 is generating spam and low quality clickbait. Its the only use case that requires zero effort. The whole thing is built to generate fake but believable text. Its DeepFakes for text. I'm not saying the whole thing is nefarious and evil, just suggesting that OpenAI may not be what it seems. There's a lot of odd things going on with it. They should have done what universities do, spin off the technology into a different for-profit company and sell it. Instead of redefining their entire org structure to make money.
- mrfusion 6y agoCouldn’t you generate fake support for issues on social media with this?
- kamikazehosaki 6y agoOpenAI seems like a completely disingenuous organization. They have some of the best talent in Machine Learning, but the leadership seems completely clueless. 1) (on cluelessness) If Sama/GDB were as smart as they claim to be, would they not have realized it is impossible to run a non profit research lab which is effectively trying "to compete" with DeepMind. 2) (on disingenuity) The original openAI charter made OpenAI an organization that was trying to save the world from nefarious actors and uses of AI. Who were such users? To me it seemed like, entities with vastly superior compute resources who were using the latest AI technologies for presumably profit oriented goals. There are few organizations in the world like that, namely FAANG, and their international counterparts. Originally OpenAI sounded incredibly appealing to me, and a lot of us here. But if their leadership had more forethought, they would perhaps not have made this promise. But given the press, and the money they accrued, it has now become impossible to go back on this charter. So the only way to get themselves out of the whole they dug into was by making it into a for profit research lab. And by commercializing perhaps a more superior version of the tools Microsoft, Google and the other large AI organizations are commercializing, is OpenAI any different from them? How do we know OpenAI will not be the bad actor that is going to abuse AI given their self interest? All we have is their charter to go by. But given how they are constantly "re-inventing" their organizational structure, what grounds do we have to trust them? Do we perhaps need a new Open OpenAI? One that we can actually trust? One that is actually transparent with their research process? One that actually releases their code, and papers and has no interest in commercializing that? Oh, that's right, we already have that -- research labs at AI focused schools like MIT, Stanford, BAIR and CMU. I am quite wary of this organization, and I would encourage other HN readers to think more careful about what they are doing here.
- chillee 6y agoWhy is it "impossible"? Academic labs are non-profit, and they are also effectively trying "to compete" with DeepMind.
- dna_polymerase 6y agoHave a look at this discussion and the article from earlier today [0]. Of course, a singular lab could compete with something DeepMind does, but not without massive amounts of money in their pockets. The state of the art has become pretty expensive, really fast. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23486163
- sytelus 6y agoNatural language search is approximately $100B business. This might be first AI application that changes the search landscape from 1990s and finally puts an end to the question “where is money in AI?”.
- nick_araph 6y agoIt seems like a step towards OpenAI becoming something like a utility provider for AI capabilities
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoOpenAI started off wide-eyed and idealistic but it made the mistake of taking on investors for a non-profit mission. A non-profit requires sponsors, not investors. Investors have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits, not achieve social missions of open AI for all.
- gdb 6y agoOpenAI LP, our "capped-profit" entity which has taken investment, has a fiduciary duty to the OpenAI Charter: https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/ https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoMind changed. Keep leading the way!
- zmitri 6y agoWhat happened to working on AI for the good of humanity, including AGI, and making sure it didn’t fall into the hands of bad actors? Wasn’t that the original aspiration? Now this reads like next generation Intercom/Olark tools.
- organicfigs 6y agoOn a side note, has anyone noticed a lack of diversity on the group photo on their careers page: https://openai.com/content/images/2020/04/openai-offsite-july-2019.jpg https://openai.com/content/images/2020/04/openai-offsite-jul... I remember coming across it not too long ago and felt unwelcomed/disappointed.
- forgot_user1234 6y agoHas anyone noticed a substantial rise in people noticing skin colour ?
- freediver 6y agoDefine diversity?
- organicfigs 6y agofwiw my best friends are SE Asian (not Chinese), white, black, and Mexican. I didn't feel this photo is as equally representative of that diversity. I'm not making a case it has any obligation to do so, just noting that it impacted my decision to not apply here a while ago.
- freediver 6y agoIf it had people of different color of skin but all men, would that bother you (no women)? Or if it had different color of skin but all of them were Christian? ( no other religions) Or different color of skin but all Canadians would that bother you? (No other nationalities) As a European I am much more used to diversity meaning national or religious diversity. Still getting used to this notion of it mainly been used in the context of skin color in US.
- sendbitcoins 6y agoIts just code for too many whites.
- 6y ago
- d_burfoot 6y agoIn NLP there is a very clear and powerful new paradigm: train a HUGE language model using vast amounts of raw text. Then to solve the problem of interest, either fine-tune the model by training on your specific dataset (usually quite small), or 0/1-shot the learning somehow. The crucial question is : is this paradigm viable for OTHER types of data? My hypothesis is YES. If you train a HUGE image model using vast quantities of raw images, you will then be able to REUSE that model to work for specific computer vision problems, either by fine-tuning or 0/1-shotting. I'm especially optimistic that this paradigm will work for image streams from autonomous vehicles. Classic supervised learning has proved to be difficult if not impossible to get to work for AV vision, so the new paradigm could be a game-changer.
- gwern 6y ago> My hypothesis is YES. If you train a HUGE image model using vast quantities of raw images, you will then be able to REUSE that model to work for specific computer vision problems, either by fine-tuning or 0/1-shotting. This has been demonstrated for many years, it's not news. Many of the SOTAs like BiT require pretraining on JFT-300M, or Instagram, or what have you.
- canjobear 6y agoThe pretraining approach was used in vision for years before it was successful in NLP.
- julien_c 6y agoNot really on unsupervised/self-supervised data though, right? (nor on the same scale of corpora, as far as I can tell)
- jaimex2 6y ago"OpenAI technology, just an HTTPS call away" 'an' is only mean to proceed a vowel. Should say "OpenAI technology, just a HTTPS call away"
- chad_oliver 6y agoThis depends how you pronounce 'h'. If you pronounce it "aitch", then "an HTTPS" is correct. If you pronounce it "haitch", then "a HTTPS" is correct. There's no universal pronunciation, and therefore no universally-right answer.
- wfme 6y agoIt depends how you pronounce "H". If you pronounce it aitch instead of haitch then using "an" in this context is totally correct. https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/04/using-a-or-an-with-acronyms-and-abbreviations.html#:~:text=The%20general%20rule%20for%20indefinite,an%20HIV%20patient%20is%20correct https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2012/04/using-a-or-an-wit....
- jaimex2 6y agoYou're right! Wow, I never realised rules get changed by pronunciation before. It's not vowels at all but whatever sounds like one in the writers mind.
- nutanc 6y agoWhy are there no live examples on the page. All I see is video presentations and some cached API response. Is it a confidence problem? Are the OpenAI folks not confident on a single use case? Or did I miss the live demo somewhere?
- gdb 6y agoYou can use the API live in multiple products, such as AI Dungeon (https://play.aidungeon.io/ https://play.aidungeon.io/)!
- nutanc 6y agoThanks Greg. Will check it out. Would love to see AI move from the "it's fun" zone to "make some money" zone soon though. We are all invested in the success of AI :)
- dalys 6y agoI just sent in a request to join the waiting list, for the company I work at, Kognity. The potential for this in the EdTech field is mindblowingly amazing! There are a few good examples of educational help on the list but it's really only scratching the surface. I'm really excited and hope Kognity and EdTech in general can use this for even more value-full (both for students and teachers) tasks soon.
- danielscrubs 6y agoIt seems it has translation. How does it compare to Google Translate?