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I've exhausted all possible avenues to get any response from OpenAI on this. Emailed them, published research that took me 2 nights to get together (saw media p

by glub 15d ago

I've exhausted all possible avenues to get any response from OpenAI on this. Emailed them, published research that took me 2 nights to get together (saw media pick it up too), I've asked every relevant OpenAI person on X to say something, anything, saw others from Moldova also do the same. Crickets. They appear to simply not care at all.

nradov 15d ago
Is there any reason why OpenAI should care? If they don't want your business then someone in your country can build a competing model.
- cubefox 15d ago
  They realistically can't. It's almost impossible to catch up to OpenAI. Only Anthropic might do it, but this is also an US American company.
  - nradov 15d ago
    It's not unrealistic. Several Chinese companies seem to be close behind. People thought they would never catch up to the US car industry and now look what happened.
    - gmueckl 15d ago
      Frankly, the US car industry hasn't set the bar very high. They were not very innovative in the last couple of decades. I think the European industry is a better benchmark, and even then the result is pretty clear.
    - cubefox 15d ago
      To the best of our knowledge, these Chinese companies rely on distillation of frontier models by OpenAI and Anthropic, which isn't a method available at the frontier itself.
      - disgruntledphd2 15d ago
        I'm not really convinced that there's much secret sauce here, all the methods and data are public, the only real difference is how much compute it takes.
        Amekedl 15d ago
        everybody do be cooking with water. Chinese Labs provided pretty good, primarily cost-reducing techniques, like the sparse attention patterns recently. I'd bet OpenAI and Anthropic use their variants of those too, so they can get greater margin on their tokens - not something they'd really want to / need to self-report.
        cubefox 14d ago
        This is obviously false. There is "secret sauce" because in fact not all the methods and data are public.
        disgruntledphd2 14d ago
        Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then? Like, (apart from tone), I find it hard to distinguish between the outputs of GPT/Claude/Kimi/GLM recently (I use cursor, and have been giving them the same prompt and comparing). If anything, I found that the non-Claude models were better in many cases, which definitely doesn't map to their pricing. > in fact not all the methods and data are public Probably not, but unless you work at a lab, I'm not sure that anyone can say (and if you do work at a lab, you should not be replying on this thread).
        cubefox 14d ago
        > Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then? In benchmarks, revenue, and comments from a lot of people on Hacker News.
        disgruntledphd2 14d ago
- glub 15d ago
  They do want my business, it's an official OpenAI market. The gate isn't "we don't serve you", it's "pay for the model that may target you, but not for defensive purposes". And without a single policy document stating this, it's just a surprise gate in some random verification flow step with no explanation or appeals. As for why they should they care, maybe they shouldn't. But then they should say which one is it, they can't care and not care at the same time. OpenAI's own safety argument for Daybreak is that defenders need access to Critical-level models because attackers route around gates. The case for releasing Astra at all stops making sense when the gate does precisely the opposite of that. OpenAI itself is saying plainly, that "We don’t think it’s practical or appropriate to centrally decide who gets to defend themselves. Instead, we aim to enable as many legitimate defenders as possible, with access grounded in verification, trust signals, and accountability.". And yes, there are competing models, from China. Except OpenAI wants these models to not be accessible either. OpenAI can pick one of two: (a) Critical-level cyber capability is dangerous enough that access must be decided by who you are and what you do, in which case the gate has to actually look at who I am and what I do, say what the criteria are, and let me contest a wrong answer. That's their own stated policy. (b) Access can be decided by a country code in a random dropdown, with no criteria published, no review, and no one at OpenAI able to say why - in which case drop "democratized access" and "clear, objective criteria" from the marketing, and say plainly that some passport holders don't deserve to have access to defensive capabilities. They're now marketing a and doing b.
- matheusmoreira 15d ago
  The reason is they keep making public statements like: > OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible. They can't claim that then simultaneously work to keep their cybersecurity models out of reach for non-US citizens like myself.
- unrented7977 14d ago
  > OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.

by glub 15d ago

nradov 15d ago

Is there any reason why OpenAI should care? If they don't want your business then someone in your country can build a competing model.

cubefox 15d ago
They realistically can't. It's almost impossible to catch up to OpenAI. Only Anthropic might do it, but this is also an US American company.
- nradov 15d ago
  It's not unrealistic. Several Chinese companies seem to be close behind. People thought they would never catch up to the US car industry and now look what happened.
  - gmueckl 15d ago
    Frankly, the US car industry hasn't set the bar very high. They were not very innovative in the last couple of decades. I think the European industry is a better benchmark, and even then the result is pretty clear.
  - cubefox 15d ago
    To the best of our knowledge, these Chinese companies rely on distillation of frontier models by OpenAI and Anthropic, which isn't a method available at the frontier itself.
    - disgruntledphd2 15d ago
      I'm not really convinced that there's much secret sauce here, all the methods and data are public, the only real difference is how much compute it takes.
      - Amekedl 15d ago
        everybody do be cooking with water. Chinese Labs provided pretty good, primarily cost-reducing techniques, like the sparse attention patterns recently. I'd bet OpenAI and Anthropic use their variants of those too, so they can get greater margin on their tokens - not something they'd really want to / need to self-report.
      - cubefox 14d ago
        This is obviously false. There is "secret sauce" because in fact not all the methods and data are public.
        disgruntledphd2 14d ago
        Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then? Like, (apart from tone), I find it hard to distinguish between the outputs of GPT/Claude/Kimi/GLM recently (I use cursor, and have been giving them the same prompt and comparing). If anything, I found that the non-Claude models were better in many cases, which definitely doesn't map to their pricing. > in fact not all the methods and data are public Probably not, but unless you work at a lab, I'm not sure that anyone can say (and if you do work at a lab, you should not be replying on this thread).
        cubefox 14d ago
        > Where does the secret sauce show up in the outputs, then? In benchmarks, revenue, and comments from a lot of people on Hacker News.
        disgruntledphd2 14d ago
glub 15d ago
They do want my business, it's an official OpenAI market. The gate isn't "we don't serve you", it's "pay for the model that may target you, but not for defensive purposes". And without a single policy document stating this, it's just a surprise gate in some random verification flow step with no explanation or appeals. As for why they should they care, maybe they shouldn't. But then they should say which one is it, they can't care and not care at the same time. OpenAI's own safety argument for Daybreak is that defenders need access to Critical-level models because attackers route around gates. The case for releasing Astra at all stops making sense when the gate does precisely the opposite of that. OpenAI itself is saying plainly, that "We don’t think it’s practical or appropriate to centrally decide who gets to defend themselves. Instead, we aim to enable as many legitimate defenders as possible, with access grounded in verification, trust signals, and accountability.". And yes, there are competing models, from China. Except OpenAI wants these models to not be accessible either. OpenAI can pick one of two: (a) Critical-level cyber capability is dangerous enough that access must be decided by who you are and what you do, in which case the gate has to actually look at who I am and what I do, say what the criteria are, and let me contest a wrong answer. That's their own stated policy. (b) Access can be decided by a country code in a random dropdown, with no criteria published, no review, and no one at OpenAI able to say why - in which case drop "democratized access" and "clear, objective criteria" from the marketing, and say plainly that some passport holders don't deserve to have access to defensive capabilities. They're now marketing a and doing b.
matheusmoreira 15d ago
The reason is they keep making public statements like: > OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible. They can't claim that then simultaneously work to keep their cybersecurity models out of reach for non-US citizens like myself.
unrented7977 14d ago
> OpenAI is committed to ensuring that the benefits of AI are broadly accessible.