📚 Elon Musk, Others, Criticize Microsoft's Exclusive License for OpenAI's GPT-3

"It looks like Elon Musk is increasingly unhappy with OpenAI, the AI research firm he helped found five years ago," reports Business Insider: Microsoft announced on Tuesday that it was exclusively licensing GPT-3, a natural language AI-powered tool made by OpenAI. The announcement was met with some dismay on Twitter from users who had thought OpenAI's mission statement was to make technologies like GPT-3 widely available. Elon Musk, who cofounded the company in 2015 as a non-profit AI research body, was among those who criticized the deal. "This does seem like the opposite of open. OpenAI is essentially captured by Microsoft," he said... Exactly how much exclusivity this license gives Microsoft is also unclear. In his blog post, Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said OpenAI will continue to offer access to GPT-3 via its API. OpenAI reiterated this in its own blog post, saying "the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through OpenAI's API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual." A Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge the deal gives Microsoft exclusive access to GPT-3's underlying code. GeekWire rounded up reactions from other AI pundits, noting that MIT's Technology Review complained OpenAI was "supposed to benefit humanity," and now "it's simply benefiting one of the richest companies in the world." And Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said "OpenAI should be renamed ClosedAI — for all intents and purposes they are a for-profit company. But he added that GPT-3 "has remarkable capabilities and will lead to numerous applications and an even more vigorous mine-is-bigger-than-yours model arms race. I can't wait to see how Google and Amazon respond, and don't forget China."

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