A former researcher at the OpenAI has come out against the company’s business model, writing, in a personal blog, that he believes the company is not complying with U.S. copyright law. That makes him one of a growing chorus of voices that sees the tech giant’s data-hoovering business as based on shaky (if not plainly illegitimate) legal ground.
“If you believe what I believe, you have to just leave the company,” Suchir Balaji recently told the New York Times. Balaji, a 25-year-old UC Berkeley graduate who joined OpenAI in 2020 and went on to work on GPT-4, said he originally became interested in pursuing a career in the AI industry because he felt the technology could “be used to solve unsolvable problems, like curing diseases and stopping aging.” Balaji worked for OpenAI for four years before leaving the company this summer. Now, Balaji says he sees the technology being used for things he doesn’t agree with, and believes that AI companies are “destroying the commercial viability of the individuals, businesses and internet services that created the digital data used to train these A.I. systems,” the Times writes.
This week, Balaji posted an […]
We live in a society based on fraud and theft. This article documents the type of fraud and theft being imposed upon the culture. “Artificial Intelligence” may certainly be artificial but it’s not intelligent. It is the re-packaging of massive linguistic models that are based on stolen or “scraped” material to feed the beast. As the whistleblower stated this is beyond fair use. It is the inappropriate theft of other people’s work, which then drives out of business legitimate companies. It is a classic case of the bad players driving out the good with profit being the major driver. This has been the prevalent business model for the past 40 years. Until regulators penalize theft and fraud this trend will continue, as the “Marketplace” will reward theft. After all its much easier to steal other people’s work than actually do it yourself.