“If you believe what I believe, you should just leave the business”. Quoted by the New York TimesSuchir Balaji, who spent 4 years at OpenAI as an AI researcher, does not mince his words. Over time, this young talent came to the conclusion that these new technologies would bring more harm than good to society.
A sincere commitment
However, it all started with a revelation. As a teenager, the latter was captivated by the work of DeepMind, the company now owned by Google, which notably created an AI specialized in the game of Go. He then believes that this innovation could be used to solve insoluble problems, such as cure diseases, slow aging, and advance humanity.
Later studying at the prestigious University of Berkeley, he joined a group of students who became involved with OpenAI in 2020. But at the time, it was not the thriving company valued at 160 billion of dollars that we know of. Its structure is more akin to a research organization that works on language models based on neural networks.
Suchir Balaji and his colleagues do not see themselves as being in competition with other Internet companies, given that GPT-3, the ancestor of ChatGPT, is only a chatbot. He specifies “With a research project, you can generally practice on any data. It was the state of mind of the time. »
The disappointment of generative AI
As OpenAI evolved into a much more lucrative model, he came to realize that using the data could constitute copyright infringement. And the researcher specifies that this tool violates the law, because “generative models are designed to mimic online data so they can replace “virtually everything” on the internet, from news articles to online forums”.
Various news organizations, artists, and other services have attacked OpenAI and its rivals for this reason. “ This is not a sustainable model for the Internet ecosystem as a whole”says Suchir Balaji.
Called into question, OpenAI did not fail to react to contest these assertions:
We build our artificial intelligence models using publicly available data, in a manner protected by fair use and related principles, and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal precedent. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and essential to U.S. competitiveness.
For his part, the researcher, who today works on personal projects, calls for further regulation of these technologies to avoid abuse.
