OpenAI has made tech waves in the recent years given the prominences of the ChatGPT family of models, and the remanent of LLMs as search engine reindexing algorithms. They were a private research entity that became a titan now competing with the likes of Google. However, their story is less than glamorous.
They started out as a non-profit funded by Musk only to be insanely profit-driven. In fact, they are a cash-burn enterprise, and on top of that there are concerns based off of the localization of AI search results, privacy concerns over social prompt injecting, the suspicious death of whistleblower Suchir Balaji, and questions on whether these LLMs, particularly OpenAI are becoming digitized religions. This all put ChatGPT in the spotlight in a negative sense, and on top of the already burning fire were the Ann Altman allegations. The biggest issue, however, is that OpenAI is extremely centralized and has a business model that is based off of incentivizing data harvesting.
On the other hand, there are researchers like me and the growing cyberpunk community who have been working on AI research for many years. The straw that broke the camel’s back for me was the localization and privacy concerns that OpenAI has raised. This led me to build AI systems based off of open peering that aims to democratize LLMs and AI applications.
In the last few months, I have done just that through the debut of just some of the open-source models knowns as the OpenPeer AI family of models. These models are now available on Huggingface for everybody to download and use and is part of larger scale initiatives done by Riemann Computing which won Hackernoon Startup of the Year for the electronics category.
However, I am not just stopping there. I am also pushing for massive updates to the decentralized-internet SDK on GitHub, and at the same time advocating for the use of mathematical constraints to safeguard AI. My goal is simple, to ensure that training for AI is democratized, can be pushed through both multicloud (on-prem and off-prem environments) and doesn’t necessarily need to harvest tons of data towards a single centralized source.
In addition to this, I am already engaged in writing other articles on Hackernoon that focus on advancing decentralization, promoting advocacy, and discussing the current state of things. ~ Andrew Kamal
Currently, nearly everyone in the tech community shares a common objective: to dethrone OpenAI. This effort goes beyond merely challenging their monopoly; it also addresses privacy issues and the necessity for safe, democratized, and ethical AI. Without these considerations, the industry’s future appears rather bleak. The chaos has been going on long enough, and if OpenAI isn’t too busy harvesting massive amounts of data, now they are adding advertising for free users in ChatGPT. However, none of these issues compare to the seriousness of Balaji’s death, and his memory shouldn’t be sunk down the memory hole. Everybody is still wondering what is going on.
