If you're unhappy about people using your work without compensating you or contributing back, don't release your work as free software. You can't have your cake and eat it too...

> it's also lame for a company named "OpenAI" to acknowledge getting their ideas from open source, then contributing absolutely NOTHING back to open source with their own implementation

Maybe those projects were used as-is by OpenAI, so there was nothing new to contribute.

I think they may be alluding to sponsorships as well as code contributions.

i.e. https://github.com/sponsors/jxnl

You don’t anyone will use it to contribute to open source projects?

Seems like an obvious net gain for the community.

This isn't generosity, it's a well known and much used strategy for market penetration. Free until-we-decide-otherwise is very much not the same as open source.

In so far as it is a conscious strategy to make it more expensive at a later data, it is actually sort of the opposite of generosity.

So if something is free but only temporarily, then that cancels out the generosity? Also, you and I have no idea how long the features will remain free. If anything, chatgpt has been making more features and stronger models free over time.

Sometimes it does, yeah. It's not unheard of for companies to deliberately operate at a loss in order to drive out their competition, then raise prices again. This is known as "predatory pricing".

No. If it were free you'd be able to use it as a programming API. It's not free and it's not unlimited - it's a time-limited marketing tool.

How are you defining the word free?

That can actually make competition from open source harder. New upstarts that are open source can't compete with free service from OpenAI and can't make money to grow their development or offerings.

OpenAI wants to kill everything that isn't OpenAI.

New open source models* still wouldn't be able to compete even if OpenAI was forcibly shut down.

Hardware's too expensive, and will be for a while, because all the big players are trying to get in on it.

* cue arguments: "'open weights' or training data'?"; "does the Meta offering count or are they being sneaky and evil?"; etc.

So should OpenAI make their product less accessible, in order to make it easier for competition? That makes no sense

I call chicken. Let them make all their products paid.

Hint: they won't, it would kill their company. The hype around OpenAI is based on people using it for free, at least at the start.

Heck, even drug dealers know this trick!

Free service != Open software