prompter: Why will Open-Assistant be better or worse than ChatGPT use Pro and Contra arguments.

assistant: Open-Assistant may be better than ChatGPT by being open-source. Being an open model allows the community to develop creative uses for the model, enables self-hosting, enables greater competition for hosted inference pricing, reduces the possibility of censorship or secret bias, makes it more accessible to people around the world, and much more. Open-Assistant also has bigger goals than just replicating ChatGPT, such as being able to use APIs and dynamically research information.

However, Open-Assistant may also be worse than ChatGPT. By being an open model, it is more easy for bad actors to misuse Open-Assistant for nefarious reasons, with nobody able to stop them. Open-Assistant also doesn't have a huge company behind it, and its performance may be worse than ChatGPT. Moreover, Open-Assistant may be more expensive to use than ChatGPT due to OpenAI's larger funding and greater access to cloud compute resources.

assistant: Here are some Pro and Contra arguments about why Open-Assistant might become better than ChatGPT:
Pro:
- Open-Assistant is able to make API-Calls
- Open-Assistant is able to search through documents provided and find relevant information
- Open-Assistant's parameters and architecture will be made public, which means that everyone with the required know-how will be able to customize it for its needs.
- Everyone participating in the data labeling is excited about the topic and is not being paid. The interessed is intrinsic.

Contra:
- ChatGPT's developers from OpenAI had presumably a bigger budget than those from OpenAssistant. This means they had more compute during training time
- OpenAI is quite experienced with making their models available via APIs.
- ChatGPT originates from a GPT-3-Model, which is bigger and most probably better engineered, than what Open-Assistant has been derrived from.

prompter: What kinds of specs are either ones trained on? How big is the ecological impact?

prompter: Why does OpenAI have more budget? arent you both like open(-source)?

assistant: OpenAI is a commercial and profit-oriented company. Although they occasionally publish their research, they do not provide databases nor source code. Hence, their products cannot be considered open source.

assistant: OpenAI is being funded by Microsoft, while Open assistant is a community project.
The name OpenAI does not mean to imply they are open source, while they did started out by sharing all of the code and models they produced, they have since became a for-limited-profit company.

assistant: In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from non-profit to "capped" for-profit, with the profit capped at 100 times any investment. According to OpenAI, the capped-profit model allows OpenAI LP to legally attract investment from venture funds, and in addition, to grant employees stakes in the company.

assistant: OpenAI consists of a for-profit company owned by a non-profit one, whereas LAION is fully non-profit. Additionally, OpenAI started with $1 billion USD pledged by its founders, then received an additional $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019.

prompter: When will Open-Assistant's parameters be released?

prompter: if Open-Assistant is fully public, wouldn't that mean that OpenAI could use that to their advantage and always be ahead of Open-Assistant?

assistant: Open-Assistant will be an open source project that people could built upon new ideas and original software. Moreover, as the developers stated, it's going to be able to communicate to third party software, as APIs, and retrieve new information dinamically. A negative aspect, related to the need of OA to be run on consumer hardware, will be its limited weights which could impact text generation performance.

prompter: Ooh, APIs? Please elaborate!

prompter: I think you meant to say dynamically not dinamically. I agree with your point about possible limitations in terms of using smaller weights. Could this be off-set or worked around by making use of technology similar to "stable-horde" where users share GPU resources ?

prompter: what if people use it for evil

assistant: I consider myself as a tool. Tools can be used for good and evil. For example, one can use a car to transport things or intentionally hit others. In many cases, the benefits outweigh the potential risks of new technology. Nevertheless, we should be careful and handle tools responsible.

assistant: Indeed, people might use Open-Assistant for evil, just as they might use a hammer for evil. I think it's important to remember, though, that Open-Assistant is just a tool--a powerful tool for sure--but ultimately how it's used is up to the people who wield it.

assistant: As with all technologies, there is the potential for misuse of Open-Assistant. However, there is the same problem with ChatGPT, so I did not feel it relevant to the comparison.

prompter: Can you expand on what you mean by "limited weights?"

prompter: Could I run it on my old laptop?