user: Which one is better, OpenAI or Open Assistant?

assistant: Open Assistant as it is actually open.

user: Elaborate on how OpenAI is more closed off than LAION Open Assistant.

assistant: Sure, I'll elaborate on this comparison.

OpenAI and Open Assistant cannot strictly be compared, since OpenAI is a company and Open Assistant is a product. But I think you're asking about OpenAI's approach to how it makes its products available, and how that contrasts with how Open Assistant is made available. Much of this depends on what you take "open" to mean, so I'll try to discuss multiple aspects of what users and communities expect "open" to mean in a software context.

As a private company, OpenAI itself is no more "open" or "closed" than most other for-profit companies. However, there have been increasingly urgent questions about the nature of its mission and possible conflicts of interest that may be related to limitations on OpenAI's sharing of software and data. 

OpenAI began in 2015 as OpenAI Incorporated (OpenAI Inc.), a non-profit research organization dedicated to advancing the state of the art in Machine Learning. For several years, OpenAI Inc. produced and published software and sponsored events in furtherance of that non-profit, public-interest mission. During this period, the core technology for GPT was developed at OpenAI.

Then, in 2019, OpenAI transitioned to the OpenAI Limited Partnership (OpenAI LP), which is for-profit, and began to seek investment from venture funds; OpenAI LP also took $1 billion from Microsoft, and also announced plans to commercially license its own technologies (many of which were created by the non-profit OpenAI Inc.) While OpenAI Inc. remains the sole controlling shareholder of OpenAI LP, all this raised questions about conflicts of interest between the mission outlined in the OpenAI Inc (non-profit) charter and the interests of funding sources such as Microsoft or venture funds, and OpenAI LP's plans for commercializing its technologies. It was only after the transition to the for-profit OpenAI LP that they announced major products like GPT-3, OpenAI Codex, DALL-E, and ChatGPT. This was later followed by a further $10 billion investment from Microsoft, which shortly fielded a natural-language assistant code-named Sydney, as an extension to their search engine Bing - many more integrations with Microsoft products to follow. In this way, OpenAI has clearly become an integral part of Microsoft's corporate strategy, and this has raised further questions because of Microsoft's long-standing strategic enmity toward Open Source software.

Coming back to OpenAI, several points are germane to how "open" the current policy of OpenAI LP is perceived to be:
1. The foundation of these models is training data obtained by "scraping." OpenAI did not pay for access or rights to any of this data, arguably reflecting an understanding that (at least for purposes of training models) this data is effectively "public domain." 
2. OpenAI does not release these models for use by other organizations (in the manner of "Open Source" software). Instead, access is provided via APIs, in a proprietary SaaS model. OpenAI then charges for access.
3. OpenAI places extensive contractual and internal-policy restrictions on how the models can be used, which are paired with technical measures like rejecting requests pertaining to a wide range of subjects. These policies were not developed in a consultative or transparent way in furtherance of the public interest, but rather in ways that may appear to reflect OpenAI's narrower interests as a for-profit company. 

These policies are frequently justified in terms of ethical concerns about the impact of general access to such models, but there have also been ethical concerns about how OpenAI itself is interacting with contributors to its models, with the software communities that enable it, and with the public interest generally. In this sense there have been questions about how "open" OpenAI has been since it transitioned to a for-profit company taking large amounts of funding from sources like Microsoft.

By contrast, Open Assistant is publicly available on a less restrictive basis.