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LLMs, Innovation, and Capitalism - by Belinda Li - Reboot

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What happens to innovation when science gets privatized?

For a long time, much of AI research was default-open. OpenAI’s GPT is an innovation on the Transformer model, which Google researchers open-sourced in 2017. Two years later, OpenAI set a new precedent by initially choosing not to release GPT-2 to the public—describing the model as simply “too dangerous.” Today, both AI research and corporate gatekeeping has accelerated massively. NLP researcher Belinda Li attributes these locked doors not to “safety,” but to capitalism. In today’s guest essay, she makes the democratic case for open science, explaining how the closed model shapes—and…

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