Clark told Synced that OpenAI’s restricted publication approach is consistent with the organization’s greater mission. As the OpenAI Charter spells out: “We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI. Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.”

OpenAI will still release a paper outlining their research methods and the architecture used along with a reduced-capability model. The organization may also consider opening wider access on a case-by-case basis.

So far the AI community’s response to the OpenAI decision remains mixed. It’s clear that the open-sourcing environment long-nurtured in the world of computer science remains sacrosanct to many. Last month, a Reddit user claimed Google AI refused to share some dataset fields for an ACL’18 paper and associated challenge at CVPR’19. Many comments attacked Google: “Reproducibility is the hallmark of science. Without that data this result is not reproducible so the science is sh*t.”

OpenAI NLP Team Manager Daniela Amodei meanwhile told Synced their team consulted a number of respected researchers regarding the decision, and received positive responses.

Responsible publication on AI?

Cautious publication decisions are already common in highly-sensitive domains such as cybersecurity and biotechnology. OpenAI believes the general AI community should also start considering more appropriate publication standards for future AI technologies.

Recent events have revealed AI’s unseemly side to the world. Last year, Reddit User “DeepFakes” shared a face-swapping tool online that flooded the Internet with realistic-looking fake celebrity porn videos. Meanwhile, some believe the bot-driven spread of misinformation and fake news may have swayed election outcomes in the US, Italy and elsewhere. Increasingly sophisticated AI-empowered synthetic tools could exacerbate these issues.

OpenAI last year published The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation. The report notes that “addressing this challenge may call for reconsidering some of the extant publication norms in the AI community.”

With the global AI community is still grappling with the open vs restricted question, OpenAI’s specific publication approach on the language model is something of a trial balloon. OpenAI says it will evaluate the results in six months to determine their next step.

Click this link to view the paper.