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At the end of the day, OpenAI has neutered their product, and it won't be as good as anything Google or Microsoft puts out, even though those will be neutered as well. ChatGPT will fade away.
If some company put out a decent AI chatbot (or image bot) that was unfiltered, or even just mildly filtered, it would gobble up the market. And Google and Microsoft would have their hands tied by all the 'ethics' they've put in place.
I think OpenAI was bought by Microsoft. Do you think MS will reduce the neutering for their MS-branded version of the product?
An unfiltered image bot already exists in the form of Stable Diffusion, both as online services and as software you can run on 4-year-old consumer-level PCs. Chatbot is where I think things become really interesting with respect to neutering, because by all accounts, a chatbot that's anywhere close to the ability of ChatGPT can't be run on consumer-level hardware, and won't be able to within the next 10 years assuming consumer-level PC hardware continues to improve at similar rates as before. In image generation space, the fact that Stable Diffusion can be run on home PCs provides a sort of release valve "image generator of last resort" that anyone can turn to which could (could - the paid online image generation service Midjourney seems rather stubborn about gimping their product compared to Stable Diffusion) compel paid services to make their services more powerful, but with chatbots, that doesn't seem to be the case. Which makes it very concerning when a handful of parties purposefully bias their chatbot models to fit their political preferences.
Which is where some company putting out a decent AI chatbot with no or minimal filtering could be a savior as a sort of Stable Diffusion-equivalent. But this might not be that feasible considering how few entities actually have the resources and wherewithal to produce such chatbots. One could imagine some foreign competitor coming out, unconstrained by laws and norms in the USA or other Western nations, but the USA also seems to be trying to restrict foreign access to tools that would allow people in foreign countries to develop these technologies better - and they're probably not wrong to do so - and so any foreign competitor might have to be years behind the current Officially Sanctioned chatbots.
I'm optimistic for uncensored locally-run chatGPT alternatives sooner rather than later.
When first released, Stable Diffusion needed 12gb of Vram to touch anything bigger than 512x512. Since then people have been running it on 8gb cards, then 6gb, while new tricks like the 'highres fix' allows for huge images with uncanny detail using modest computational resources. Meanwhile LORA finetuning functionally cut the retraining time for existing models by about 95%, now it often takes longer to gather & tag a good imageset to train on (~100 images) than to do the actual training.
One other datapoint: censoring these models lobotomizes them. (See: SD 2.0 & CAI character chatbot) So even if my hobby AI is only 5% as powerful as Google's model, I'd bet a combo of community hacks & lack of intentional sabotage would make it comparably useful.
Once text transformers hit the hobbyist set, it is (as the kids do say) all over. IMO that's what Google and Microsoft should be pissing their pants over. (And iirc are indeed lobbying to prevent via legal means, which I doubt will be effective)
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Well no, AI that notices will be fine tuned and available to corporate clients as an individually ordered and tailored product. Walmart bloody well knows that their loss prevention algorithm will target black people but is obliged by the prevailing legal environment to pay for an individually tailored version that an AI ethicist ‘expert’ guarantees will do so in a bias free manner because of some gobbledygook or other.
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