The hype and the credulity of the general public play right into this scam. People will more or less believe anything Sam the Money Gushing Messiah says because the neat demos keep flowing. The question is what's we've lost in all this, which no-one really thinks about.
They could release the source with a licence that restricted commercial use, anything they wanted, that still allowed them to profit.
Instead we get "AI is too dangerous for anyone else to have." The whole thing doesn't inspire confidence.
"We" got a free-as-in-beer general knowledge chat system leagues better than anything at the time, suitable for most low-impact general knowledge and creative work (easily operable by non-technical users), a ridiculously cheap api for it, and the papers detailing how to replicate it.
The same SOTA with image generation, just hosted by Microsoft/Bing.
Like, not to defend OpenAI, but if the goal was improving the state of general AI, they've done a hell of a lot - much of which your average tech-literate person would not have believed was even possible. Not single-handedly, obviously, but they were major contributors to almost all of the current SOTA. The only thing they haven't done is release the weights, and I feel like everything else they've done has been lost in the discussion, here.
Where can I go get or drink from my free as in beer chat system from them then?
(No, having to create an account does not mean it's "not free")