Open source charter vs proprietary moat
Ilya Sutskever — Chief Scientist, OpenAI, The Verge Interview on GPT-4 Release
“We were wrong to be open source in the past. As models become more powerful, safety dictates that sharing weights is a bad idea. Closed models are about safety.”
Internal Commercial Strategy Briefing — commercial partnership memos, Microsoft Partnership Governance Agreement
“Exclusive commercial licensing of model weights to Microsoft is vital to secure the multi-billion-dollar compute allocations required to maintain competitive dominance against Google.”
The Split:OpenAI rationalized closing its model weights to the public as a solemn safety precaution. Behind closed doors, the commercial agreements with Microsoft explicitly locked the technology down to protect enterprise exclusivity.
When an open-source non-profit suddenly discovers that 'safety requires keeping everything secret and proprietary', check the investor contract.