A few days back it was revealed that Microsoft has exclusively licensed OpenAI’s GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3) groundbreaking autoregressive language model. Now Elon Musk who was one of the founders at OpenAI does not seem to be happy about the fact that Microsoft has now an exclusive license for OpenAI’s GPT-3. He said that exclusive license seems to be the opposite of open, as OpenAI was essentially captured by Microsoft.
Although Microsoft did announce that OpenAI will still be able to sell access to GPT-3 via its API, and continue to develop the new projects and models on this platform. Also, OpenAI made it clear that “The deal with Microsoft has no impact on the continued access to GPT-3 and through OpenAI’s API, and existing and future users of it will continue building applications with our API as usual.” Microsoft has actually gained access to the source code by exclusive license and has now the capability to modify it. However, it will not affect any existing models that are being developed on GPT-3.
The deals provide Microsoft with an underlying code of GPT-3, which contains technical advancements. It will be used in the future by Microsoft to integrate with their product and services. Elon Musk wanted the GPT-3 code free for all but OpenAI does not want to do it and allow people to create unmonitored apps that could be harmful to the users in the future. No matter what Elon Musk thinks about it, Microsoft has assured that the deal will not affect the use of GPT-3 code in any way for OpenAI.