OpenAI

The company with the deep pockets and great models. OpenAI can be credited with making AI and ML trendy and bringing a lot more people to the space. People got very excited about GPT-2 when it was released publicly and with the private beta of GPT-3 from 2020 onwards, developers have been building on top of the technology in a rapid speed.

GPT-3 from OpenAI offers a few different models. The most powerful of these is the davinci model which has 175 billion parameters. The other models include curie, babbage and ada. OpenAI have also released a code specific model which has a lot of knowledge of github.

The OpenAI infrastructure is reliable and easy to build on. They offer an online playground where you can create and interact with the models without using the APIs. OpenAI take a very strict rule on what they will allow you to build and every single user has to go through a pre-launch review process prior to introducing features to their audience. There are also some completely off limit use cases such as automated social media, anything to do with Instagram or Twitter and Adult content.

If you are looking to build a business application then OpenAI is a good choice. The davinci model can be expensive if you are looking to generate large amounts of text whereas the curie model is more reasonable and provides good outputs with quality prompt engineering. Like everything, it is worth experimenting for your specific usecase.

Fine-tuning is an area of focus where OpenAI are starting to lead the way. Being able to create a fine-tune with your data will help you get a more relevant outcome and being able to self-serve your fine-tune needs is super important to reduce friction and allow those who have the ability to master their own datasets to get the most out of this technology.

With extremely limited exceptions, OpenAI requires all production live usecases to have their content filter active. The filter returns a 0, 1 or 2. If it returns a 2, you are not supposed to provide the end-user with that output. The filter can be frustratingly broad at times and is a definite downside to using OpenAI’s technology.

OpenAI recently took their models out of private beta and into a public beta and that means that anyone can go to their website and signup. This helps to bring the ecosystem into the open as prior to this you could find yourself waiting months on a waiting list. I waited 5 months personally to get access back in 2020!