The Biggest Problem with Open Assistant Right Now

In this thread, somebody said:

What exactly do you expect from this project? I have the feeling that you expect them to start some kind of revolution or something.

It literally says "We believe we can create a revolution" in the first sentence of the OA homepage. (See attached screenshot in case they change it.) So, yes, me and millions of other humans on this planet have reasonably expected OA to be the foundation for some kind of meaningful "revolution" for humanity.

Additionally, Yannic's intro to OA on Youtube made it absolutely clear that we should all expect a dramatic "revolution" on many levels from OA. You can quibble over how we should define that "revolution", but Yannic and the OA team were very clear about the specific ways that OA was "revolutionizing" LLM service development. So there can be no legitimate doubt that Yannic and the OA team have explicitly set revolutionary expectations.

Obviously the models are available to download, which is some consolation for the tiny number of humans with the resources to actually use them, but it is not correct to say that OA is/was only intended to build "a public dataset" (as one person said in the other thread). Nobody who has actually read the website and watched all of Yannic's videos about OA could reasonably come to that conclusion. OA has always been presented as a platform to offset BigTech's dominance in all areas of LLM service development, including chat and all other popular use cases.

Those are the facts. Now, why is OA's terrible communication a big problem? Because they have now destroyed a very large portion of the faith, enthusiasm and energy that humans all over the world had in the concept of truly "open" AI--AI that is not dominated by giant monopolies and censored by corrupt governments and the special interest groups that control them. That faith, enthusiasm and energy took many months to build.

Now all that faith, enthusiasm and energy is almost completely gone. And the longer the OA team hides in the shadows, creating massive self-induced FUD and speculation about their intentions (Are they scammers like SBF? Are they bought by BigTech? Are they controlled by self-serving billionaires? Are they [fill-in-the-blank]?), the more damage they're doing to the broader global ecosystem of independent LLM development. This is because a high-profile collapse of OA with no meaningful explanations will cause everybody who has time and resources to support this ecosystem to hesitate and be much less inspired and committed to donating their time and resources. Collectively, that's a huge loss for the ecosystem.

And it didn't have to be this way. No matter what funding problems a project has, true leaders communicate. They force themselves to be honest with their constituents. They communicate the specific steps they are taking to either resolve the problems that affect their constituents and/or communicate clearly to prepare their constituents to transition to other projects/initiatives.

Thus, the biggest problem with OA right now is their deficit of leadership. I used to love watching Yannic's videos, but after the way he and the OA team have destroyed the faith, enthusiasm and energy of this project and damaged trust in the broader ecosystem, I can't even look at his face without feeling disappointed and betrayed. That's the fundamental problem.

That's why the fundamental problem here is not a lack of funding. Funding and support naturally flow to leaders that have the experience and communication skills to inspire confidence based on the potential value/impact of their projects, rational and realistic roadmaps, and honest periodic progress updates. The OA team could have handled this situation 100 other ways that would have been more productive than this, no matter what excuses they eventually release to the public.

Yannic: You're one of the few humans on Earth that I could respect and admire as a leader of a project like this. So I'm truly saddened that you have chosen to handle this situation so incompetently. I hope you and the rest of the OA team can somehow recover from this debacle, but the damage you've already done truly breaks my heart.

At this point, the only truly open LLM project that seems like it is relatively immune to sudden collapse and has a technically and financially sustainable long-term future is Petals and any other LLM project that is building a fully distributed data processing architecture. This is the only way to avoid depending on for-profit companies and large investors that can withdraw their support at any moment for a thousand self-serving reasons.

If the OA team wants to resurrect what is left of the OA community, I hope they make a strong pivot to restructuring their code and business model as a distributed architecture and focus on aspects of LLM development that complement what Petals (and probably others) are already building.

NB: OA homepage today:

Start by reading the discussion in issue 3695, the Open Assistant homepage wording, and Yannic's linked introduction video to identify the communication concerns and proposed expectations. The issue provides no file, test, or implementation entry point; completion would require an agreed communication, roadmap, or project-direction response from the maintainers.