trog 2 days ago

> The source seems to be at the linked repo, and the license is MIT. How’s that a stretch?

Speaking for myself, I clicked on this thinking it might be open source in the sense of something I can run fully locally, like with a small grammar-only model.

  • n_plus_1_acc 2 days ago

    Check out languagetool, as mentioned in other comments. It isbtruly open source

latexr 2 days ago

Because it’s a wrapper on a closed-source system.

Imagine writing a shell script that cuts and converts video by calling ffmpeg, would you say it was “a video converter written in bash”? No, the important part would not be in bash, that’s just the thin wrapper used to call the tool and could be in any language. Meaning it would be useless to anyone who e.g. worked on a constrained system where they are not allowed to install any binaries.

Same thing here. If you only run open-source software for privacy reasons, sending all your program data to some closed server you don’t control doesn’t address your issue. There’s no meaningful difference between making an open-source plugin that calls an OpenAI API and one that calls a Grammarly API.

TheDong 2 days ago

Code is only copyrightable if it has any element of creativity.

This repo is _only_ really 7 sentences, like "Please correct spelling mistakes in the following text: " (these https://github.com/zlwaterfield/scramble/blob/2c1d9ebbd6b935...)

Everything else is uncreative, and possibly un-copyrightable, boilerplate to send those sentences to OpenAI.

All of the creative software happens on OpenAI's servers using proprietary code.

  • too_damn_fast 2 days ago

    Why would you even say 'please' in a prompt ?

    • t-writescode 2 days ago

      There has been evidence that better responses are sometimes provided with politeness for some LLMs.

      And some people just try to be polite and it only costs a couple tokens.

      • chaosist 2 days ago

        I use to say please/thank you to gpt4 in 2023 all the time but it was because I was completely anthropomorphizing the model in various ways.

        I suspect it would be just as easy to write a paper that saying please has absolutely no effect on the output. I feel like gpt4 is/was stochastically better on some days and at some hours than others. That might even be wrong though too. The idea that it is provable that "please" has a positive effect on the output is most likely a ridiculous idea.

dotancohen 2 days ago

The MIT licensed code is a wrapper for the OpenAI API. That OpenAI API provides the core functionality, and it is not open source.

xdennis 2 days ago

The entire codebase is one call to `api.openai.com`.

If I sold you an electrical generator, but the way it worked was by plugging it in, would you say it's fair to say it's a generator?