Yes. The same is true of many products from many companies.
I feel bad about GPT-3 and DALL-E being released under the terms they were, but I don't feel bad about this. I'm not going to condemn OpenAI for the good things they did, but I will hold them accountable for bad things or good ones they didn't do.
I'd given up on OpenAI being open or ethical, but this is a start. It took them down from "evil super-villain" status to mere villain.
> It's one model and in a non-strategic area where there are existing open source projects (Kaldi, DeepSpeech, ...).
I can already tell this is much better than any of the existing open source projects with the exception of the wav2* sequence of projects and potentially nvidia's nemo.
Kaldi is an open, pluggable framework and is a ton more flexible and powerful than this. It's used by hundreds of teams, including a number of consumer tech companies you've heard of. They're not going to move to this over it.
Especially because ASR is a living organism. You have to constantly update your language model as new people, ideas, and words move into the normal lexicon. As people start talking about "COVID", "metaverse", "king charles", or whatever new things that happen, these need to be added to your language model. You need these updates monthly at a minimum and OpenAI didn't release the raw data which means you can't retrain it even if you wanted to spend the time/resources to.
So, this is an interesting research project and helpful for small teams and side projects, but it's unlikely it makes any real impact on the industry.
Kaldi just is not fast or high quality enough compared to other modern alternatives like wav2letter. I appreciate that it is more flexible than this, it certainly is - but I am not so sure about "powerful."
For a company that raised $1B, that's not exactly living up to their name and original mission.