Re: Help building Pen.el (GPT for emacs)

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > GPT is potentially the best thing to happen to emacs in a very long time.

If GPT-3 were released as a free program, we might want to use it.
Perhaps it would be very useful.

Please correct me if I am mistaken, but I think GPT-3 is an unreleased
program which people can use only via SaaSS.  SaaSS stands for Service
as a Software Substitute.  It means that a "service" accepts your
data, does a specific computing job, and sends you back the results.
Using such a service is morally mostly equivalent to running a nonfree
program -- so we cannot suggest that anyone DO that.

See https://gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html for
more explanation of this issue.

  > The way this will work is you will download
  > the free GPT model, such as GPT-j, GPT-neo or
  > GPT-neox and then you will have an offline and
  > private alternative to many things previously
  > you would go online for.

Are you saying there is a free replacement for GPT-3 and we can
run these free models with it on our own computers?

That could be good news, because we could actually use it.

  > It will bring back power from the corporations and save it to your
  > computer,

That sounds exciting but it is not concrete enough to think about.

              open source and transparent, 

What follows is a side issue, but it's an important side issue.

"Open source" is the slogan of a campaign we don't advocate.
It is partly similar to the free software movement but discards
the moral foundation: the idea of freedom.

We don't use the slogan "open source" because we want to advocate
freedom, not forget it.

See https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for more explanation of the difference between free software and open
source.  See also https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler for
Evgeny Morozov's article on the same point.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)