Seems a stretch to call it "more privacy-friendly" if it talks to OpenAI.

Disagree. The fact that it can call another closed-source service doesn't mean that this tool itself is not open source.

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

> 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.

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

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.

I've seen posts of "js interpreter written in 1 line" that was just a script calling node…

Were those being serious? That sounds like it could’ve been a joke/commentary.

Then again, there are people who genuinely believe they could trivially rewrite curl.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/05/20/i-could-rewrite-curl/

Yes I think they were serious, and they used eval() or whatever.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?