‘Entirely automating everything is not the future we want’: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman lays out his company’s vision as it opens a ‘third phase’ and looks to build technology “to benefit everyone” | Daily Reports Online
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki list future goals for the AI giant
- The world economy is now beginning to shape around AI and are committed to delivering tools that people would use
- The note also reaffirmed OpenAI’s commitment to AGI with a caveat: ensuring it benefits all of humanity
With modern AI solutions moving well beyond simple chatbots to agents and projected to evolve into operators, one could assume that the automation of everything is an eventual goal.
This, however, has been denied by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who said the goal of the artificial intelligence research and deployment company is not to automate everything but to allow people to make better decisions as AI improves their lives.
In a note titled ‘Built to benefit everyone’ that marked a break from OpenAI’s AI model capability pushes of late, two of the most important people in the AI ecosystem penned an unusually values-forward document that outlined their future plans for AI.
AI for everyone equally?
The note highlighted three major focuses for OpenAI:
– Building an automated AI researcher
– Accelerating the economy
– Giving everyone on Earth a personal AGI
OpenAI estimates that by March 2028, a significant portion of its research will be conducted by AI systems, in addition to its own researchers. This will help them to traverse a ‘post-AGI world’.
This, combined with the focus on giving everyone an AGI, is an interesting outlook because it assumes that everyone agrees on what AGI would look like. The definition is not set in stone and can vary from person to person and also at an organizational level.
OpenAI’s statement also provides clues about what an AGI would be like, with an “automated AI researcher” who both provides a path to AGI and is an important cog in the wheel.
OpenAI’s narrative about AI benefiting everyone worldwide is not a new one, but its focus on equality is an interesting one, especially given the timing: OpenAI’s note popped up exactly the same day it filed confidential paperwork for its IPO, making it perhaps read more as PR than it would otherwise be perceived.
OpenAI’s latest models are state-of-the-art, but many feel Anthropic’s now-banned Fable pushes frontier models even further than what GPT currently offers in multiple segments. Training new models is increasingly capital-intensive even as new capabilities are introduced, tested, and refined over time.
OpenAI also has something of an image problem after it stepped in to replace Anthropic’s Claude and Mythos-class solutions for the US military earlier this year, a move the latter company maintains was necessary because the restrictions it insisted on for the use of its AI were important.
When OpenAI stepped in to replace Anthropic on classified networks, it was widely perceived as willing to look past those restrictions to some degree, even though Sam Altman insists that the same two principles (no domestic mass surveillance and use of force permitted only by humans) would apply, with many critics pointing to a ‘softer’ approach on the matter by OpenAI to fill the void that comes with lucrative military contracts in the future.
The note, therefore, does read like a checklist for the future, but also paints OpenAI as a more magnanimous organization before its IPO, and that might be the primary intention here, but it does fail to weigh in on growing power consumption concerns, even as one could also consider it a reply or acknowledgment to a similar note by Anthropic about recursive self-improvement where its AI solutions effectively already act as an AI researcher for the company.
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