- OpenAI's Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki list future goals for the AI giant
- The global economy is starting to take shape around AI and we are committed to providing tools that people can use.
- The note also reaffirmed OpenAI's commitment to AGI with a caveat: ensuring it benefits all of humanity.
Since modern AI solutions go far beyond simple chatbots to become agents and are expected to evolve into operators, one might assume that automating everything is an end goal.
This, however, has been denied by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki, who said the AI research and implementation company's goal is not to automate everything, but rather to enable people to make better decisions as AI improves their lives.
In a note titled 'Built to benefit everyone' that marked a break from the latest advances in the capabilities of OpenAI's AI model, two of the most important people in the AI ecosystem wrote an unusually advanced securities document outlining their future plans for AI.
AI for everyone equally?
The note highlighted three main approaches for OpenAI:
– Build an automated AI investigator
– Accelerate the economy.
– Give everyone on Earth a personal AGI
OpenAI estimates that by March 2028, a significant portion of its research will be conducted by artificial intelligence systems in addition to its own researchers. This will help them navigate a “post-AGI world.”
This, combined with the focus on giving everyone an AGI, is an interesting perspective because it assumes that everyone agrees on what the AGI would look like. The definition is not set in stone and can vary from person to person and also at the organizational level.
OpenAI's statement also provides clues as to what an AGI might look like, with an “automated AI researcher” providing a path to AGI and being an important cog in the wheel.
OpenAI's narrative about AI benefiting everyone around the world isn't new, but its focus on equality is interesting, especially given the timing: OpenAI's memo appeared on the exact same day it filed confidential paperwork for its IPO, perhaps making it read more like PR than it might otherwise be perceived.
OpenAI's latest models are state-of-the-art, but many feel that Anthropic's now-banned Fable takes cutting-edge models even further than what GPT currently offers in multiple segments. The formation of new models requires increasingly more capital, even as new capabilities are introduced, tested and refined over time.
OpenAI also has 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 significant.
When OpenAI stepped in to replace Anthropic in classified networks, it was widely perceived as willing to look beyond those restrictions to some extent, even though Sam Altman insists that the same two principles would apply (no internal mass surveillance and human-only permitted use of force), and many critics point to a “softer” approach to the matter by OpenAI to fill the void that comes with lucrative military contracts in the future.
The note therefore reads as a checklist for the future, but it also presents OpenAI as a more magnanimous organization ahead of its IPO, and that could be the main intention here, but it does not address the growing concerns about energy consumption, even though it could also be considered a response or acknowledgment to a similar note from Anthropic on recursive self-improvement where its AI solutions effectively already act as an AI researcher for the company.
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