- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki List the AI Giant’s Future Goals
- The global economy is now starting to revolve around AI and we are committed to providing tools that people could use.
- The memo also reaffirms OpenAI’s commitment to AGI with a caveat: ensuring it benefits all of humanity.
As modern AI solutions go far beyond simple chatbots to become agents and are expected to evolve into operators, one would assume that automating everything is an eventual goal.
This, however, was denied by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, who said the company’s goal of researching and deploying artificial intelligence is not to automate everything but to enable people to make better decisions as AI improves their lives.
In a memo titled “Built for Everyone’s Benefit” that marks a departure from recent advances in the capabilities of OpenAI’s AI model, two of the most important people in the AI ecosystem have written an unusually values-driven document outlining their future plans for AI.
AI for everyone equally?
The note highlighted three major axes for OpenAI:
– Build an automated AI researcher
– 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 AI systems, in addition to its own researchers. This will help them navigate a “post-AGI world.”
This, combined with the goal of giving everyone an AGI, makes for an interesting prospect because it assumes everyone agrees on what the AGI would look like. The definition is not set in stone and can vary from person to person as well as organizationally.
OpenAI’s statement also provides clues as to what an AGI would look like, with an “automated AI researcher” both paving the way for AGI and serving as an important cog in the wheel.
OpenAI’s narrative that AI benefits everyone in the world is not new, but the focus on equality is interesting, especially given the timing: OpenAI’s memo appeared on exactly the same day it filed confidential paperwork for its IPO, perhaps making it more like PR than it would otherwise be perceived.
OpenAI’s latest models are cutting edge, but many believe Anthropic’s now-banned Fable pushes frontier models even further than what GPT currently offers in several segments. Training new models requires more and more capital, even as new features are introduced, tested, and refined over time.
OpenAI also has an image problem after replacing Anthropic’s Claude and Mythos-class solutions for the US military earlier this year, a move the latter company said was necessary because the restrictions it insisted on using its AI were significant.
When OpenAI stepped in to replace Anthropic on classified networks, it was widely seen as willing to go beyond these restrictions to some extent, although Sam Altman insists that the same two principles (no national mass surveillance and use of force permitted only by humans) would apply, with many critics pointing to a “softer” approach to the matter by OpenAI to fill the void that accompanies lucrative military contracts in the future.
The memo therefore reads like a checklist for the future, but also presents OpenAI as a more magnanimous organization ahead of its IPO, and that might be the main intention here, but it fails to weigh in on the growing concerns over energy consumption, although one could also view it as a response or acknowledgment to a similar memo from Anthropic on recursive self-improvement where its AI solutions already effectively act as an AI researcher for the company.
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