Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And safely here means non disruptive to established businesses Why would OpenAI care about that? No, it means safety, as in not giving out dangerous answers that get people killed.
Because they belong to Microsoft. Because they are funded by rich people who own established businesses. Because they are the privileged .01% who are invested in the status quo. Because their whole networks consist of people with entrenched business interests. Pick one or more. Why would you think rich American engineers are in general any more worried about the overall safety of the world then their own self interes…
They don't — 49%, and they get to buy themselves out of even that, and if they do that by eating MS's lunch? Then it would suck to be an MS shareholder.
And they've been cautious since before the investment, with the cautious announcement of GPT-2 a month before the change in corporate structure to allow investors.
But even if OpenAI were owned completely by MS, why should MS care? Disrupting all employment sounds like the raison d'être for most if not all of silicon valley.
At the very least, imagine all the employees MS could let go if GPT-4 was even 80% as good as the advertisements in the form of "buy my guide for how to use GPT to make a fortune with best selling books/award winning advertisements/fantastic business proposals" keep claiming.
> Why would you think rich American engineers are in general any more worried about the overall safety of the world then their own self interest?
One is a subset of the other.
People regularly disagree about how risky things are, but they don't generally pick "destroy all things" over "destroy that which is close to me" when they actually believe that's the real choice and not, say, a panicked Chicken Little (which is how I think LeCun sees Yudkowsky).