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OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

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Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#121

Post by sonofhans »

bigyabai wrote: post #86
andrewflnr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're in an impossible situation they created themselves and inflict on the rest of us. Forgive us if we don't shed any tears for them.

Sure - so is Google Chrome for abetting them with a browser, and Microsoft for not using their Windows spyware to call suicide hotline. I don't empathize with any of these companies, but I don't trust them to solve mental health either.

False equivalence; a hammer and a chatbot are not the same. Browsers and operating systems are tools designed to facilitate actions, not to give mental health opinions on free-text inquiries. Once it starts writing suicide notes you don’t get to pretend it’s a hammer anymore.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#126

Post by magicalhippo »

overgard wrote: post #101
fghorow wrote: post #18

Yes. ChatGPT "safely" helped[1] my friend's daughter write a suicide note. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-h...

I have mixed feelings on this (besides obviously being sad about the loss of a good person). I think one of the useful things about AI chat is that you can talk about things that are difficult to talk to another human about, whether it's an embarrassing question or just things you don't want people to know about you. So it strikes me that trying to add a guard rail for all the things that reflect poorly on a chat age…

> Like, all the time chatGPT is like "Great question!".

I've been trying out Gemini for a little while, and quickly got annoyed by that pattern. They're overly trained to agree maximally.

However, in the Gemini web app you can add instructions that are inserted in each conversation. I've added that it shouldn't assume my suggestions as good per default, but offer critique where appropriate.

And so every now and then it adds a critique section, where it states why it thinks what I'm suggesting is a really bad idea or similar.

It's overall doing a good job, and I feel it's something it should have had by default in a similar fashion.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#127

Post by simonw »

behnamoh wrote: post #119

I think this has more to do with legals than anything else. Virtually no one reads the page except adversaries who wanna sue the company. I don't remember the last time I looked up the mission statement of a company before purchasing from them.

It matters more for non-profits, because your mission statement in your IRS filings is part of how the IRS evaluates if you should keep your non-profit status or not.

I'm on the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation and the board has to pay close attention to our official mission statement when we're making decisions about things the foundation should do.

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#129

Post by pants2 »

simonw wrote: post #124
DrammBA wrote: post #122

Still waiting for the "Open" in OpenAI to become more than branding.

They did win back a little bit of their open-ness with the gpt-oss model releases, but I'd like to see updated versions of those.

They are (in my mind) still the best models for fast general taka, when hosted on Groq / Cerebras

Re: OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

#130

Post by simonw »

alexwebb2 wrote: post #116

I assume a lawyer took one look at the larger mission statement and told them to pare it way down. A smaller, more concise statement means less surface area for the IRS to potentially object to / lower overall liability.

I'd love to know why their lawyers appear to hate apostrophes so much. The most recent one is:

> OpenAIs mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Many of the older ones skipped some but not all of the apostrophes too.

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