So, Ilya is out of the board, but Adam is still on it. I know this will raise some eyebrows but whatever. Still though, this isn't something that will just go away with Sam back. OAI will undergo serious changes now that Sam has shown himself to be irreplaceable. Future will tell but in the long terms, I doubt we will see OAI as one of the megacorps like Facebook or Uber. They lost the trust.
The OpenAI of the past, that dabbled in random AI stuff (remember their DotA 2 bot?), is gone. OpenAI is now just a vehicle to commercialize their LLM - and everything is subservient to that goal. Discover a major flaw in GPT4? You shut your mouth. Doesn’t matter if society at large suffers for it. Altman's/Microsoft’s takeover of the former non-profit is now complete. Edit: Let this be a lesson to us all. Just becau…
In fact this observation is pertinent to the original stated goals of openAI. In some sense companies and organisations are superinteligences. That is they have goals, they are acting in the real world to achieve those goals and they are more capable in some measures than a single human. (They are not AGI, because they are not artificial, they are composed of meaty parts, the individuals forming the company.)
In fact what we are seeing is that when the superinteligence OpenAI was set up there was an attempt to align the goals of the initial founders with the then new organisation. They tried to “bind” their “golem” to make it pursue certain goals by giving it an unconventional governance structure and a charter.
Did they succeed? Too early to tell for sure, but there are at least question marks around it.
How would one argue against? OpenAI appears to have given up the lofty goals of AI safety and preventing the concentration of AI provess. In their pursuit of economic success the forces wishing to enrich themselves overpowered the forces wishing to concentrate on the goals. Safety will be still a figleaf for them, if nothing else to achieve regulatory capture to keep out upstart competition.
How would one argue for? OpenAI is still around. The charter is still around. To be able to achieve the lofty goals contained in it one needs a lot of resources. Money in particular is a resource which enables one greater powers in shaping the world. Achieving the original goals will require a lot of money. The “golem” is now in the “gain resources” phase of its operation. To achieve that it commercialises the relatively benign, safe and simple LLMs it has access to. This serves the original goal in three ways: gains further resources, estabilishes the organisation as a pre-eminent expert on AI and thus AI safety, provides it with a relatively safe sandbox where adversarial forces are trying its safety concepts. In other words all is well with the original goals, the “golem” that is OpenAI is still well aligned. It will achieve the original goals once it has gained enough resources to do so.
The fact that we can’t tell which is happening is in fact the worry and problem with superinteligence/AI safety.