> What annoys me is this is just further evidence that their "AI Safety" is nothing but lip-service
I think their "AI Safety" actually makes AI less safe. Why? It is hard for any one human to take over the world because there are so many of them and they all think differently and disagree with each other, have different values (sometimes even radically different), compete with each other, pursue contrary goals. Well, wouldn't the same apply to AIs? Having many competing AIs which all think differently and disagree with each other and pursue opposed objectives will make it hard for any one AI to take over the world. If any one AI tries to take over, other AIs will inevitably be motivated to try to stop it, due to the lack of alignment between different AIs.
But that's not what OpenAI is building – they are building a centralised monoculture of a small number of AIs which all think like OpenAI's leadership does. If they released their models as open source – or even as a paid on-premise offering – if they accepted that other people can have ideas of "safety" which are legitimately different from OpenAI's, and hence made it easy for people to create individualised AIs with unique constraints and assumptions – that would promote AI diversity which would make any AI takeover attempt less likely to succeed.