by Sigal Samuel
September 26, 2024
from VOX Website


 

Sigal Samuel

is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast.

She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications.

Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic.



 


Sam Altman.

Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua

via Getty Images




OpenAI

as we knew it is dead.
The maker of ChatGPT

promised to share its profits

with the public.

But Sam Altman

just sold you out...

 

Sam Altman is a Technocrat who plays the long game.

 

When he first got involved with OpenAI in 2015, he jockeyed to take the helm in 2019 but he was constrained by a board of directors.

 

By 2023, the Board saw through him and ousted him.

 

Then the real Sam Altman appeared as he "clawed his way back to power", kicked the directors off the board and reconstituted another board subservient to him.

By 2024, top executives saw through Altman's Hitleresque schemes and fled the company, leaving the safety team in shambles.

 

Just this week, the company's Chief Technology Office (CTO), Mira Murati, abruptly walked out.

Now VOX notes,

"he's stripped the board of its control entirely" and taken dictatorial control of OpenAI.

Read the original and simple Charter below. This was originally signed by Altman.

 

Since then he has violated every word of it.

 


OpenAI Charter
 

Our Charter describes the principles we use to execute on OpenAI's mission.

This document reflects the strategy we've refined over the past two years, including feedback from many people internal and external to OpenAI.

 

The timeline to AGI remains uncertain, but our Charter will guide us in acting in the best interests of humanity throughout its development.

OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) - by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work - benefits all of humanity.

 

We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

 

To that end, we commit to the following principles:

 


Broadly distributed benefits

We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI's deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.

Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.

 

We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.

 


Long-term safety

We are committed to doing the research required to make AGI safe, and to driving the broad adoption of such research across the AI community.

We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions.

 

Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project.

 

We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be "a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years."

 


Technical leadership

To be effective at addressing AGI's impact on society, OpenAI must be on the cutting edge of AI capabilities - policy and safety advocacy alone would be insufficient.

We believe that AI will have broad societal impact before AGI, and we'll strive to lead in those areas that are directly aligned with our mission and expertise.
Cooperative orientation

We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI's global challenges.

We are committed to providing public goods that help society navigate the path to AGI.

 

Today this includes publishing most of our AI research, but we expect that safety and security concerns will reduce our traditional publishing in the future, while increasing the importance of sharing safety, policy, and standards research.

 

Altman has proven himself to be shrewd, unprincipled and ruthless, who will get what he wants regardless of who gets crushed along the way.

 

Now he has sole possession of the most dangerous weapon since the atomic bomb - 'Artificial General Intelligence' (AGI).

What could go wrong?

Source


 

OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out.

 

Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially.

They've touted the company's unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives.

OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission:

keep humanity safe...

But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation.

 

Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn't have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI.

 

In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company.

 

Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a "WTF" emoji in Slack.

WTF indeed...

The whole point of OpenAI was to be nonprofit and safety-first.

 

It began sliding away from that vision years ago when, in 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit arm so it could rake in the kind of huge investments it needed from Microsoft as the costs of building advanced AI scaled up.

 

But some of its employees and outside admirers still held out hope that the company would stick to its principles.

 

That hope can now be put to bed.

"We can say goodbye to the original version of OpenAI that wanted to be unconstrained by financial obligations," Jeffrey Wu, who joined the company in 2018 and worked on early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3, told me.

 

"Restructuring around a core for-profit entity formalizes what outsiders have known for some time: that OpenAI is seeking to profit in an industry that has received an enormous influx of investment in the last few years," said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell's Tech Policy Institute.

The shift departs from OpenAI's,

"founding emphasis on safety, transparency and an aim of not concentrating power."

And if this week's news is the final death knell for OpenAI's lofty founding vision, it's clear who killed it.

 

 

 

 

How Sam Altman became an existential risk to OpenAI's mission

 

When OpenAI was cofounded in 2015 by Elon Musk (along with Altman and others), who was worried that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity, the budding research lab introduced itself to the world with these three sentences:

OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company.

 

Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.

 

Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

All of that is objectively false now...

 

Since Altman took the helm of OpenAI in 2019, the company has been drifting from its mission.

 

That year, the company - meaning the original nonprofit - created a for-profit subsidiary so it could pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge AI.

 

But it did something unprecedented in Silicon Valley:

It capped how much profit investors could make.

They could get up to 100 times what they put in, but beyond that, the money would go to the nonprofit, which would use it to benefit the public.

 

For example, it could fund a universal basic income program to help people adjust to automation-induced joblessness.

 

Over the next few years, OpenAI increasingly deprioritized its focus on safety as it rushed to commercialize products. By 2023, the nonprofit board had grown so suspicious of Altman that it tried to oust him.

 

But he quickly clawed his way back to power, exploiting his relationship with Microsoft, with a new board stacked in his favor. And earlier this year, OpenAI's safety team imploded as staffers lost faith in Altman and quit the company.

 

Now, Altman has taken the final step in consolidating his power:

He's stripped the board of its control entirely.

Although it will still exist, it won't have any teeth.

"It seems to me the original nonprofit has been disempowered and had its mission reinterpreted to be fully aligned with profit," Wu said.

Profit may be what Altman feels the company desperately needs.

 

Despite a supremely confident blog post published this week, in which he claimed that AI would help with,

"fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics," OpenAI is actually in a jam.

It's been struggling to find a clear route to financial success for its models, which cost hundreds of millions - if not billions - to build.

 

Restructuring the business into a for-profit could help attract investors.

 

But the move has some observers ­ including Musk himself - asking:

How could this possibly be legal...?

If OpenAI does away with the profit cap, it would be redirecting a huge amount of money - prospective billions of dollars in the future - from the nonprofit to investors.

 

Because the nonprofit is there to represent the public, this would effectively mean shifting billions away from people like you and me.

 

As some are noting, it feels a lot like theft.

"If OpenAI were to retroactively remove profit caps from investments, this would in effect transfer billions in value from a non-profit to for-profit investors," Jacob Hilton, a former employee of OpenAI who joined before it transitioned from a nonprofit to a capped-profit structure.

 

"Unless the non-profit were appropriately compensated, this would be a money grab.

 

In my view, such a thing would be incompatible with OpenAI's charter, which states that OpenAI's primary fiduciary duty is to humanity, and I do not understand how the law could permit it."

But because OpenAI's structure is so unprecedented, the legality of such a shift might seem confusing to some. And that may be exactly what the company is counting on.

 

Asked to comment on this, OpenAI said only to refer to its statement in Bloomberg.

 

There, a company spokesperson said OpenAI remains,

"focused on building AI that benefits everyone," adding that "the nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist."

 

 

 

The take-home message is clear: Regulate, regulate, regulate

 

Advocates for AI safety have been arguing that we need to pass regulation that would provide some oversight of big AI companies - like California's SB 1047 bill, which Gov. Gavin Newsom must either sign into law or veto in the next few days.

 

Now, Altman has neatly made their case for them.

"The general public and regulators should be aware that by default, AI companies will be incentivized to disregard some of the costs and risks of AI deployment - and there's a chance those risks will be enormous," Wu said.

Altman is also validating the concerns of his ex-employees who published a proposal demanding that employees at major AI companies be allowed a "right to warn" about advanced AI.

 

Per the proposal:

"AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this."

Obviously, they were right:

OpenAI's nonprofit was meant to reign over the for-profit arm, but Altman just flipped that structure upside down.

After years of sweet-talking the press, the public, and the policymakers in Congress, assuring all that OpenAI wants regulation and cares more about safety than about money, Altman is not even bothering to play games anymore.

 

He's showing everyone his true colors.

Governor Newsom, are you seeing this...?

 

Congress, are you seeing this...?

 

World, are you seeing this...?