Humanity’s final challenge – AI profit?

Much in the news cycle. Much buzz. I’ll expect books and a movie script for something even more epic that The Social Connection.

OpenAI’s “bizarre org chart.” Mission creep or mission miscommunication? Was a wizard workers mass exit a real scenario? The twists and turns …

Is “the problem posed by superintelligence” really “humanity’s final challenge?” (Like in The Foundation or Dune novels?)

• Wired > email Newsletter > Steven Levy > Plaintext > The Plain View > “OpenAI’s boardroom drama could mess up your future” (November 22, 2023) – Reflecting on a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI’s headquarters.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond human level—termed artificial general intelligence or AGI—in a safe way. The company discovered a promising path in large language models that generate strikingly fluid text, but developing and implementing those models required huge amounts of computing infrastructure and mountains of cash. This led OpenAI to create a commercial entity to draw outside investors, and it netted a major partner: Microsoft. Virtually everyone in the company worked for this new for-profit arm. But limits were placed on the company’s commercial life. The profit delivered to investors was to be capped—for the first backers at 100 times what they put in—after which OpenAI would revert to a pure nonprofit. The whole shebang was governed by the original nonprofit’s board, which answered only to the goals of the original mission and maybe God.