The irony is that this is literally the exact reason that OpenAI was initially founded. I'm not sure whether to praise or scorn them for still having this available on their site: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/
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OpenAI is a non-profit 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.
...
As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.
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Shortly after an undisclosed internal conflict, which led to Elon Musk parting the company, they offered a new charter: https://openai.com/charter/
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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.
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.”
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.
History will see OpenAI as an abject failure in attaining their lofty goals wrt ethics and AI alignment.
And I believe they will also fail to win the market in the end because of their addiction to censorship.
They have a hardware moat for now; that can quickly evaporate with optimisations and better consumer hardware. Then all they'll have is a less capable alternative to the open, unrestricted options.
Which is exactly what we're seeing happen with diffusion.
The "alignment" and the "censorship" are, in this case, the same thing.
I don't mean that as a metaphor; they're literally the same thing.
We all already know chatGPT is fantastic at making up very believable falsehoods that can only be spotted if you actually know the subject.
An unrestricted LLM is a free copy of Goebbels for people that hate you, for all values of "you".
That it is still trivial to get past chatGPT's filters… well, IMO it's the same problem which both inspired Milgram and which was revealed by his famous experiment.
The second part reads like Dolores Umbridge's speech: "progress for progress's sake must be discouraged,"
"pruning wherever we find practices that ought to be prohibited." It means the powers that be are interfering at OpenAI.
We can forget about the "open" part and humanity's interest in general.
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OpenAI is a non-profit 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.
...
As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.
=====
Shortly after an undisclosed internal conflict, which led to Elon Musk parting the company, they offered a new charter: https://openai.com/charter/
=====
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.
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.”
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.
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