OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

Well there you have it. That rug wraps it up.

"For the Benefit of Humanity®"

Why delete it even if you don’t want to care about safety? Is it so they don’t get sued by investors once they’re public for misrepresenting themselves?

Let the profits flow!

By November it will be "Just give us $10 billion more and we will be able to improve ChatGPT8 by 1% and start making a profit, really we will. Please?"

Safety comes down to the tools that AI is granted access to. If you don't want the AI to facilitate harm, don't grant it unrestricted access to tools that do damage. As for mere knowledge output, it should never be censored.

…and a whole lot of other words too.

Still waiting for the "Open" in OpenAI to become more than branding.

Nobody should have any illusion about the purpose of most business - make money. The "safety" is a nice to have if it does not diminish the profits of the business. This is the cold hard truth.

If you start to look through the optics of business == money making machine, you can start to think at rational regulations to curb this in order to protect the regular people. The regulations should keep business in check while allowing them to make reasonable profits.

Silicon Valley is a joke. Does anyone take these statements seriously anymore? Yea don't do evil yea safely yea no.

Moneeey moneeey honey and power. That's the REAL statement.

I hope this doesn't come across as being cynical in my old(er) age, but instead I just hope it's a reflection of reality

Lot's of organizations in the tech and business space start out with "high falutin", lofty goals. Things about making the world a better place, "don't be evil", "benefitting all of humanity", etc. etc. They are all, without fail, complete and total bullshit, or at least they will always end up as complete and total bullshit. And the reason for this is not that the people involved are inherently bad people, it's just that humans react strongly to incentives, and the incentives, at least in our capitalist society, ensure that profit motive will always be paramount. Again, I don't think this is cynical, it's just realistic.

I think it really went in to high gear in the 90s that, especially in tech, that companies put out this idea that they would bring all these amazing benefits to the world and that employees and customers were part of a grand, noble purpose. And to be clear, companies have brought amazing tech to the world, but only insofar as in can fulfill the profit motive. In earlier times, I think people and society had a healthier relationship with how they viewed companies - your job was how you made money, but not where you tried to fulfill your soul - that was what civic organizations, religion, and charities were for.

So my point is that I think it's much better for society to inherently view all companies and profit-driven enterprises with suspicion, again not because people involved are inherently bad, but because that is simply the nature of capitalism.

“To boldly go where no one has gone before.”

this is fine

"Don't be evil"

I mean Sam Altman was answering ”bio terrorism” on the question of what’s the most worrying things right now from AI in a town hall recently. I don’t have the url currently but it should be easy to find.

C'mon folks. They were always a for-profit venture, no matter what they said.

And any ethic, and I do mean ANY, that gets in the way of profit will be sacrificed to the throne of moloch for an extra dollar.

And 'safely' is today's sacrificed word.

This should surprise nobody.

Honestly, it's a company and all large companies are sort of f** ups.

However, nitpicking a mission statement is complete nonsense.

[dupe]

Isn't it great how they can just post hoc edit their mission statement in order to make it match whatever they're currently doing or want to do? /s

[dead]

Scam Altman strikes again

Can you benefit all humanity and be unsafe at the same time? No, right? If it fails someone, then it doesn't benefit all humanity. Safety is still implied in the new wording.

I can't believe an adult would fail such a simple text interpretation instance though. So what is this really about? Are we just gossiping and playing fun now?

Took them long enough to ignore the neurotic naysayers who read too many Less Wrong posts

Rubbish article, you only need to go to about page with mission statement see the word “safe”

> We are building safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome

https://openai.com/about/

I am more concerned about the amount of rubbish making it to HN front page recently

Missions should evolve with the stage of the company. Their last mission is direct and neat. The elimination of the sentence "unconstrained by a need to generate financial return" does not have any negative connotation per se.

I'm more worried about the anti-AI backlash than AI.

All inventions have downsides. The printing press, cars, the written word, computers, the internet. It's all a mixed bag. But part of what makes life interesting is changes like this. We don't know the outcome but we should run the experiment, and let's hope the results surprise all of us.