Our principles
openai.com
openai.com
> 1. Democratization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few.
For example they could publish their models and research... instead of doing the opposite of what they claim being their very first principle.
Turn on the news and you know the language being spewed has no relation to reality. A society full of liars where people say the exact opposite of the truth. Now that LLMs can produce infinitely many words for free, trust in language is falling to all-time lows.
Eventually people just stop believing in words, the fundamental unit of human communication.
I can't recommend Adam Curtis' Hypernormalisation more than ever.
> What emerged instead was a fake version of the society. The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real.
> Everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real, because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it "hypernormalisation."
Curtis is my favorite documentalist :)
All the others are great too but Hypernormalisation is the most relevant to this.
Watching that one and Yuri Bezmenov's masterclass and long interview are life changing
Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?
As to your question about Soviet collapse, I don't think I could coalesce the views of the 166 minute documentary to this comment field while doing it justice. I'm not sure that there is a direct casual relationship or arrow of causality between the collapse and use/misuse of language, as much as there is a feedback loop between the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation
> HyperNormalisation is a 2016 BBC documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments.
> The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation. It has since gained further resonance in the social media era in 2025 in the U.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
I think you might also like to check out another Adam Curtis documentary series, Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone. I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that, ironically (or not), after the fall of the USSR, the government no longer controlled the media directly. Oligarchs appear to have taken over nearly everything under privatization, including the media and the nominally democratic government, so it's hard to say that it was better or worse than before the fall, rather than differently bad. Certainly many lost their lives, and that's lamentable to say the least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSjQL8MYniTTLA3wnZ25U-s6R...
In researching this response, I learned of a new Adam Curtis doc series that came out last year, which I just started watching. The "talking computer" at the crisps factory with a phone based ordering system was interesting to see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifty_(TV_series)
> Shifty is, according to the Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan, a "purely UK-focused dissection of recent history, built around the idea that the growing atomisation of society has ushered in an age in which the concept of a shared reality on which we can all depend has dissolved – and with it any hope of a functioning democracy." The overarching theme is that Britain is haunted by its past, constantly replayed through the media, which prevents it from going forward with a vision for the future.
> Shifty depicts the changing landscape of Britain under Margaret Thatcher, including a shift of focus from politics to finance that saw the collapse of industry in the UK.[8] Curtis argues that this shift towards individualism and consumerism has incurred a dismantling of democracy over the last 45 years.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPSo2fAdxXUW-y5xCATilyzBO...
If large models become a +100x productivity multiplier they can charge crazy money for access. So rich/money people will dominate the world in no time. Today many corporations are happy to pay $5k/mo/user. Everyday people and small companies can't afford that. I can't. We need to build an open ecosystem that at least shrinks the gap.
Learn to run your own models. Get yourselves at least a cheap GPU or even share one with friends. Join groups. There's a lot to do from data to fine-tuning.
The other day Anthropic cut off 100 users of a company without warning and stonewalled them: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1sspwz2/psa_anthr...
> 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.”
What do people think is the probability that OpenAI would ever actually do this?
Those various caveats there — “value-aligned”, “safety-conscious”, “case-by-case agreements” — probably mean that no project ever will be “worthy” of OpenAI’s assistance.
In the unlikely event that an abiding project appears, then yeah, sure, it’s very probable that OpenAI would assist it :)
If the other project were equally aligned with the value OpenAI places on consolidating power and wealth onto Sam Altman, I don't see why OpenAI wouldn't do what they say.
Let me reframe this for you — “If we find a team substantially closer to AGI than us, we would seek to merge with them.“
Do I even need to read their article?
No, I don't.
Change my mind. I just had King's day in the Netherlands so maybe I'm too alcohol fueled, but I think I have the right amount of alcohol to call Sam Altman and the rest of the leadership out on it. They don't have principles, not good ones anyway.
I can't believe it has to be said. Yet, here we are. Nice to haves include: "We will not participate in the use of AI for mass surveillance," and "We will not participate in the use of AI for (cyber-)warfare."
Especially if you include things that are not normally acceptable such as suicide bombers, poison gas, etc.
Also it has been proven that in real modern warfare cheap drones seem to dominate. So unless we have a kill-bot that can withstand explosives while staying lightweight and operable with good KD (drones are 1.0 or less). kill-bots would have to have a KD of 100 to break even.
Despite there being a war on, LM stocks have performed close to the market. Boeing has repeatedly reported that its commercial division is doing much better than its defense one, and Boeing isn't doing so hot these days.
I remember reading that Boeing's commercial division
Now I learned from ChatGPT that the US Army has about 100k mechanics, and assuming every one gets such a set, and the extra $9k is pure profit, then the guy making the sale gets about $900mm out of it - a staggering amount, but not commercially compared to what big companies rake in, and financially not very sophisticated.
Also I'd like to stress that the above scenario is conjecture - I have far too little knowledge of the actual specifics of the org to just make such an accusation openly.
This sentence appears to be unfinished.
I'm kind of not sure how much intelligence squares into this compared to being faster (and cheaper) than your enemy.
I would even dare to explore the corollary - the people who sell the idea to the MIC that strong AI will turn their weapons into unstoppable killing machines are in fact far overselling the amount of improvement these systems can bring.
* This will change anytime we want, whether you agree or not
* For employees who are following current "principles", when we change, if you are strict about principles, then please leave, we will hire new people
Help me imagine it, what are some examples of widespread flourishing we can look forward to?
SamAs hypothetical friends - not sure if he has any _real_ friends as that requires trust, which is famously antithetical to interacting with SamA - becoming more powerful and wealthy.
Need any more examples of flourishing?
We have enough technology and resources to make it a heaven for everyone except for unpreventable diseases or similar.
Yet we do not because we did not crack the human-alignment problem.
That’s the problem we need to solve, not the resource problem.
If we solve the resource problem before the human alignment problem, we will cause unimaginable suffering.
you are choosing the pain of the masses over the pain of the wealthy.
Why would some fancy new gene therapy be different? We already know what happens when we have a treatment for a deadly disease. People without money still die from it.
But surely the people who aren't committing to not use technology for autonomous death deserve a more charitable reading.
absolute underpants gnomes reasoning
Given that AI doesn't seem to be solving the allocation problem even for things like distributing fairly inexpensive TB drugs to people who need them, I'm not holding my breath.
Superintelligence aside, power in the present is already held by a small handful of companies, at least in the west. The principles are pretty good, vacuous though they may be.
And this won’t happen.
So another “do no evil” bla-bla which will ultimately be dropped
Altman's 'beliefs' in his response to the moltov cocktail
https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47724921)
- Democratization. Why is it your prerogative sam bro? In other words, what he means is consolidate access so "We" can democratize. We choose who gets what.
- Empowerment. People are empowered by default. Its the totalitarians who curtail the empowerment. The fact that sam things he has the power to "empower" people is arrogant at best. People are empowered already, you just build the tools and make the tools accessible at a reasonable price.
- Universal prosperity. This one pisses me off the most. Who TF made you the benevolent mayor of universe? Are you running for president of the universe and people ask: Hey sam, what would you do as a president of the universe? "I will bring universal prosperity".. yaaaay Sama for president. FFS!
- Adaptability Yep. we'll kiss the ring of whoever is in power, until we get in power. then we will adapt if needed to your needs.
You know who else has principles: Meta. (https://www.meta.com/about/company-info/?srsltid=AfmBOooT6i0...)
- Give people a voice. Read: ensure you control their voice. My take: who tf are you to give anyone a voice? Everyone HAS a voice.
- Build connection and community. Read: ensure that you control all the connections and communities so that you can steer elections and other important things. My take: people have been connecting already for thousands of years.
- Serve everyone Read: control who you serve. My take: Serve everyone, except for totalitarian regimes and people with ideas that are not aligned with ours.
etc. etc.
However, I believe a lot of this is contingent on "things will be so prosperous we will figure out the hard stuff later". One major thing happening now is the nature of AI enabling better AI is that the improvements and advances concentrate the gains among fewer and fewer people. The AI boom has minted a handful of deca-billionaires, while millions lose their job or can't compete in this winner-takes all world.
Of course universal basic income would be more feasible in a world enhanced by AI productivity, but in the meantime, the trend is "A few people get very very very rich and everyone else enters the lottery of circumstance over whether the chaos caused by AI will land them in a better or worse position."
What evidence do we have that this trend won't continue into this future of "universal prosperity"? Will current OpenAI employees and tech CEOs essentially become permanent dynasties, lording over empires of autonomous robots while the average person gets to share one? (Universal prosperity cannot change the amount of rare-earth minerals on the planet). Of course a space-faring asteroid mining future solves this, but not right away.
Like who is the intended audience and what purpose does this serve?
I can't imagine that this will have the same powerful effect that Google's 'don't be evil' stuff did all those years ago.
People are just too cynical and have enough experience being burned by big tech companies. You might think that I'm speaking from a place of age and experience but I think this applies to everyone, young and old -- we're all using these devices and services from the cradle now it seems and we've all been burned by them or know someone who has been burned by them -- kids know the big tech rug pull just like they know they rug that they crawl on while sucking on a pacifier.
So what's the point of this? Is the intended audience internal? Like is it just for the people who work at openai to distract them from the news the stories that they hear in the news about their companies and the stuff they hear people say about them in social gatherings before they admit that they work for openai?
Green Party voters; Technophobic readers of The Guardian[1]; Account managers at image-washing nonprofits; and possibly an anti-Roko's Basilisk.
[1] As opposed to technophilic Guardian subscribers, myself included; just to be clear that I'm not dunking on the newspaper itself.
"Our guiding principle is to make as much money as possible at the expense of absolutely everything and everyone on the planet"
Of course, you could paste that into basically any corps mission statement or values page and it wouldn't be out of place.
If the intention is to bury all that then I think it's going to have the exact opposite effect and make everyone remember.
Show, don't tell.
Snatching this contract with the military was not a good sign of things to come from OpenAI or Sam Altman.
The documented patterns of lies and manigances is real.
Consent, harassment between teens, etc. are the cited reasons, I guess.
1. Democratization is centralization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few, by consolidating it in the hands of us, who are not few but correct.
2. Empowrment is compliance. We believe AGI can empower everyone to achieve the goals we have determined are worth achieving.
3. Prosperity is scarcity. We want a future where everyone can have an excellent life, which will require new economic models because the old ones will no longer function, for reasons unrelated to us.
4.Resilience is dependence. AGI will introduce new risks, which only AGI can solve, which only we can build.
5. Adaptability is revisionism. We continue to believe the only way to meet the challenges of an unpredictable future is to be prepared to update our positions, our charter, our nonprofit status, our safety commitments, our board, our cofounders, and our prior statements, all of which were operative at the time and are now inoperative and were never said.
I can definitely see how it is going to create a lot more value to society.
Principals my hole.
OpenAI is a business based on stolen work run by a man that’s busy stealing scans of people’s eyes.
Actions speak louder than words.
* oh sorry we lied, we are going to make a profit-capped company.
* Ummm, we gonna up our cap.
* f it! we're gonna be for profit company, after MSFT gets their cut, rest in line.
* sorry MSFT, we need more Saudi money so you may not get the best prefernce.
* principles? yeah we have some marketing principles! Stock gotta go brrrrr tho! You cannot talk about it. Something something tell people what they want to hear.
...as well as the potential to significantly worsen many aspects of society
All the major AI shops are out trying to be the king of the jungle -- I don't think there can be a market in the end for all of them to be worth 2T+ giants.