‘We will learn quickly and course-correct’ — Sam Altman says this is OpenAI’s future, but it’s not the one it started with

OpenAI has just published a new document called ‘Our Principles’ written by Sam Altman, and at first glance it reads like a simple corporate manifesto update. But the more I read it, the more I start to think that it isn't what it appears to be.

Something has definitely changed here, compared to OpenAI’s previous statements, so let’s unpack what it is. We can start by taking a look at what it is not saying, as well as what it is saying.

The race of AGI — is it still happening?

For a start, the post is very deliberately credited to Sam Altman, as if it’s something of a personal mission statement, which made me want to compare it to his previous blogs on AI.

What immediately struck me as curious about the new principles document, compared to his old blogs, is the lack of reference to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Achieving AGI for the benefit of humanity was, after all, the whole goal of creating OpenAI in the first place, but it is only mentioned in passing a few times in the new document. It seems to have been replaced by talking about broader AI deployment instead.

Eleven months ago, Altman was talking in much stronger terms about AGI in his personal blog: “We are past the event horizon;”, he wrote, “the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”

Reading it back now it sounds like AGI was about to happen at any moment. Compared to the latest document, the language has softened significantly. If the takeoff had started, it seems the AGI rocket is still on the landing pad.

AI: The risks vs the rewards

While the broader benefits of AI are stressed — “a lot of the things we’ve only let ourselves dream about in sci-fi could become reality”, Altman says — there’s also the acknowledgement that these good outcomes aren’t guaranteed.

“Power in the future can either be held by a small handful of companies using and controlling superintelligence, or it can be held in a decentralized way by people”, Altman says. “We believe the latter is much better, and our goal is to put truly general AI in the hands of as many people as possible.”

Later the document raises more of the dangers of AI, particularly regarding pathogens:

"No AI lab can ensure a good future alone. For an obvious example, there may be extremely capable models that make it easier to create a new pathogen, and we need a society-wide approach to defend against this with pathogen-agnostic countermeasures.”

I was left wondering whether to be excited or scared for the future. And that feeling of contradiction started to increase the more I read...

Competitive spirit

While the document initially reads as collaborative, and there is a lot of talk about getting AI into the hands of everyone: “We want a future where everyone can have an excellent life”, Altman says, the question I have is how that happens.

Altman is talking about distribution, and in practice that usually means shipping faster, integrating it into more products and reaching more users — all things which define competition in tech. For that to happen in practice, it feels like OpenAI is going to have to become more competitive than it already is.

And when Altman says later, “We will learn quickly and course-correct”, he means shipping, learning, improving and repeating, which sits uneasily next to the new documents heavy safety framing.

Even when he says “We deserve an enormous amount of scrutiny” — it sounds humble on the surface, but strategically it’s perhaps more about OpenAI's willingness to justify decisions publicly. It’s the kind of language companies tend to use when they’re under increasing scrutiny.

In fact, the more I read the whole document, the more it starts to sound contradictory. Safety implies restraint and deliberation while scale implies speed and iteration.

After reading the document I’m still not entirely sure what OpenAI’s principles actually are. Principles should be clear and emphatic, while this document feels softer and more flexible, giving OpenAI more room for maneuver than it had before.

It’s hard not to think of the famous quote by Groucho Marx “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

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