Despite the hyperbolic title, the article outlines pretty clearly the outcomes of the OpenAI debacle and where things are headed. "Mission-oriented" AI research is dead; it's just another tech race by the big boys now.
> Both sides of the rift in fact care a great deal about AI Safety.
I disagree. Yes, Sam may have when it OpenAI was founded (unless it was just a ploy), but certainly now it's clear that the big companies are on a race to the top and safety or guardrails are mostly irrelevant.
The primary reason that the Anthropic team left OpenAI was over safety concerns.
most certainly would have still taken place; no one cares about how it was done; what they care about it being able to make $$; and it was clearly going to not be as heavily prioritized without Altman (which is why MSFT embraced him and his engineers almost immediately).
> notified their employees and investors
they did notify their employees; they have fiduciary duty to investors as a nonprofit.
1) openAI was explicitly founded to NOT develop AI based on "market forces"; it's just that they "pivoted" (aka abandoned their mission) once they struck gold in order to become driven by the market
2) this is exactly the reasoning behind nuclear arms races
Exactly this. OpenAI was started for ostensibly the right reasons. But once they discovered something that would both 1) take a tremendous amount of compute power to scale and develop, and 2) could be heavily monetized, they choose the $ route and that point the mission was doomed, with the board members originally brought in to protect the mission holding their fingers in the dyke.
It's clear most employees didn't care much about OpenAI's mission -- and I don't blame them since they were hired by the __for-profit__ OpenAI company and therefore aligned with __its__ goals and rewarded with equity.
In my view the board did the right thing to stand by OpenAI's original mission -- which now clearly means nothing. Too bad they lost out.
One might say the mission was pointless since Google, Meta, MSFT would develop it anyway. That's really a convenience argument that has been used in arms races (if we don't build lots of nuclear weapons, others will build lots of nuclear weapons) and leads to ... well, where we are today :(
Google, Meta and now OpenAI. So long, responsible and safety AI guardrails. Hello, big money.
Disappointed by the outcome, but perhaps mission-driven AI development -- the reason OpenAI was founded -- was never possible.
Edit: I applaud the board members for (apparently, it seems) trying to stand up for the mission (aka doing the job that they were put on the board to do), even if their efforts were doomed.