New Delhi: As OpenAI files for an initial public offering in the United States, founder Sam Altman has unveiled his “current plan” for the company. In an article on the company website, Altman and OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki compared artificial intelligence with electricity, casting it as a net good for humanity.
The article, titled ‘Built to benefit everyone: our plan’, stressed that OpenAI is ‘people-first’. It doesn’t want power to be concentrated in the hands of the developers of AI models.
“We want to empower people broadly, not see power concentrated among a few companies, governments, or individuals. We believe the safer future is one where power is broadly distributed, so more of the world can participate in building a resilience ecosystem,” the authors wrote.
The article comes weeks after Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was invited by Pope Leo XIV to speak at the presentation of the latter’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The company, OpenAI’s key rival, has also presented itself as centring human values.
Altman recently revealed that his company has filed preliminary paperwork for becoming a publicly traded company. This makes it the third major AI developer to go public, after Anthropic and SpaceX.
Third phase of OpenAI
Altman argued in the article that his goal for AI is not complete automation, as that can be ‘unfulfilling and dangerous’.
“As AI systems become more capable, the human role becomes more important: setting direction, making tradeoffs, applying judgment, and bringing values, taste, care, and responsibility to the work,” Altman said.
At the same time, he wants AI research to be conducted by AI. It’s the first of his three main goals for OpenAI:
- Build an automated AI researcher
- Accelerate scientific progress, productivity, and economic growth
- Give everyone on earth a personal artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical type of AI that can match or surpass human capabilities
“Our internal belief is that by March of 2028 we may have a significant fraction of our research being done by AI systems in tandem with our own researchers… This will help us navigate the transition to the post-AGI world so that we collectively decide the path toward the future,” the article read.
Altman and Pachocki called for “national and global coordination” on AI.
“We have long believed there should ultimately be an international organization that helps coordinate leading AI efforts to reduce catastrophic risk,” they wrote, adding that such an organisation should also be empowered to slow AI development when needed.
According to the OpenAI founder, the company is entering its third phase. The first was research, while the second was becoming a product company.
“The economy is beginning to reshape around AI. The central question now is how to make advanced AI abundant, affordable, safe, useful, and easy enough for every person and organization to benefit from it,” Altman wrote.
A recent UN report revealed that the amount of water used up by AI data centres is likely to equal the needs of 1.3 billion people by 2030. But the strain on global resources and local ecosystems went unaddressed in Altman’s article.
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