ph6 The Fight for the Soul of A.I.

One of the nice things about OpenAI is that it was built on distrust. It began as a nonprofit research lab because its founders didn’t think artificial intelligence should be pioneered by commercial firmsph6, which are driven overwhelmingly by the profit motive.

As it evolved, OpenAI turned into what you might call a fruitful contradiction: a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit board with a corporate culture somewhere in between.

Many of the people at the company seem simultaneously motivated by the scientist’s desire to discover, the capitalist’s desire to ship product and the do-gooder’s desire to do this all safely.

The events of the past week — Sam Altman’s firing, all the drama, his rehiring — revolve around one central question: Is this fruitful contradiction sustainable?

Can one organization, or one person, maintain the brain of a scientist, the drive of a capitalist and the cautious heart of a regulatory agency? Or, as Charlie Warzel wrote in The Atlantic, will the money always win out?

It’s important to remember that A.I. is quite different from other parts of the tech world. It is (or at least was) more academic. A.I. is a field that had a research lineage stretching back centuries. Even today, many of the giants of the field are primarily researchers, not entrepreneurs — people like Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing Award (the Nobel Prize of computing) together in 2018 and now disagree about where A.I. is taking us.

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