Well, I mean, if we take what they themselves said (at the time) as truth, then that was their sincere mission:

> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/

Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

> Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

We're talking about Sam Altman here. Of course he was lying from the beginning, just as he's lying to his investors now about the future of his company. I think most of us are just confused why the world seems to have perpetual amnesia when it comes to Sam Altman—he can do and say whatever he wants to get ahead and a year later people are still taking him at his word.

> Well, I mean, if we take what they themselves said (at the time) as truth, then that was their sincere mission

In general, you should never take anything a corporation or an extremely wealthy person says as sincere.

Like an LLM, what they say corresponds occasionally with "beliefs" but don't confuse that with holding sincere beliefs. It's mostly transactional.

The few exceptions to this rule - who are rarely the most wealthy/powerful - are generally considered traitors to their class.

>Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.

I don't see how those notions contradict each other when it's all to get funding.

That's not what investors want to hear, so it definitely wasn't to get funding

It was to get engineers. No one wants to hear they are working for the next orphan crushing machine.

Yet...

Or, to put it another way, you presume that investors want to hear how they will make money, as opposed to wanting to hear that OpenAI can 'talk the talk'

I don't mean to engage in conspiratorial thinking but I believe in this industry we have to assume dishonesty. It's just so many orders of magnitude easier to run a con than actually do the thing being promised.

Some of the parties involved are known for long-cons, shameless backstabbing, and generally ruthless self-interest.

So I would wouldn't be surprised if the "open" and "non-profit" was just a thin PR veneer from the start.

It would also explain how values consistent with their supposed mission seem to have been zero consideration in hiring. (Given that, during what looked like a coup, almost all of those hires lined up to effectively say they would discard the values in exchange for more money.)

US tax law is designed to help with this - the tax status of nonprofits is evaluated based on if their activity supports their published mission.

Those mission statements (ostensibly) have teeth!

And US law is rigorously enforced these days.