Three and a half years since OpenAI ushered artificial intelligence into the mainstream with the release of ChatGPT, its CEO and cofounder says the company is entering its third phase — making AI abundant, accessible, and safe.
Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, published a blog post on Monday outlining their plan for the company. They said the first phase of OpenAI was about research toward artificial general intelligence, while the second was about offering their products to the world and learning how people actually use them.
“Now we are entering the third phase,” Altman and Pachocki wrote. “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. Frontier capability is only part of the job. The bigger task is turning that capability into tools people can actually use to thrive.”
They said OpenAI has three main goals: to build an automated AI researcher, to accelerate the economy, and to give everyone on Earth a personal AGI.
“Powerful systems must remain safe, aligned with human intent, and subject to human control,” they wrote, adding, “Entirely automating everything is not the future we want. It would be unfulfilling, and it would be dangerous. AI should help people pursue their goals, not become untethered from them.”
They also said national and global coordination was needed and reiterated their call for an international organization that would work on reducing risks posed by AI and could slow down the development of frontier models if needed.
“A good AI future cannot be one where a small number of institutions control most of the capability and most of the upside. It should be a future where many people, companies, communities, and countries can build, benefit, and hold power,” Altman and Pachocki said.
The plan came the same day OpenAI announced it had confidentially filed for an initial public offering, though the company said it “may be a while” before its stock actually hits the market.
The blog post was also reminiscent of one from another leading AI company eyeing an IPO. Researchers at Anthropic said in a post last week that AI is advancing so quickly that leading frontier labs may need to slow down.
“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology,” the post said.
Read the full blog post from OpenAI here.
