Foundering
OpenAI Walked Back Early Promises of ‘Openness’
The project began with an emphasis on open-source and nonprofit ideals.
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In OpenAI’s early days, its employees were motivated by the sci-fi dream of building an artificial general intelligence, which could think and solve problems better than a human mind. They were also driven by a high-minded vision: to be an antidote to the closed-off, profit-oriented incentives of AI rivals such as Google. At first, though, the reality was a little more mundane, and they spent their days building bots that played video games and solved Rubik’s cubes.