Silicon Valley has never been famous for its moral practices. In the latest series of (unfortunate) events OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker has been second guessing its core values as it recently tweaked them secretly. The AI company’s revised career page mentions its values as “AGI focus,” “intense and scrappy,” “scale,” “make something people love,” and “team spirit.”

Less than a month ago’s archived page shows the capped-profit company’s original core values — including attributes like “audacious,” “thoughtful,” “unpretentious,” “impact-driven,” “collaborative,” and “growth-oriented.”

In 2019, the same year GPT-2 was released in the wild, OpenAI announced turning from a non-profit to capped profit model to “allow it to rapidly increase investments in compute and talent.“ The company’s co-founder and tech industry’s self proclaimed troubleshooter, Elon Musk also fumed when OpenAI became a ‘$30 billion market cap-company’ after his $100 million donation. 

The budding startup among the who’s who of tech is not the first one to re-do its root principles and move away from its original purpose — the betterment of humanity instead of minting money. In the case of OpenAI, the company has publicly never shied away from voting for an AGI or “the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker.” Hence, the revised language marks a bigger shift in OpenAI’s focus. 

Google’s Mischief Managed

A year before OpenAI was to be founded Google’s Larry Page admitted that the company outgrew its original mission statement to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” from the launch of the company, but he did not know how to redefine it.

Back in 2014, Page set out to do some really big things with the resources at his disposal. He wanted to push the boundaries of technology and the market in various areas, like AI, robotics, health, disease, and biotechnology. This effort was led by Sergey Brin and his Google X labs, which were known for taking on daring “moonshot” projects.

A few years later, the duo moved away from their responsibilities at the company. Google also figured out its love-to-make-money identity and has crossed various lines to do so. The recent episode is when Google updated its privacy policy amid the ongoing ‘bigger the better’ language model war. The updated policy allows the company to collect and analyse information its users share online to “improve its services and develop new AI-powered products.” 

More recently, behind the users’ back, Google rewrote its ‘Helpful Content Update’, from “written by people” to “content created for people” to rank sites on its search engine.The linguistic pivot shows that the company does recognise the significance of AI tools. 

The Other End

As some companies have witnessed severe backlash for changing its Terms of Service (TOS), new questions are being raised about customer privacy, choice and trust as some users have no option to opt out of the updates. 

On the contrary, software king Microsoft, which funnelled eyebrows raising $10 billion dollars in OpenAI, has also revamped its terms and conditions to handle AI. The latest five changes limit the user’s from using Microsoft service’s data to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.

The Satya-Nadella run corporation has previously said that it doesn’t save conversations or use that data to train its AI models for its Bing Enterprise Chat mode. Its policies are less clear for its Microsoft 365 Copilot; although it doesn’t appear to use customer data or prompts for training, it does store information.

Joining the veteran’s club, OpenAI lost no time and consolidated core values which now feels like a bunch of fluff. However, it shows OpenAI’s hand when it comes to its single-minded focus looking forward. “We are committed to building safe, beneficial AGI that will have a massive positive impact on humanity’s future,” the OpenAI job postings page now explains. “Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope.”