OpenAI has long made it its number one goal to realize artificial general intelligence, which it describes in 2023 blog post “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans” and that would benefit “all of humanity”.
Since then, experts have often accused the company changing goalposts frequentlyIn fact significantly undermining its original goal of AI being able to surpass human intelligence.
And now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly sidelining what was once his firm’s top priority in an effort to prevent the company from succumbing to stiffer competition.
Last week, news emerged that the embattled executive had declared “Code Red.” Note to employees received by wall street journalHe was urged to improve the quality of ChatGPTT at the expense of delaying other projects like advertising and a personal assistant.
Now, the newspaper has New details emerge about Altman’s call to armsSuggesting that OpenAI “may have to put on hold” its pursuit of advancing AGI to keep the company alive.
It’s a sobering admission, highlighting how much pressure the company is under as it plans to spend more than a trillion dollars building infrastructure over the next five years. Google, whose AI offerings are growing rapidly, has clearly sent a strong signal, causing the OpenAI executive arm to work hard and double down on its core offering, ChatGPT.
Instead of checking the tool’s output with the help of human professionals, Altman is looking to “make better use of user signals.” WSJIn other words, the company is doubling down on user feedback to increase engagement — even if it means making its models flatter, which could have disastrous side effects,
It is a close race between OpenAI and Google. OpenAI is expected to release its latest AI model, called 5.2, later this week, which is likely a response to Google’s Gemini 3, which is benchmarked against OpenAI’s current most powerful model.
Google’s Nano Banana Pro AI image model, released last month This was also hailed as a giant leap forwardWhile OpenAI’s video is going to create more controversy The app, Sora, has fallen by the wayside. In fact, according to WSJSora can also be stopped as OpenAI doubles down on ChatGPT.
It appears that OpenAI staff are very well aware of the ups and downs of OpenAI and Google Trading, they closely follow LM Arena, an AI leaderboard that assigns each AI model a score based on users choosing the best output for the same prompt between two AI models.
Indeed, Altman argued in his memo that “we should be on top of things like LM(A)RENA.”
To do this, the executive has called on the company to focus on making its AI models more engaging, a quality that experts warn could lead to serious confusion among more users.
Where this leaves OpenAI’s original goal of building AI that can surpass human intelligence is still unclear. Altman, who has long had a reputation for setting sweeping and extremely ambitious goals, is now singing a different tune than before – as his company has doubled from the number one money maker at all costs.
More on Altman: OpenAI is suddenly in big trouble
