Because they belong to Microsoft. Because they are funded by rich people who own established businesses. Because they are the privileged .01% who are invested in the status quo. Because their whole networks consist of people with entrenched business interests. Pick one or more. Why would you think rich American engineers are in general any more worried about the overall safety of the world then their own self interest? That's what they show day in day out with their decisions.
They don't — 49%, and they get to buy themselves out of even that, and if they do that by eating MS's lunch? Then it would suck to be an MS shareholder.
And they've been cautious since before the investment, with the cautious announcement of GPT-2 a month before the change in corporate structure to allow investors.
But even if OpenAI were owned completely by MS, why should MS care? Disrupting all employment sounds like the raison d'être for most if not all of silicon valley.
At the very least, imagine all the employees MS could let go if GPT-4 was even 80% as good as the advertisements in the form of "buy my guide for how to use GPT to make a fortune with best selling books/award winning advertisements/fantastic business proposals" keep claiming.
> Why would you think rich American engineers are in general any more worried about the overall safety of the world then their own self interest?
One is a subset of the other.
People regularly disagree about how risky things are, but they don't generally pick "destroy all things" over "destroy that which is close to me" when they actually believe that's the real choice and not, say, a panicked Chicken Little (which is how I think LeCun sees Yudkowsky).
MS not owning OpenAI outright is a technicality. "It would suck to be an MS shareholder" due to things done to subsidiaries of MS constitutes dereliction of duty by MS officers. MS is not Silicon Valley. They're based in Seattle and predate 95% of SV. Besides this is just one of my points. Even if everything you claimed were to be true, OpenAI still is, as I pointed out, part of the American Corporate establishment and despite their PR posturing, they won't provide us with technology to disrupt said establishment.
They are clearly trying to angle for maximizing the profitability of that establishment.
> OpenAI still is, as I pointed out, part of the American Corporate establishment and despite their PR posturing, they won't provide us with technology to disrupt said establishment
They're not acting like they're part of the American corporate establishment, and I don't understand why you think they are.
