Details Emerge on Sam Altman’s Panic Sweats

OpenAI has long made it its number one goal to realize artificial general intelligence, which it described in a 2023 blog post as “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans,” and which will benefit “all of humanity.”

Since then, experts have often accused the company of repeatedly shifting the goalposts, greatly watering down its original goal of an AI truly capable of surpassing the intellect of a human being.

And now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly setting aside what was once his firm’s top priority in an effort to stop the company from succumbing to its steep competition.

Last week, news emerged that the rattled executive had declared a “code red” in a note to staffers obtained by the Wall Street Journal, urging them to improve the quality of ChatGPT at the cost of delaying other projects, like advertising and a personal assistant.

Now, the newspaper has revealed new details about Altman’s call to arms, suggesting OpenAI “may have to pause” its quest to pursue AGI for the company to survive.

It’s a damning admission, highlighting how much pressure is building up on the company as it plans to spend well north of a trillion dollars to build out infrastructure over the next five years. Google, whose AI offerings are rapidly catching up, has clearly sent a strong signal, causing OpenAI’s executive branch to batten up the hatches and double down on its core offering, ChatGPT.

Instead of vetting the tool’s output with the help of human professionals, Altman is looking to make “better use of user signals,” per the WSJ. In other words, the company is doubling down on user feedback to boost engagement — even if that means making its models more sycophantic, which can have disastrous side effects.

It’s a neck-in-neck race between OpenAI and Google. OpenAI is expected to release its latest AI model, called 5.2, later this week, likely a response to Google’s Gemini 3, which impressed with benchmarks that exceeded OpenAI’s current most powerful models.

Google’s Nano Banana Pro AI image model, which was released last month, has also been hailed as a substantial leap, while OpenAI’s video and controversy-generating app, Sora, has fallen by the wayside. In fact, according to the WSJ, Sora may also be put on pause as OpenAI doubles down on ChatGPT.

OpenAI staffers appear to be painfully aware of OpenAI and Google trading blows, closely following LM Arena, an AI leaderboard that assigns each AI model a score based on users choosing the best output to the same prompt between two AI models.

Indeed, Altman argued in his memo that “we should be at the top of things like LM [A]rena.”

To do so, the executive is calling on the company to focus on making its AI models more personable, a quality that experts warn could lead to more users spiraling into severe delusions.

Where that leaves OpenAI’s original goal of building an AI that can surpass the intellect of a human being remains unclear at best. Altman, who has long garnered a reputation for setting sweeping and extremely ambitious goals, is now singing a notably different tune from before — as his company doubles down on its number one money maker at all costs.

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