This is the charter of the California-based startup OpenAI, founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and many others. The charter delineates the core mission and modus operandi of this unique endeavor. Specifically, the charter captures the company’s core principles: Broadly Distributed Benefits, Long-Term Safety, Technical Leadership, and Cooperative Orientation. This charter is important because it the technology that OpenAI develops will be critical in the race to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the years to come – it already has achieved groundbreaking results with its latest model, GPT-3, and it reflects their goal of keeping this technology safe and in the open. OpenAI wants to prevent the scenario where any single entity or country has a monopoly on AGI – which would pose the greatest cybersecurity threat we have ever encountered – from ever happening. To this end, the charter explains how the company is governed and how it operates, and should serve as a model for the future of technology development.
