Our principles
Key Points
- Democratize AI access
- Prioritize resilience and safety
- Invest in infrastructure for broad prosperity
Summary
OpenAI outlines five operational principles for developing AGI: democratization, empowerment, universal prosperity, resilience, and adaptability. The company prioritizes broad access to powerful models, minimizing centralized control, iterating deployments to manage harm, investing in infrastructure to drive down costs, and remaining transparent and responsive as capabilities evolve.
Key Points
- Democratize access: design products and APIs so that diverse users can access and reuse capabilities; favor governance and decision-making that preserves decentralization.
- Empower users: maximize autonomy and utility so users can accomplish increasingly valuable tasks while providing guardrails to minimize local and catastrophic harms.
- Build for universal prosperity: invest in compute, datacenters, vertical integration, and cost reduction to enable widespread economic participation and new value creation.
- Prioritize resilience and safety: use iterative deployment, technical alignment, and cross-sector collaboration (governments, agencies, other labs) to address systemic risks (e.g., biosecurity, cybersecurity).
- Be adaptable and transparent: update policies and operating principles as evidence emerges; be explicit about trade-offs (e.g., empowerment vs. resilience) and course-correct rapidly.
- Engineer guidance: adopt conservative defaults under uncertainty, instrument deployments for feedback, use models to harden infrastructure and OSS, and plan for long-term monitoring and governance integration.