The Role Of Purpose In A GAI World

The recent tumultuous events at OpenAI mark the end of the old OpenAI, originally conceived as a nonprofit, and the rise of a new one that seeks investment and develops products.

As a result, the internal governance structure of OpenAI is expected to change.

Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that the old structure and ethos will not disappear wholesale, but there will be some change. How exactly needs to be defined.

Whether it will maintain its original nonprofit ethos or transform into a more commercially driven entity we will see.

But if we take OpenAI’s mission at its word, the stakes couldn’t be much higher. The company aims to develop AI technology that makes machines with capabilities on par with or exceeding those of humans, potentially affecting nearly every job in the world.

Even if it falls short of that goal, the way OpenAI governs itself could determine who prospers and who suffers from the rollout of world-shaping AI technologies like ChatGPT.

At the same time, competitors like Google and Amazon aren’t bound to the same structural limitations as OpenAI.

Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, asks in an interview on Wired: “Does OpenAI want to be a startup that just has some ethical grounding? Or does it want to be a lasting public institution that is building AI in service of humanity? They need to get clear with themselves, and get clear with the world on what they want to be.”

I couldn’t agree more with that and I found his words an invitation to ponder the importance of purpose for OpenAI and all startups or newborn companies in the GAI world.

The question has never been so important:

“What’s their purpose?”

“What’s their reason to exist?”

“Is everyone working in these hyper-tech companies aware of it?“

Most importantly, is everyone’s purpose aligned with the purpose-driven organization’s culture?