What if friendliness is not a property of the technology, but of the use? With all the potential concerns of AGI, I think nuclear technology is a good analogue. It has great potential for peaceful use, but proliferation of nuclear weapons is a so-far inseparable problem of the technology. It's also relatively easy to use nuclear technology unsafely compared to safely.
The precedent for general intelligence is not good. The only example we know of (ourselves) is a known existential threat.
OpenAI is a research company - that's what research is, working out how to do things we don't know how to do. Research requires some money so at one level it is a money problem.
but this is alchemy isn't it? there isn't even a theoretical framework from which we can even begin to suggest how to keep any "general intelligence" benign. good old fashioned research notwithstanding, a billion dollars is not about to change this. it reads to more to me like this is an investment in azure (ie microsoft picking up some machine learning expertise to leverage in its future cloud services). that's not a judgement, and i'm sure lots of cool work will still come from this, given the strength of the team and massive backing they have. it just smells funny.
