Can we talk about the usage of the term "AGI" here? Considering its connotations in popular culture it sounds terrifically inappropriate in terms of what we can feasibly build today.
Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?
Open AI has always had AGI as their real mission as far as I know. And always been serious about it.
It is a research mission. No one "feasibly" knows exactly how to build AGI yet. But still we have many groups publicly pursuing it today.
If Microsoft is giving them a billion dollars in this context, I assume that Open AI engineers and scientists will build out services for Azure ML that will then be sold to developers or consumers.
This type of thing is actually pretty normal for just about every company that is seriously pursuing AGI, since they eventually need some kind of income and narrow AI is the way for those types of teams to do that.
The purpose of OpenAI is to eventually lead to safe AGI. It's part of their core business purpose. Whatever they do with Machine Learning today is merely instrumental in leading up to that goal.
We certainly cannot feasibly build AGI today, hence OpenAI's use of the term "pre-AGI technologies".
I can't see how pure AGI can be "safe". Huge part of human intellect revolves around the need to survive,be it danger,lack of food,or less rational choices based on emotions.If computers can rationalise positive behaviour of humans,they may not be able to do so well with greed, jealousy, hunger for power,that aren't very logical processes but create a lot of positive and negative nonetheless.
Can we assume that marketing overrode engineering on the terminology of this press release?