Our principles

AI has the potential to significantly improve many aspects of society.

This technology, like others before, will give people more capability and agency; what people will be able to do with AI will dwarf what people could do with steam engines or electricity.

We envision a world with widespread flourishing at a level that is currently difficult to imagine, and a world in which individual potential, agency, and fulfillment significantly increase. A lot of the things we’ve only let ourselves dream about in sci-fi could become reality, and most people could live more meaningful lives than most are able to today.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were nervous about releasing the weights of GPT‑2 because we weren’t sure what the impacts on society will be. Obviously in retrospect that was a misplaced worry, but it led to us discovering the strategy of iterative deployment, which has been one of the most important things we’ve figured out.

4. Resilience. AI will introduce new risks, and we will work with other companies, ecosystems, governments, and society to solve them. We will make significant use of our Foundation’s resources to support this work.

But this outcome is not guaranteed. Power in the future can either be held by a small handful of companies using and controlling superintelligence, or it can be held in a decentralized way by people. We believe the latter is much better, and our goal is to put truly general AI in the hands of as many people as possible. Like the present, the future won’t be all bad or all good, but the decisions we make now can help maximize the good.

Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Here are the principles that guide our work.

1. Democratization. We will resist the potential of this technology to consolidate power in the hands of the few.