Same way for me.

Imagine what a genuinely openness-focused organization of this sort could be. Even if we imagined a commercial half, we could imagine a foundation with mass-membership, perhaps with a membership fee equal to 1/2 the typical personal subscription and functioning to set the direction, elect the board, etc., and then a commercial half which might be rough, tricky, deceptive, making deals with anybody.

I think I'd have been fine with the commercial half being a bit of a monster, as long as I'm part of the members and we decide what sort of board it gets and there's a clear "this is basically controlled by the public" and if I were part of a club of this sort, I would, like you absolutely fill up a directory with texts and computer programs and careful annotations to aid training.

and they could have had it. It could have been easy to make an organization like this. I think you still can. An international AI club, the members vote on what sort of training material may be supplied and for what intents, create some committees to review quality, and then everyone starts making their little games and RL environments and annotated stories and programs that ordinary LLMs misunderstand, and then they get together and fine-tune something, and if that works well they then get some staff and better training infrastructure and end up with a commercial half.

Both you and the parent comment give Sam Altman a lot of undue credit. He was given funding specifically because his sociopathic tendencies were considered useful for the job. It was only after he had connections through YC that he started fearmongering around AI. The "AGI" concept as he describes it is part and parcel with this deceptive marketing that he does.

How can any of us act surprised, now that OpenAI has gone mask-off? Sam made those Worldcoin orbs. He's Paul Graham's cannibal king. You have been warned at every stop along this road, and yet we still take him seriously when he says empty platitudes to placate investors. AGI is like "China's Final Warning", a plain lie that only teases a potential innovation but never precedes it.