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. 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. This means that in addition to giving everyone access to AI, we need to ensure that key decisions about AI are made via democratic processes and with egalitarian principles, and not just made by AI labs. 2. Empowerment. We believe AI can empower everyone to achieve their goals, learn more, be happier and more fulfilled, and pursue their dreams, and that society as a whole will benefit from this. Achieving this requires letting people explore the enormous potential in front of us, and we need to build products that enable this. Users should reliably be able to accomplish increasingly valuable tasks with our services. The world is diverse and people have different needs. We want to give our users the autonomy they need and allow as much as we reasonably can. Although we want to give our users very broad latitude in how they use our services and strongly believe that AI will be hugely beneficial on the whole, we have a responsibility to build and deploy it in a way that minimizes harm. This includes of course preventing catastrophic harm, but also minimizing local harms and avoiding potential corrosive societal effects. This will mean erring on the side of caution in the face of uncertainty, and relaxing constraints with more evidence. 3. Universal prosperity. We want a future where everyone can have an excellent life. By putting easy-to-use AI systems with a lot of compute power into the hands of everyone, we believe people will find new ways to generate value and massively improve quality-of-life for everyone, especially with discovery of new science. For prosperity to be fully realized and widely shared, we believe that 1) our…