OpenAI boss Sam Altman has updated his company’s mission statement, outlining the steps needed to achieve human-level artificial intelligence.
The 1,100-word document, published on OpenAI’s website on Sunday, details five guiding “principles” to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI) “benefits all of humanity”.
They include democratisation of the technology, greater user empowerment, improved safety resilience, better corporate adaptability, and what Altman refers to as “universal prosperity” through the building of huge amounts of AI infrastructure.
“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 decentralised way by people,” he wrote.
“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... Our mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.”
There are some notable key differences to the language used compared to previous mission statements, which focused on ushering AGI in the safest way possible.
He claimed that holding back models that might pose a threat – like OpenAI did with the restricted roll out of GPT-2 – was a “misplaced worry”.
Instead, Altman said OpenAI would “embrace that uncertainty” by deploying its systems and learning from their interactions with the world.
OpenAI unveiled its most powerful AI model to date last week, describing it as a “new class of intelligence”.
The GPT-5.5 is designed to carry out tasks, like online research and data analysis, without human oversight.
“What’s really special about this model is how much more it can do with less guidance,” said OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, claiming it could conduct “messy, multi-part tasks” intuitively and independently.
Early users of the latest model, which is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users, have claimed that it feels like it is approaching human-level artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Pietro Schirano, chief executive of AI design took MagicPath, said in a post to X that he had his “first taste of AGI” using GPT-5.5.