#14: If there have indeed been secret capability gains, so that Altman was not joking about reaching AGI internally (it seems likely that he was joking, though given the stakes, it’s probably not the sort of thing to joke about), then the way I read their documents, the board should make that determination:
Fifth, the board determines when we’ve attained AGI. Again, by AGI we mean a highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work. Such a system is excluded from IP licenses and other commercial terms with Microsoft, which only apply to pre-AGI technology.
Once they’ve made that determination, then Microsoft will not have access to the AGI technology. Given the possible consequences, I doubt that Microsoft would have found such a joke very amusing.
Honestly this does seem… possible. A disagreement on whether GPT-5 counts as AGI would have this effect. The most safety minded would go “ok, this is AGI, we can’t give it to Microsoft”. The more business oriented and less conservative would go “no, this isn’t AGI yet, it’ll make us a fuckton of money though”. There would be conflict. But for example seeing how now everyone might switch to Microsoft and simply rebuild the thing from scratch there, Ilya despairs and decides to do a 180 because at least this way he gets to supervise the work somehow.
#14: If there have indeed been secret capability gains, so that Altman was not joking about reaching AGI internally (it seems likely that he was joking, though given the stakes, it’s probably not the sort of thing to joke about), then the way I read their documents, the board should make that determination:
Once they’ve made that determination, then Microsoft will not have access to the AGI technology. Given the possible consequences, I doubt that Microsoft would have found such a joke very amusing.
Honestly this does seem… possible. A disagreement on whether GPT-5 counts as AGI would have this effect. The most safety minded would go “ok, this is AGI, we can’t give it to Microsoft”. The more business oriented and less conservative would go “no, this isn’t AGI yet, it’ll make us a fuckton of money though”. There would be conflict. But for example seeing how now everyone might switch to Microsoft and simply rebuild the thing from scratch there, Ilya despairs and decides to do a 180 because at least this way he gets to supervise the work somehow.