02/06/2024

Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Make AI More ‘Democratic’

OpenAI scientists are trying to align their AI to human values

One afternoon in early May 2023, Colin Megill nestled into a chair in a plant-filled meeting space at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters.

He was surrounded by seven staff from the world's leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. He wanted Megill's help. 

For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill’s view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

Please select this link to read the complete article from TIME.