OpenAI has quietly changed its core values, and being 'thoughtful' and 'audacious' no longer makes the cut

• OpenAI has quietly changed the core values it displays on its career page.
• Being "thoughtful," "audacious," and "impact-driven" are out.
• Instead, the company now values "AGI focus" and being "intense and scrappy."

OpenAI has quietly changed its core values on the company's careers page.

A snapshot from the Internet Archive of the page on September 25 shows the company's original core values — including attributes like "audacious," "thoughtful," "unpretentious," "impact-driven," "collaborative," and "growth-oriented."

OpenAI's new core values are now "AGI focus," "intense and scrappy," "scale," "make something people love," and "team spirit," per the company's careers page. It is unclear when the change occurred.

The initial set of core values had been used since at least January 2022, per the Internet Archive.

While some older core values seem to have been folded into new ones, others lack a clear replacement.

Being "unpretentious" is now mentioned under being "intense and scrappy," while being "collaborative" is now listed under "team spirit."

Being "thoughtful" has no clear substitute on OpenAI's careers page. The company's career page previously stated: "We thoroughly consider the consequences of our work and welcome diversity of thought." The company still has a statement about how it values diversity and inclusion on the careers page, but no longer lists it as a core value.

Meanwhile, OpenAI's new core value, "AGI focus," refers to artificial general intelligence, a form of AI that can understand, learn, and perform any intellectual task that a human being can.

"For me, AGI…is the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a co-worker," Altman told the New Yorker in September.

Experts are divided over the feasibility of AGI and when it is likely to occur. Geoffrey Hinton, who is considered to be the godfather of AI, estimated that it could take up to twenty years to develop.

OpenAI was cofounded by former Y Combinator president Sam Altman and tech billionaire Elon Musk in 2015 — though Musk eventually parted ways with the company three years later. The company is currently headed by Altman and is on course to hit $1 billion in sales by August 2024, the Information reported. In January, Microsoft confirmed that it was investing an additional $10 billion into the AI company.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, sent outside regular business hours.