AI for self empowerment

We create AI in order to empower people. As AI technology progress continues, a key focus for the world should be tracking the capability overhang: the gap between what AI systems can now do and the value most people, businesses, and countries are actually capturing from them at scale.

One challenge with even understanding the size of the capability overhang is that AI is a very counterintuitive technology which continually plays out in surprising ways. We launched ChatGPT three years ago with an at-the-time frontier AI that could answer simple questions, and were shocked by how quickly it was adopted and the creative ways people found to apply it in their lives. We now have frontier AI which can reason and act across increasingly complex tasks, from building software to performing mathematical research, and we don't yet know the full extent of how it will integrate into business or personal life. As Alan Kay said, "the best way to predict the future is to invent it", and we've found that it takes a community of people exploring these tools to find amazing new uses that their capability has unlocked.

Just like with the invention of computers themselves, those who lean into the technology can reach a new level of individual productivity. For example, ChatGPT usage data reveals that the typical power user uses 7x more thinking power (and thus 7x more compute power) than the typical user. Power users don’t just use AI more—they use AI more comprehensively, applying the most advanced capabilities across a wider range of tasks—and as a result they can produce more economically valuable work.

We expect AI to enable some incredible high-level outcomes—such as double-digit GDP growth, affordable and effective healthcare, and rapid scientific advancement—which can raise the floor for everyone, while also raising the ceiling in new ways. The better we manage the capability overhang as a society, the more people will empower themselves to create new economic opportunity by fully exploring what these new tools can do.

OpenAI’s Principles for Managing the Capability Overhang

1. First to Truth

In periods of rapid change, accurate information creates agency. People, businesses, and policymakers can make better decisions given well-grounded, credible data about what is actually happening: which roles are growing or shrinking, how AI is being used in practice, and where productivity gains are emerging. We don’t have all the answers, but we can help.

That's why we've been making public our foundational economic data based insights, including a measurement of how AI tools match up in terms of performance with humans across a range of tasks.

2. Access

As AI increasingly shapes economic outcomes, access to core tools will help people achieve more. Businesses need practical ways to adopt AI at scale, and countries need a systematic way for AI to be applied in their jurisdiction. AI's usefulness will scale directly with compute power, and thus every individual, business, and country needs ways of accessing their own slice of compute.

That's why we created a free tier of ChatGPT, supported by advertising, towards our mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity. We created a now industry-standard API for developers to build applications on top of. We work with many institutions large and small—including governments—to support broad access to frontier AI capabilities.

3. Self Empowerment

We build tools which people can use to shape the future. That means putting a lot of power into people's hands and designing our tools to be customizable and usable in ways we didn't anticipate.

This approach is useful for everyday users and small businesses, where we design product experiences that help people do more than they thought they could—optimize a family’s budget, find jobs more effectively, develop ideas for a future business. It's also useful for unlocking the next wave of innovation, such as for builders and founders, where we support high-agency people who turn frontier capability into new companies, products, and markets.

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We believe this is how the Intelligence Age can expand opportunity for everyone, and result in a future that is much better than the present. We believe everyone should focus on managing the capability overhang so as many people, businesses and countries empower themselves to participate in and benefit from the positive transformative potential of AI.