Can OpenAI Live Up To The ‘Open’ Brand Promise?

Is Their Company Name a Core Value Or Marketing Spin

You learn a lot when buying a first home. I learned that there are principal agent issues with your realtor exacerbated by the transactional incentive model. I learned that disclosure statements can be worded in a very specific manner that doesn’t truly describe what happens to your basement during rainy season. And I learned that the origin of a neighborhood’s name will reveal whether or not it’s descriptively accurate. What do I mean by this last point? Well, right next to where I live is called ‘Sunnyside.’ If it was given this label by the land’s indigenous peoples then it almost certainly is sunny. But if it was coined ‘Sunnyside’ by the real estate industry you can assume it’s foggy AF. [spoiler, in my case it’s foggy]

Hearing a company’s brand name always brings me back to this point. Was it coined because the promise provides a true north to its identity? A goal for every employee to live up to every day when they think themselves as representing the organization? Or was it a feint? Something that reassures each time it’s spoken but with no actual deep roots. A plastic flower instead of a living blossom.

I think of this every time “OpenAI” is mentioned. And these days OpenAI is mentioned a lot! The technology betas released by this group have been some of the most compelling, exciting, and energizing experiences our industry has shared in years. And I applaud them for moving quickly towards ‘general availability’ (although one can assume that the usage data becomes its own moat). Their work has entered my Top 10 of personal “isn’t software amazing” moments. But I then pause and wonder about the name.

What does ‘Open’ aspire to in this case? In their 2015 introductory blog post, the group said

We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution. As a non-profit, our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world. We’ll freely collaborate with others across many institutions and expect to work with companies to research and deploy new technologies.

My assumption is that Open was juxtaposed against a potential future ‘owned’ (and siloed) by Google, Apple, etc and the promise was you needed a fundamentally different…