It's a real shame OpenAI didn't succeed with their core and most fundamental mission of being open and improving humanity as a whole, where new FOSS models would have been seen as a success, not as a competitor or threat. We're all worse off because of it.
You frame it like they sincerely had this mission at all. Which I doubt seriously. Why would anyone who funded them have such aim?
> OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact.
https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/
Of course, they could have been lying at that point, in order to gain interest I suppose , but they were pretty outspoken about that idea at least in the beginning.
I don't see how those notions contradict each other when it's all to get funding.
Or, to put it another way, you presume that investors want to hear how they will make money, as opposed to wanting to hear that OpenAI can 'talk the talk'
In general, you should never take anything a corporation or an extremely wealthy person says as sincere.
Like an LLM, what they say corresponds occasionally with "beliefs" but don't confuse that with holding sincere beliefs. It's mostly transactional.
The few exceptions to this rule - who are rarely the most wealthy/powerful - are generally considered traitors to their class.
We're talking about Sam Altman here. Of course he was lying from the beginning, just as he's lying to his investors now about the future of his company. I think most of us are just confused why the world seems to have perpetual amnesia when it comes to Sam Altman—he can do and say whatever he wants to get ahead and a year later people are still taking him at his word.
Those mission statements (ostensibly) have teeth!
So I would wouldn't be surprised if the "open" and "non-profit" was just a thin PR veneer from the start.
It would also explain how values consistent with their supposed mission seem to have been zero consideration in hiring. (Given that, during what looked like a coup, almost all of those hires lined up to effectively say they would discard the values in exchange for more money.)