Sam Altman’s departure: speed, scale, and safety in Artificial Intelligence.

In new technology, a trilemma often emerges between conflicting values: speed, safety, and scale.

OpenAI’s launch propelled artificial intelligence into previously untapped avenues of speed and scale, creating an easy-to-use interactive product that was as elegant on the human side as it was complex on the backend.

Such a product was rightly lauded, and CEO Sam Altman became a figurehead of the burgeoning AI movement.

But what about safety?

Safety is more than technical provenance: it is the structural safeguarding of a common, broader good for all humankind. It is the relentless process of securing that technology can do no harm before scaling it.

While OpenAI admirably began as a nonprofit, it didn’t take long for the immense promise of the project to escape its initial containment. The nonprofit project became, in practice, a for-profit company worth north of $80 billion dollars — yet still managed by the nonprofit board installed to safeguard the project.

Sam Altman’s dismissal — and subsequent immediate hiring by Microsoft — has brought to light some of the uncomfortable tensions between AI as a utility and AI as a product.

As a utility, AI has given the world an almost unthinkable amount of newfound power, potential, and possibility. If the internet brought raw data to the forefront of the digital world, AI has the power to turn that raw information into action.

This action, unfathomable in its scale and potential, necessitates the consideration, compliance, and care that humans must seek to apply. The power involved in the utility drastically alters the associated safety that must be considered and managed.

a digital extension, an experience that not only reflects our humanity but expands and enhances it.

Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI is a clear signal of what is all too common in the technical spaces: prioritization of rapid commercialization over AI safety. In the trilemma of speed, scale, and safety, relentless investor pressure can sometimes prioritize the first two at the expense of the third. But without safety, clarity, and compliance, no AI project can be trusted — and human trust is the most important problem for AI as we create new applications with AI.

​​The board of OpenAI took that mission seriously. Whatever unknown unknowns remain in the ether of Sam Altman’s ousting, it is clear that these concerns, in terms of scale, can be well justified even as we search for the specifics that industry experts have clamored for time and again.

At MIMIO, we believe in a holistic approach towards AI to establish not just the technical guidelines required for personalized AI, but also the ethical considerations of how AI can and will impact its users, our society — and even the AIs themselves.

Doing so requires us to earn trust with clarity, honesty, and transparency, and keeping MIMIO aligned with our core purpose and values above all.

These values center on our ultimate vision of AI to be not just a tool for tasks but a digital extension, an experience that not only reflects our humanity but expands and enhances it. Rather than building AI as a generalist tool, we’re working to create an AI model capable of distinguishing and reflecting the individual humanity of the user. Such a process, while scalable, is uniquely intimate. And, since people know themselves, it can’t be faked.

To meet that ambition of a meaningful product, we need to cleave tightly to our purposeful mission. And central to that purpose is elevating safety above all else.

But safety is more than encoded: it also extends to the human element of trust. With faith in companies and institutions at such deep lows, it’s no surprise to see that mood extend to AI. Combatting that insecurity will require a concerted effort from companies and even governments working in tandem to create and implement the standards we can all count on as we work to build our collective futures with AI. To do so means elevating the discussion of trust and safety beyond boardroom drama and into a meaningful conversation between experts and leaders.

Only a clear, holistic, and trusted vision of AI can truly succeed. And, with so much at stake, we at MIMIO will work tirelessly to bring it about, and hope you will join us on this journey as we build the world’s first Personality Engine™