[Question] Will OpenAI’s work unintentionally increase existential risks related to AI?

[The original question was “Is OpenAI increasing the existential risks related to AI?” I changed it to the current one following a discussion with Rohin in the comments. It clarifies that my question asks about the consequences of OpenAI’s work will assuming positive and aligned intentions.]

This is a question I’ve been asked recently by friends interested in AI Safety and EA. Usually this question comes from discussions around GPT-3 and the tendency of OpenAI to invest a lot in capabilities research.

[Following this answer by Vaniver, I propose for a baseline/​counterfactual the world where OpenAI doesn’t exists but the researchers there still do.]

Yet I haven’t seen it discussed here. Is it a debate we failed to have, or has there already been some discussion around it? I found a post from 3 years ago, but I think the situation probably changed in the meantime.

A couple of arguments for and against to prompt your thinking:

  • OpenAI is increasing the existential risks related to AI because:

    • They are doing far more capability research than safety research;

    • They are pushing the state of the art of capability research;

    • Their results will motivate many people to go work on AI capabilities, whether out of wonder or out of fear of unemployment.

  • OpenAI is not increasing the existential risks related to AI because:

    • They have a top-notch safety team;

    • They restrict the access to their models, by either not releasing them outright (GPT-2) or bottlenecking access through their API (GPT-3);

    • Their results are showing the potential dangers of AI, and pushing many people to go work on AI safety.Is OpenAI increasing the existential risks related to AI?