OpenAI quietly rewrites its core values to focus on AGI

OpenAI just gave its company culture a blunt reality check.

According to Semafor, the company quietly overhauled the core values listed on its careers page in recent weeks, stripping away corporate fluff to double down on artificial general intelligence.

Out with unpretentious, in with AGI

An Internet Archive snapshot from September 25 shows OpenAI previously listed six values: Audacious, Thoughtful, Unpretentious, Impact-driven, Collaborative, and Growth-oriented.

That list is gone. It now features five values, headlined by AGI focus.

OpenAI spells it out plainly on the page: anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope.

The other four values are intense and scrappy, scale, make something people love, and team spirit.

CEO Sam Altman has previously defined AGI as roughly equivalent to a median human coworker, while the company's 2018 charter called it highly autonomous systems outperforming humans at economically valuable work.

Why it matters

This is OpenAI officially dropping any remaining pretense of being a gentle research non-profit. The pivot from thoughtful and unpretentious to intense and scale signals a wartime footing.

For anyone tracking the frontier model race, the message is loud and clear: OpenAI is cutting off side quests to pour every ounce of compute and talent into reaching AGI.

In our view, this laser focus gives OpenAI an operational edge by eliminating internal distractions. However, quietly dropping thoughtful from the playbook will only fuel outside worries that safety checks might take a back seat to raw speed.