[Eridrus]

I think its an admission that the near term benefits are from applications of existing tech, not AGI, and they have hired for folks who want to do research, not people who want to do the grueling work of making a startup.

This is fine though if OpenAI actually has an edge. I don't think they have a meaningful tech edge, you can see folks like GPT-Neo fully reimplement the ideas in papers. I also think they see this since they're looking to make a small amount of investments, and the big benefits of things like the GPT-3 API are for low experience/funding projects.

But maybe they have an edge in evaluating AI startups, and an edge in advising them beyond the typical VC. And if they do have a good repeatable edge there, this actually seems like a pretty interesting way to fund a research lab.