I assume many people who want OpenAI to fail want to whole AGI program in general to fail, at least for a few decades longer. A competitor won't help, it'll plausibly make it worse.
Agreed. I was talking about folks that wish AI were being built differently (i.e. more transparent, etc.) as opposed to being against the rapid pace of AI development itself. I should have made myself more clear.
Personally the way I'm thinking is AI cooperatives. Democratic membership controlled organisations with relatively low fees to train AI aligned with the interests of the members.
Such organisations won't solve the fact that functioning AGI or very effective LLMs that can program or solve general text tasks precisely reduces the power of workers, but they'd at least mean that ordinary people control their own propaganda apparatus and are not stuck with models that are part of other people's propaganda apparatus (the state, Microsoft shareholders, some charity board that they do not control etc.).
Something impactful like AI shouldn't be a technology dominated by a single entity. That can only have bad outcomes. I hope OpenAI will fail, but I hope they'll fail because people wake up and realize it's not a good thing to have a limited group of people that has so much power.
And then I hope people will invest in a truly open technology that truly benefits everyone.