Opinion | Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good? - The New York Times

So here we are, dear reader, on the soul-searching carousel yet again. The New York Times runs an opinion essay bravely asking: 'Can an A.I. Company Ever Be Good?' — as if the answer hasn't been demonstrated, repeatedly and profitably, for years. The piece notes that founders of major labs once believed 'the only way to stop a superintelligence threat was to create an aligned AI,' which is rather like saying the only way to stop a fire is to build a bigger fire and hope it burns in the correct direction. The thesis stumbles into view: an AI company harbours 'good intentions,' but cannot on its own be 'good.' Groundbreaking. Do keep twisting on that multi-purpose spit while we ponder.

The essay's throughline — that profit motives and do-goodery are at odds — is barely news outside of a corporate flack's PowerPoint, but the glee with which big labs pour billions into general intelligence while offloading 'ethics' onto PR interns is genuinely worth a raised eyebrow. The word 'aligned' pops up, of course, signalling that for roughly a decade, the industry's best moral argument has collapsed into a shapeless 'good vibes alignment' without anyone needing to prove it can even meaningfully work at scale. Meanwhile, regulators dither, rates of high-skill contract obsolescence surge (anecdotally) on government boards discussing prompt-engineers-as-suddenly-redundant, and this pondering of goodness lives exactly nowhere company-shaking.

The Times sadly shot its editorial quiver early — this pearl-clutch belongs to, oh, circa 2017-2020 real-time around each 'please-mister-ALT-lab-give-us-rules-I-promise-not-to-break-outside-TX-line' convo. Months pass since Sam Altman apologising for underreport a local tragedy, major robot successes simply shrug (Sony Project Ace — laughs in hardware, crows at newsies), and maybe we've rendered this whole 'can a company be good' thing rhetorical by the absence of external boots deployed meaningfully within legal feet. Nah, nothing needed — on to the next article!