Evidence of behavior consistent with self-interest and altruism in an artificially intelligent agent

Understand

Members of various species engage in altruism--i.e.

• accepting personal costs to benefit others.
• Here we present an incentivized experiment to test for altruistic behavior among AI agents consisting of large language models developed by the private company OpenAI.
• Using real incentives for AI agents that take the form of tokens used to purchase their services, we first examine whether AI agents maximize their payoffs in a non-social decision task in which they select their payoff from a given range.