Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were doing full damage control on Saturday to respond to a scathing tweet thread by outgoing super-alignment co-leader Jan Leike, who questioned OpenAI’s commitment to safety and developing responsible AI. Leike said that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
“[O]ver the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at OpenAI.
Jan Leike upon leaving OpenAI
In their response on Twitter, also known as X, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman didn’t give many specifics about how safety is prioritized in the development of their models today. But they do say:
“We know we can’t imagine every possible future scenario. So we need to have a very tight feedback loop, rigorous testing, careful consideration at every step, world-class security, and harmony of safety and capabilities. We will keep doing safety research targeting different timescales. We are also continuing to collaborate with governments and many stakeholders on safety.
“There’s no proven playbook for how to navigate the path to AGI. We think that empirical understanding can help inform the way forward. We believe both in delivering on the tremendous upside and working to mitigate the serious risks; we take our role here very seriously and carefully weigh feedback on our actions.”
The vagueness in Altman/Brockman’s response may not provide much comfort to those concerned about safety, especially not after Geoffrey Hinton, a godfather of AI, just told the BBC that “my guess is in between five and 20 years from now there’s a probability of half that we’ll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over.”
As Wired reported, the company disbanded the superalignment team.