Adding to high profile departures from AI companies, Greg Robinson, one of the longest safety employees at OpenAI, just quit OpenAI. He criticizes the culture — and lack of wisdom — in Silicon Valley companies to handle dangerous technologies.
He wrote:
The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence.
Greg Robinson
My former colleagues are smart, work hard, and try to make good choices. But as the company sprints from one launch to the next, it is failing to achieve the level of care that I believe is needed. Now I plan to work on the outside, in the hope that I can help more people understand the risks I saw, and strengthen the incentives OpenAI and other firms have to be safer.
Robinson’s criticisms may well describe how OpenAI operates — or operated. But Robinson noticeably fails to address the views of Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg, who said each company is responsible for the safety of their models. Or, as Huang succinctly put it: Don’t release it if you have any safety concerns. Don’t release it.
Huang may be right.
So Robinson’s criticism of the Silicon Valley culture’s lack of wisdom might more accurately describe OpenAI. And, after the White House’s AI summit last week, perhaps even OpenAI is changing. OpenAI just stated that it’s not releasing its new GPT-6.1 Astra model due to safety concerns.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, told WSJ. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
