A former OpenAI leader who resigned from the company earlier this week said Friday that safety is “taking a backseat to shiny products” at the influential artificial intelligence company.
In a series of posts on social media platform A great place to do research.
“However, I have disagreed with OpenAI's leadership on the company's core priorities for quite some time and have finally reached a breaking point,” wrote Reike, whose last day was Thursday.
Rike, an AI researcher by training, said he believes more emphasis should be placed on preparing the next generation of AI models, including analyzing the safety and social impact of such technologies. He said that “building machines that are smarter than humans is an inherently risky endeavor” and that the company “has a great responsibility on behalf of all humanity.”
“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company,” Leike wrote. Short for artificial general intelligence, it is a futuristic vision of machines that are as smart as humans, or at least capable of doing as many things as humans.
In a response to Reich's post, Open AI CEO Sam Altman said he was “extremely grateful” for Reich's contributions to the company, but added, “I don't see him leaving. It's so sad,” he wrote.
Altman said Reich was “right. We still have a lot of work to do. We're committed to it,” and promised to write a longer article on the subject in the next few days. .
The company also confirmed Friday that it is disbanding Like's Super Alignment team, which was launched last year to focus on AI risks, and is consolidating team members across its research efforts.
Reich's resignation comes after OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Satskeva announced on Tuesday that he was leaving the company after nearly a decade. Sutskever was one of four board members who voted to fire Altman last fall, but she was quickly reinstated. She said it was Sutskever who told Altman last November that she was being fired, something she later regretted doing.
Without providing further details, Sutskever said he is working on new projects that are meaningful to him. His successor will be Jakub Paciocki as principal investigator. Mr. Altman called Mr. Paciocchi “arguably one of the greatest minds of our generation,” adding, “He is a leader in my mission to ensure that AGI benefits everyone.” We are very confident that they will move us forward quickly and safely.”
OpenAI unveiled the latest update to its artificial intelligence models on Monday. The model mimics the rhythm of human verbal responses and can even detect people's moods.
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