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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promises to share more in the coming days about what the ChatGPT maker is doing to keep its artificial intelligence technology secure.
OpenAI confirmed Friday that it has disbanded a team dedicated to mitigating the long-term risks of super-smart artificial intelligence.
The San Francisco-based company said OpenAI began disbanding its so-called “superalignment” group several weeks ago and integrating members into other projects and research.
This week, company co-founder Ilya Satskeva and team co-leader Jan Reike announced their departure from the ChatGPT maker.
The dismantling of the OpenAI team, which focused on bringing advanced artificial intelligence under control, comes as such technology faces increased scrutiny from regulators and concerns about its dangers grow.
“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI (artificial general intelligence) company,” Reich wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Friday.
Reike called on all OpenAI employees to “act with the weight” that is appropriate to what they are building.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to Reich's post with a comment of his own, thanking him for his work at the company and saying he was sad to see Reich go.
“He's right, we still have a lot of work to do,” Altman said. “We are fully committed to doing that.”
Altman promised to expand on this topic in the coming days.
Sutskever told X that he is retiring after nearly 10 years at OpenAI, whose “trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous.”
“We are confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is safe and useful,” he added, referring to computer technologies that aim to match or exceed human cognitive performance.
Satskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, was a member of the company's board of directors that voted to fire fellow CEO Altman last November.
The ouster left the San Francisco-based startup in turmoil, with staff and investors revolting, and the OpenAI board rehired Altman a few days later.
Earlier this week, OpenAI released a higher-performance, more human-like version of the artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT, making it available for free to all users.
“It feels like the AI in the movies,” Altman said in a blog post.
Altman previously cited Scarlett Johansson's character, who played the voice of an AI-based virtual assistant who dates men in the movie Her, as an inspiration for where AI interactions are headed.
In a speech at the TED AI Summit in San Francisco late last year, Sutskever said, “The digital brain will one day be as good as the human brain, or even better.”
“AGI will have a dramatic impact on all areas of life.”
