OpenAI’s Altman, Brockman address concerns after departure of safety execs

Days after two top safety execs announced their departure from OpenAI, company CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman took to X, formerly known as Twitter, Saturday to assuage concerns.

On May 14, co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever said on X he was resigning from the company. Sutskever was a board member who voted to oust Altman from the company back in November 2023.

Later that day, Jan Leike, co-head of OpenAI’s superalignment unit and a colleague of Sutskever, also said he was leaving.

In an X post of his own on May 17, Leike said, “I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point.”

In other posts that day, he said that safety culture and processes were not given the priority that was needed, especially regarding artificial general intelligence, a type of AI that can potentially exceed human capabilities across a wide variety of tasks.

“We are long overdue in getting incredibly serious about the implications of AGI,” Leike wrote, adding, “OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company.”

In a post co-signed by Altman and Stockman on Saturday, the pair argued that they are aware of the risks and benefits of AGI.

“We’ve repeatedly demonstrated the incredible possibilities from scaling up deep learning and analyzed their implications; called for international governance of AGI before such calls were popular; and helped pioneer the science of assessing AI systems for catastrophic risks,” they wrote.

“There’s no proven playbook for how to navigate the path to AGI,” Altman and Stockman added. “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.”

In January 2023, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced it had made a “multibillion” dollar investment into OpenAI.