The former leader of OpenAI, who resigned from the company earlier this week, said Friday that security had “taken a backseat to shiny products” at the influential artificial intelligence company.
Jan Leike, who led OpenAI’s “Super Alignment” team with the company’s co-founder, who also resigned this week, wrote in a series of posts on social media platform X that he joined the San Francisco-based company because he thought it was best a place to conduct artificial intelligence research.
“However, I have been at odds with OpenAI management on the company’s core priorities for a long time, and we have finally reached a breaking point,” wrote Leike, whose last day was Thursday.
Leike, an artificial intelligence researcher by training, said he believed more emphasis should be placed on preparing for next-generation artificial intelligence models, including on issues such as security and analyzing the impact of such technologies on society. He said that building “machines smarter than humans is an inherently perilous endeavor” and that the company “bears an enormous responsibility on behalf of all humanity.”
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“OpenAI must become a security-first AGI company,” Leike wrote, using a shortened version of artificial general intelligence, a futuristic vision of machines that are as clever as humans, or at least can do many things as well as humans .
Open AI CEO Sam Altman wrote in response to Leike’s posts that he “greatly appreciates” Leike’s contributions to the company and is “very melancholy to see him go.”
Leike is right that we have much more to do; we are determined to do this,” Altman said, pledging to write a longer post on the topic in the coming days.
Leike’s resignation comes after OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said on Tuesday that he was leaving the company after nearly a decade. Sutskever was one of four board members who voted to push Altman out last fall but quickly reinstated him. It was Suckever who told Altman last November that he was being fired, but later said he regretted doing so.
Sutskever said he is working on a modern project that is meaningful to him, without providing any additional details. He will be replaced by Jakub Pachocki as chief scientist. Altman called Pachocki “certainly one of the greatest minds of our generation” and expressed “deep confidence that he will lead us to rapidly and safely advance our mission to ensure that AGI benefits all.”
On Monday, OpenAI unveiled the latest update to its artificial intelligence model, which can mimic the rhythm of human verbal responses and even attempt to detect human moods.
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