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Days after two top security executives announced their departure from OpenAI, the company’s CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman took to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Saturday to allay concerns.
On May 14, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever further said X was resignation from the company. Sutskever was a board member who voted to remove Altman from the company in November 2023.
Later that day, Jan Leike, co-head of OpenAI’s super-alignment unit and Suckever’s colleague, also said he was leaving.
In his own post on X on May 17: Leike said“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.”
In other posts that day, he stated that security culture and processes had not been given the necessary priority, particularly with regard to artificial general intelligence – a type of artificial intelligence that has the potential to exceed human capabilities for a wide range of tasks.
“It’s long past time we started taking the implications of AGI extremely seriously,” Leike wrote, adding: “OpenAI must become a security-first AGI company.”
In a Saturday post signed by Altman and Stockman, they both argued that they were aware of the risks and benefits of AGI.
“We have repeatedly demonstrated the incredible capabilities of scaling up deep learning and analyzed its implications; we called for international governance of AGI before such calls became popular; and helped pioneers learn how to assess AI systems for catastrophic threats,” they wrote.
“There is no proven playbook for following the path to AGI.” Altman and Stockman added. “We believe that empirical understanding can lend a hand inform next steps. We believe in both achieving enormous benefits and working to reduce solemn risks; “We take our role very seriously and carefully consider feedback on our actions.”
In January 2023, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) announced it has made a “multi-billion dollar” investment in OpenAI.