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🏠 Ilya is out

🏠 Ilya is out

What did Ilya see?

Brett Goldstein
May 20, 2024

GM! It’s Brett again. I hit my head at CrossFit this weekend so now I look like Harry Potter. Anyway, let's get into it.

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🏠 AI

OpenAI's superalignment exodus

You've probably heard the news.

OpenAI's AI safety and alignment teams have been decimated by a wave of high-profile departures. It's the most sensational exodus of key talent… well, since the attempted ouster of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman back in November.

November 2023: Ilya attempted to oust Altman, who regained control by threatening to take talent to Microsoft. (Ilya has since not been seen at the OpenAI office)

Pre-May 2024: Superalignment team members Aschenbrenner, Izmailov fired. Researchers O'Keefe, Saunders left.

April 2024: Governance member Kokotajlo resigned, citing lost trust in leadership.

2024: Ilya resigned.

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the… x.com/i/web/status/1…
— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut)
11:00 PM • May 14, 2024

One day later: Jan Leike, former co-leader of superalignment team with Ilya, quit.

Yesterday was my last day as head of alignment, superalignment lead, and executive @OpenAI.
— Jan Leike (@janleike)
3:57 PM • May 17, 2024

In the thread, Jan expressed frustration that his team was struggling to get enough compute to ensure advanced AI systems remain aligned with human values. Jan was in effect saying that we need to put more emphasis on AI safety and alignment as models rapidly advance.

Yann LeCun (Chief Scientist of Meta AI) had a different take. He argued that the superalignment team's focus was "misguided and premature before we even have cat-level AI."

LeCun scolded the sense of urgency around controlling superintelligent AI as an "extremely distorted view of reality" when we are still far from human-level capabilities.

We don’t know what’s happening at OpenAI now, especially for safety and alignment.

But it’s good to see two strong and different POVs in this matter.

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🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

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Rabbit Hole: Every Billionaire is a Cult Leader (Robert Evans)