OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But requests for a fraction of that compute were often denied, blocking the team from doing their work. That issue, among others, pushed several team members to resign this week, including co-lead Jan Leike, a former DeepMind researcher who while at OpenAI was involved with the development of ChatGPT, GPT-4, and ChatGPT’s predecessor, InstructGPT. Leike went public with some reasons for his resignation on Friday morning. “I have been disagreeing with OpenAI leadership about the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a breaking point,” Leike wrote in a series of posts on X. “I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact, and related topics. These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.” OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment about the resources promised and allocated to that team. OpenAI formed the Superalignment team last July, and it was led by Leike and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who also resigned from the company this week. It had the ambitious goal of solving the core technical challenges of controlling superintelligent AI in the next four years. Joined by scientists and engineers from OpenAI’s previous alignment division as well as researchers from other orgs across the company, the team was to contribute research informing the safety of both in-house and non-OpenAI models, and, through initiatives including a research grant program, solicit from and share work with the broader AI industry.
Full report : OpenAI Reportedly Dissolves Its Existential AI Risk Team Created To Control Superintelligent AI.
