alt Hacker NewsTomek Korbak: OpenAI's head of safety told they no longer trust me
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I think that 2 things can be true at once: OpenAI doesn't care enough about safety, and these researchers violated the terms of their employment by sharing proprietary information they were not authorized to. IMO safety is a lost cause unless we somehow agree with China to halt model development. Think its pretty clear they violated the terms of their employment, otherwise they would be suing (California labor laws are very employee friendly), and to be quite frank none of what they are doing is particularly important in the grand scheme of safety, which requires geopolitical changes well beyond their power. OpenAI is also pretty scummy though and are obviously not in the right morally even if they are legally.
I mean it's pretty clear that OpenAI does not want "safe" AI. That is far too much work and effort that's preventing them from moving fast and creating their computer God.
And OpenAI does not care who they hurt in the process (as long as it's not themselves).
I can see parallels between this race to push AI everywhere and nuclear energy. Parallels in the regret humanity will experience. It's all well and good until things go wrong, and then they go spectacularly wrong - such as in Fukushima.
With hindsight we can all see what should have been done better. At least with nuclear power plants, there was a number of safeguards and it took a sequence of improbable events for things to go badly wrong. Given the lackadaisical approach to "AI safety", I suspect things will start going badly wrong very soon. Time will tell how bad this will get.