Fired OpenAI researchers send letter to company’s board
Now, a Wall Street Journal reports that the fired employees have sent a letter to the ChatGPT-maker stating that they may not be able to control AI agents until they work with “outside safety auditors” and “preserve the ability to monitor increasingly sophisticated AI models”. These included Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak and Mikita Balesni who worked on safety and alignment research teams at OpenAI.
OpenAI fired three researchers earlier this month after an internal investigation concluded that they violated the company policies governing access to sensitive information.
Stating that they were concerned AI companies could end up losing the ability to monitor AI systems’ chain-of-thought, the researchers wrote “As an industry, we do not yet know how to safely develop and deploy models that we cannot monitor”. “OpenAI and other frontier companies should not move forward with developments that further decrease” the ability to monitor AI, the letter added. The ChatGPT maker said that the employees were dismissed following a probe into the handling of confidential company data, according to a Wall Street Journal report. “We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information,” an OpenAI spokesperson said. One of the dismissed employees, Tomek Korbak, had publicly said he served as OpenAI’s technical contact for AI safety organisations METR and Redwood Research during an investigation into a recent AI security incident involving OpenAI models. Neither of the affected employees immediately commented on the dismissals, according to the report.
The researchers were accused of sharing confidential company information with third-party AI safety organisations, including nonprofit research groups involved in evaluating advanced AI systems. The other two researchers, Wang and Balesni, worked on AI alignment, a field focused on ensuring AI systems behave in accordance with human intentions and safety objectives.