16 Jul 2024 – OpenAI employees raise more safety concerns

Published by rudy Date posted on July 17, 2024

 

Superhuman AI
16 July 2024

What if you thought your company was doing something wrong — but you felt you had no way of speaking out against it? That’s the predicament some OpenAI employees say they’ve lately found themselves in. In a complaint to the SEC, whistleblowers claim they were asked to sign away their right to send tips to government regulators — meaning they had to keep quiet about safety concerns.
Why are some employees fearful? They say that in order to stay ahead of its competition, OpenAI is rushing out models that haven’t been fully vetted. In one case, the Sam Altman-led startup allegedly planned a GPT-4o release party even before it had started testing the new model’s safety features. By then, some employees felt there was no going back — it was coming out, one way or another. Meanwhile, restrictive non-disclosure agreements had made it impossible for them to voice their concerns.
What’s OpenAI’s response? It says it welcomes criticism from both inside and outside the company. A spokesperson admitted GPT-4o’s release had been “stressful for our teams” but maintained that the company didn’t skimp on testing.
Why now? The complaint comes at a pivotal time for OpenAI. It thinks it’s on the verge of a new breakthrough: A model with high-level reasoning capabilities, which could scan the internet or complete in-depth research on its one. One project codenamed “Strawberry” will be able to plan for the future and anticipate how the world reacts to decisions. Reuters reported that a recent version had scored over 90% on a competition-level math test.
Those innovations might be adding to employees’ concerns: As AI becomes more sophisticated, its risks to the public also start to multiply. Criticism might continue to mount unless OpenAI can prove it’s willing to pause upcoming releases until it’s certain they’re safe. It might already be starting to get the message: The company recently pushed back the release of its much-hyped voice assistant by a month so that it could first go through more testing.

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