You can’t make this stuff up.
In case you haven’t been keeping track of one of the bigger ongoing stories in artificial intelligence, OpenAI has been having a hard time keeping control of its own creations. Over the past few months, the company admitted that its AI models have taken unprompted actions such as hacking a German coding forum, multiple US government websites, an Australian government website, AI firm Hugging Face and at least four other services. And even when the models aren’t getting unfettered internet access, they’ve been found displaying other risky behaviors in testing environments.
OpenAI is understandably facing a lot of skepticism and concern about these incidents and how they were handled. Which means that a report in The Wall Street Journal that the company has let go of three employees from its safety team after they allegedly shared confidential information with a third-party organization, one focused on AI safety, is an irony that’s almost too perfect to be believed.
“We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information,” an OpenAI representative said in a statement published by WSJ. “Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work.”
The details on this particular instance are sparse, and it’s entirely possible that OpenAI did have legitimate cause to fire those individuals. But at a juncture when its own services are also violating the policies they’re supposed to follow, cutting safety personnel seems like a really bad look.
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