• OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, dedicated to ensuring the safety of AI, has effectively dissolved following the departures of two team executives, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, due to disagreements with senior management over priorities.
  • Jan Leike, the former head of alignment at OpenAI, resigned on May 17, 2024, citing disagreements with the company’s priorities and a lack of focus on safety and ethics in AI development.
  • Leike, who was the co-head of the superalignment team at OpenAI, stepped down due to disagreements over the company’s core priorities, following the release of GPT-4o and Sutskever’s resignation.
  • Leike publicly criticized OpenAI’s leadership for prioritizing “shiny products” over AI safety and expressed concerns that the company’s safety culture and processes were being sidelined.
  • The former executive emphasized the need for more focus on preparing for the next generation of AI models, including safety and societal impact analysis, and called for OpenAI to prioritize being a “safety-first AGI company”.
  • OpenAI’s Superalignment team faced challenges with computational resources, leading to the resignation of some team members, including co-lead Jan Leike, who criticized the company for prioritizing “shiny products” over safety culture.
  • There is internal disagreement at OpenAI over prioritizing safety and human survival over commercial interests, with experts claiming the company is not focused on building safe superintelligence.
  • CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the need for improvement and commitment to addressing the challenges raised by Leike, but Sutskever expressed confidence in OpenAI’s leadership and its mission to develop safe artificial general intelligence.
  • OpenAI required exiting employees to choose between keeping their vested equity and speaking out against the company, but the company acknowledged that it had never enforced this provision and employees were not penalized for not agreeing to the separation agreement.
  • The company required departing employees to agree to nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions to keep their vested equity.

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