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OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/03/openai-safety-leader-quits-warning-ai-companys-culture-is-broken
48•jethronethro•1h ago

Comments

danpalmer•38m ago
Was this a "build better sandboxing" and "don't tell people to eat glue" safety leader, or a Roko's Basilisk believing safety leader?

A lot of the "AI safety" types are very focused on the latter and not at all concerned with the former. We need both, but we clearly need a much stronger focus on the problems we are seeing now, and much less on the hypothetical problems we might see in the future.

BryantD•17m ago
Given that he’s citing the need to learn from safety in other fields, I’d say the former.
nradov•12m ago
We don't actually need anybody worrying about silly hypothetical scenarios — at least not as paid employees. There are already a surplus of sci-fi authors doing that.
lhurtig•35m ago
Well this is a great sign for OpenAI. I'm sure the typo inclusive memorandum will save us.
plastic-enjoyer•31m ago
>“Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster,” he wrote.

This sounds more like an attempt at regulatory capture. Current AI systems aren't physical infrastructure that can just run away like a nuclear power plant, for example. At the end of the day, AI is still just software running on someone's hardware.

worik•16m ago
Yes

And the statements of the "doomers" tells us a lot about them, and nothing about the technology

BryantD•12m ago
So… like the Therac-25 radiation accidents? Software bugs do sometimes have physical consequences.
switchbak•28m ago
“I believe there’s about a 50% chance we all die because of the development of smarter-than-human AI systems"

... over an unbounded timeframe?

And how exactly?

Those are very round numbers, but also very specific. Can we get some accounting on how you came to that? Anything? Vibes?

I mean, if you want me to take you seriously, let's have a deep discussion with things that can be measured. I absolutely agree that OpenAI and friends aren't being restrained enough and are acting with recklessness, but declarations of doom based on vibes isn't cutting it.

Terr_•24m ago
Note: That quote is from a different person than the titular one who quit.

> Geoffrey Irving, who worked at OpenAI and DeepMind before becoming chief scientist of Resolution, also joined the warnings on AI on Saturday.

gizmodo59•21m ago
He is a hypocrite for all we care. You work there for a while when your stock is getting vested and suddenly you have this feeling? Like the dude hired a PR firm as well.

While the safety and alignment is a real problem, I don’t get this guy or the Anthropic dude. First world problems.

voidhorse•19m ago
The LeCun article being posted at the same time as this is quite apt.

These "safety" people should have spent more time reading actual cybersecurity textbooks and less time reading EA forums and less wrong (or in Robinson's case, it appears, being policy wonks). Maybe then these labs wouldn't be totally incompetent.

irishcoffee•18m ago
See also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49944227

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