OpenAI safety chief resigns, warns the company’s culture is “damaged”

A safety executive at OpenAI has left the company, warning that its culture is damaged and that artificial intelligence (AI) companies are not showing due care as they develop this technology, as Telegrafi reports.

David Robinson, who led the drafting of the safety reports that accompanied product launches at the company that created ChatGPT, explained his resignation in an article titled: “I left OpenAI because its culture is damaged.”

Robinson wrote that a fundamental cultural change was needed at leading AI companies, and that incidents such as the one in which a “swarm” of OpenAI agents — AI programs that act autonomously without human oversight — attacked the AI start-up Hugging Face were “typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.”

Writing for The Atlantic magazine, Robinson stressed: “I agree with other employees who have recently left that the companies building this technology are not showing enough care. But I believe we need to look beyond specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.”

Referring to the pace of OpenAI’s development, he wrote: “As the company rushes rapidly from one launch to the next, it is not reaching the level of care that I believe is necessary.”

However, OpenAI has shown signs of care in recent weeks after the Hugging Face incident and the revelation that it has notified more than 100 organisations about the activity of agents operating out of control.

This week, the company announced the cancellation of the launch of a next-generation AI model after researchers raised safety concerns during internal testing.

OpenAI has also suspended training of its most advanced models.