OpenAI’s Directors Have Some Serious Explaining To Do. But The Latest Twist Is More Intriguing

The OpenAI saga unfurled at such speed in the past week that it is easy to forget that nobody has yet said in clear terms why Sam Altman was fired as the chief executive in the first place. He was reinstated this week in an epic reversal of events.

The original non-explanation from OpenAI, the force behind the ChatGPT chatbot, was that Altman had to leave the firm because he had not been “consistently candid” with other directors. Not fully candid about what? The precise reason still matters.

“And now, we all get some sleep.” Do we, though?

There were only four members of the board apart from Altman. One was Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who performed an unexplained U-turn. Another – Adam D’Angelo of Quora intends to transition seamlessly from the board that sacked Altman to the one that hires him back.

That leaves Tasha McCauley, a tech entrepreneur, and Helen Toner of Georgetown University’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology. Virtually the only comment from either has been Toner’s post on X after Altman’s reinstatement: “And now, we all get some sleep.”

Do we, though? In the latest twist, Reuters reported on Thursday that OpenAI researchers were so concerned about the dangers posed by the latest AI model that they wrote to the board before Altman’s dismissal warning it could threaten humanity.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) In The Limelight

The firm was reportedly working on an advanced system that was so powerful it triggered safety concerns among staff. The model, called Q*, was able to solve basic maths problem it had not seen before, according to the tech news site The Information.

Scores of experts have raised alarm over companies such as the San Francisco-based OpenAI moving too fast towards developing Artificial General Intelligence – the term for a system that can perform a wide variety of tasks at human or above human levels of intelligence.