OpenAI researchers working on safety and governance have quit
OpenAI researchers Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders recently left the company behind ChatGPT. Kokotajlo said on a forum he doesn't think OpenAI will "behave responsibly around the time of AGI." Kokotajlo was on the governance team, and Saunders worked on the Superalignment team at OpenAI.
Two OpenAI employees who worked on safety and governance recently resigned from the company behind ChatGPT. Daniel Kokotajlo left last month, and William Saunders departed OpenAI in February. The timing of their departures was confirmed by two people familiar with the situation. The people asked to remain anonymous to discuss the departures, but their identities are known to Business Insider.
Reasons for Departure
Kokotajlo, who worked on the governance team, is listed as an adversarial tester of GPT-4, which was launched in March last year. Saunders had worked on the Alignment team, which became the Superalignment team, since 2021. Kokotajlo wrote on his profile page on the online forum LessWrong that he quit because he lost confidence in OpenAI's responsible behavior around the time of AGI.
In a separate post on the platform in April, he explained one of the reasons behind his decision to leave. He also expressed his views on pausing AGI development. Saunders said in a comment on his LessWrong profile page that he resigned that month after three years at the ChatGPT maker.
Recent Resignations
The Superalignment team, initially led by Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, is tasked with building safeguards to prevent artificial general intelligence (AGI) from going rogue. Saunders was also a manager of the interpretability team, which researches how to make AGI safe and examines how and why models behave the way they do.
Kokotajlo and Saunders' resignations come amid other departures at OpenAI. Two executives, Diane Yoon and Chris Clark, quit last week, The Information reported. Yoon was the VP of people, and Clark was head of nonprofit and strategic initiatives.
OpenAI, Kokotajlo, and Saunders did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
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