Escalation of Concerns Over Time

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The decision to resign was influenced by a pattern of incidents over time, shifting from initially hoping the organization would do things right to feeling unheard and concerned about the direction. The speaker expressed a fear that the organization may not prioritize caution and carefulness, especially with increasing financial investments in their systems. The escalation of financial investments signifies a growing pressure to deliver value from these investments, raising doubts about the possibility of improvement in the future.

This week, a group of current and former employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind penned an open letter accusing the industry’s leading companies of prioritizing profits over safety. This comes after a spate of high profile departures from OpenAI, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and senior researcher Jan Leike, as well as reports that OpenAI has gone to great lengths to silence would-be whistleblowers.

The writers of the open letter argue that researchers have a “right to warn” the public about AI risks and laid out a series of principles that would protect that right. In this episode, we sit down with one of those writers: William Saunders, who left his job as a research engineer at OpenAI in February. William is now breaking the silence on what he saw at OpenAI that compelled him to leave the company and to put his name to this letter.

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