TapTechNews, May 28th. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI has established a board committee to assess the safety of its artificial intelligence models. This move comes just weeks after the company disbanded its internal safety team and the departure of its head of safety.
Previously, OpenAI's governance issues were severely criticized by two former board members, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley. They wrote in The Economist magazine on Sunday, questioning OpenAI's governance approach.
The newly established committee will assess the safeguards of OpenAI's technology within 90 days and submit a report. 'After the board completes a comprehensive review, OpenAI will publicly share the adopted recommendations in a manner consistent with safety principles,' the company wrote in its blog on Tuesday.
OpenAI also stated that they have recently begun training their latest AI model.
Last autumn, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman had a conflict with co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever regarding the speed of AI product development and measures to limit harm. Altman was briefly ousted in a board coup.
This month, Sutskever and his right-hand man Jan Leike left the company. These two scientists led OpenAI's superalignment team, which focuses on researching the long-term threats of superhuman artificial intelligence. Leike wrote after his resignation that his department had encountered difficulties in 'competing for computing resources' within OpenAI. Other departing employees also expressed similar critical opinions.
After Sutskever's departure, OpenAI disbanded his team. The company said on Tuesday that this particular work will continue under its research department and the newly appointed head of alignment science, co-founder John Schulman.
TapTechNews noted that last week OpenAI canceled a policy that would revoke the stock options of former employees if they criticized the company.
The newly established safety committee of OpenAI will consist of three board members, namely Chairman Bret Taylor, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, and former Sony Entertainment executive Nicole Seligman, as well as six employees including Schulman and Altman. The company stated that it will continue to consult external experts and mentioned two of them: Rob Joyce, a former advisor to the Department of Homeland Security during the Donald Trump era, and John Carlin, a former official in the Department of Justice during the tenure of President Joe Biden.