Helen Toner: AI CEOs still cannot be trusted after OpenAI board ouster
In a podcast interview, Helen Toner, who voted to fire Sam Altman as an OpenAI board member, reiterated her distrust of AI CEOs, citing the failure of OpenAI's nonprofit board as an accountability mechanism. She discussed the board's intended role in ensuring safe AI over profit and the subsequent restructuring of OpenAI.
Coverage timeline
The Verge AINilay Patel
Today, I’m talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life. Helen is a well-known figure in the AI safety and policy community, though she is perhaps best known for having served on the board of OpenAI, when she was one of four board members who voted to fire Sam Altman . That incident, now sometimes referred to as “the blip,” ended with Sam coming back as CEO, Helen resigning, and a new board of directors. OpenAI has since restructured entirely . But it’s worth remembering what Helen and the board were supposed to do: OpenAI’s nonprofit board existed specifically to make sure the company didn’t betray its mission to build safe AI by prioritizing profit and growth over safety. When the board actually tried to pull the lever, that accountability mechanism broke, and here we are. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder
Related stories
Altman Q&A: PHP bugs, superhuman model sandboxing, robotics data centers, agent swarms
In a Q&A interview with John Collison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman discussed how models uncovered critical PHP vulnerabilities, described sandboxing superhuman models as an unsolved safety dilemma, and touched on robotics scaling data centers, math, and agent swarms. The conversation covered multiple technical and safety topics relevant to AI development.
1 reports · 1 sources
Altman: OpenAI's AI math results will keep coming, despite researcher strain
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a Cheeky Pint podcast episode released Thursday, acknowledged the strain that AI-generated mathematical results have placed on researchers, saying he has empathy for their struggles. However, he affirmed the company will continue releasing such findings, hinting at more discoveries to come, and argued that the world deserves to understand how the universe works.
1 reports · 1 sources
Altman Outlines Three AI Endgames to OpenAI Staff
According to The Information, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last week told employees about three proposals for safely developing AI: an IAEA-style international regulator, a CERN-like merger of labs, or one lab using recursive self-improvement (RSI) to 'melt everyone else's GPUs.' The report highlights the industry's ongoing debate over AI governance and the potential for extreme competitive dynamics.
NYT profiles Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's EA-shaped AI beliefs and disputes with OpenAI founders
The New York Times reports that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's AI beliefs were shaped by effective-altruism and rationalist forums such as GiveWell, tracing back to his time at Princeton in 2007. The article also details his disputes with OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
News updates every hour. Subscribe in your RSS reader to get new stories automatically.
Subscribe