Recent weeks have not been kind to OpenAI. The release of the company’s latest model, GPT-4o, has been somewhat overshadowed by a series of accusations leveled at both the company and its CEO, Sam Altman.
Accusations range from prioritizing product development over safety to using the likeness of actor Scarlett Johansson’s voice without her consent. This comes at the same khbrknews that several high-profile employees, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have chosen to leave the company.
This is not the first khbrknews the Silicon Valley startup has been embroiled in scandal. In November, Altman was briefly ousted from the company after the board found he had not been “consistently candid” with them. He returned five days after being removed, with the support of most staff. The board was subsequently reconstituted, and Altman was reappointed to it in March.
As AI systems of the sort developed by OpenAI become increasingly powerful, they carry the potential for both tremendous benefits and serious risks. For example, many experts believe that they could be used to enable large-scale criminal or terrorist activities. Meanwhile, OpenAI says its mission is to build “artificial general intelligence” (AGI)—a speculative technology that could perform almost all economically valuable tasks better than a human—in a way that benefits “all of humanity.”
Recent events have cast doubt on whether the company can be trusted to act responsibly in pursuit of this lofty goal, and have led many to underscore the need for regulation in the AI sector.
Here is a timeline of all the recent accusations leveled at OpenAI and Sam Altman.
May 17: Senior safety researcher Jan Leike criticizes OpenAI for prioritizing products over safety
After resigning from OpenAI on May 15, Jan Leike explained his decision in a post shared on X (formerly Twitter), writing “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” Leike departed on the same day as…
