In the fall of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, sent secret memos to three fellow-members of the organization’s board of directors. For weeks, they’d been having furtive discussions about whether Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O., and Greg Brockman, his second-in-command, were fit to run the company. Sutskever had once counted both men as friends. In 2019, he’d officiated Brockman’s wedding, in a ceremony at OpenAI’s offices that included a ring bearer in the form of a robotic hand. But as he grew convinced that the company was nearing its long-term goal—creating an artificial intelligence that could rival or surpass the cognitive capabilities of human beings—his doubts about Altman increased. As Sutskever put it to another board member at the time, “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button.”
OpenAI’s own inner circle was rocked by a knife-edge betrayal in the fall of 2023 when chief scientist Ilya Sutskever quietly fired off secret, disappearing memos to three board members, helping build a damning paper trail against CEO Sam Altman and his deputy Greg Brockman as the board debated whether they were fit to lead the company. Once friends — Sutskever even officiated Brockman’s 2019 wedding at OpenAI, with a robotic hand as ring bearer — he had grown alarmed as the firm raced toward its lofty mission of building AI that could match or surpass human intelligence, telling one board member bluntly, “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have his finger on the button.” The hidden files, a pile of some 70 pages of Slack messages and HR documents sent in secret and not previously disclosed in full, accuse Altman of misleading executives and directors and deceiving them about safety protocols, with one memo opening on the cold, brutal charge that Sam shows “a consistent pattern of . . .” and
📰 Via Newyorker
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