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Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn

Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn

Your Undivided Attention vor 2 Jahren

Whistleblower William Saunders quit over systemic issues at OpenAI. Now he’s put his name to an open letter that proposes 4 principles to protect the right of industry insiders to warn the public about AI risks. On Your Undivided Attention this week, Tris

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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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employees: An investigation by Vox into OpenAI’s policy of
non-disparagement.

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