GoKawiilElon Musk’s legal effort to dismantle OpenAI may hinge on how its for-profit subsidiary enhances or detracts from the frontier lab’s founding mission of ensuring that humanity benefits from artificial general intelligence.
On Thursday, a federal court in Oakland, California, heard a former employee and board member say the company’s efforts to push AI products into the marketplace compromised its commitment to AI safety.
Rosie Campbell joined the company’s AGI readiness team in 2021, and she left OpenAI in 2024 after her team was disbanded. Another safety-focused team, the Super Alignment team, was shut down in the same time period.
“When I joined, it was very research-focused and common for people to talk about AGI and safety issues,” she testified. “Over time it became more like a product-focused organization.”
Under cross-examination, Campbell acknowledged that significant funding was likely necessary for the lab’s goal of building AGI but said creating a super-intelligent computer model without the right safety measures in place wouldn’t fit with the mission of the organization she originally joined.
Campbell pointed to an incident where Microsoft deployed a version of the company’s GPT-4 model in India through its Bing search engine before the model had been evaluated by the company’s Deployment Safety Board (DSB). The model itself did not present a huge risk, she said, but the company needed “to set strong precedents as the technology gets more powerful. We want to have good safety processes in place we know are being followed reliably.”
OpenAI’s attorneys also had Campbell admit that in her “speculative opinion,” OpenAI’s safety approach is superior to that at xAI, the AI company that Musk founded that was acquired by SpaceX earlier this year.
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