Miles Brundage, a longtime policy researcher at OpenAI and senior advisor to the company's AGI readiness team, has retired.
In a post on Today's It will continue to rise.”
“Part of what made this a difficult decision is that working at OpenAI is now more of an opportunity to make an enormous impact than ever before,” Brundage said. “OpenAI requires employees who think deeply about its mission and are committed to maintaining a culture of rigorous decision-making around development and deployment, including internal deployments that will become increasingly important over time. ”
With Brundage's departure, OpenAI's economic research division, which until recently was an AGI-enabled subteam, will now report to OpenAI's new chief economist, Ronnie Chatterjee. Brundage said the remaining members of the AGI readiness team are being downsized and will be distributed to other OpenAI divisions. Joshua Achiam, Mission Coordination Officer, will be responsible for some of the AGI-enabled projects.
We have reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this post if we hear back.
Mr. Brundage joined OpenAI in 2018, starting as a researcher and later becoming the company's director of policy research. Prior to joining OpenAI, Mr. Brundage was a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future of Humanity at the University of Oxford.
Within the AGI preparation team, Mr. Brandage had a particular focus on the responsible deployment of language generation systems such as ChatGPT. In recent years, OpenAI has been accused by several former employees and its board of directors of sacrificing AI safety in favor of commercial products.
In a post about X, Brundage encouraged OpenAI employees to “have their say” on how the company can become better.
“Several people have told me they are sad to see me leave, and appreciate that I have often been willing to raise concerns and questions while I have been here… “OpenAI has a lot of difficult decisions ahead of us, and we're not going to make the right decisions by succumbing to groupthink,” he wrote.
OpenAI has fired high-profile executives in recent weeks, culminating in disagreements over the company's direction. CTO Mila Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and vice president of research Barrett Zoff announced their resignations at the end of September. Renowned research scientist Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI in February. A few months later, OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Satskeva resigned, along with former safety leader Jan Reik. In August, co-founder John Schulman announced he was leaving OpenAI. The company's president, Greg Brockman, is on extended leave.
It wasn't a very happy Wednesday for OpenAI.
This morning, the company was in the news for a New York Times profile of former OpenAI researcher Suthir Balaji, who said he left the company because he didn't want to contribute to a technology he believed would do more harm than good to society. Ta. Balaji also accused OpenAI of violating copyright by using IP-protected data to train models without permission. This is a claim made by other companies against the company in a class action lawsuit.