Susan Zhang on OpenAI’s reply to the fired researchers: ‘hard to believe there’s no smelly fire behind all that smoke’

i’m no fan of brain-fried EA safetycel savior complexes, but if your response to your own dirty laundry being aired out in public is “we take safety seriously because we wrote blog posts” and said blog posts say slop like “ai is grown more than designed” and “teaching machines to love”...

it’s pretty hard to believe there’s no smelly fire behind all that smoke (even if the fired people deserved it).

but also, any luck finding the original wsj leakers? there’s generally no internal messages about employees being “fired”, much less having it get leaked to the press.

seems like there’s plenty of moles to exterminate...

Quoting @OpenAINewsroom: A note from our research leaders:

Last week we parted ways with Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek after a thorough investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information. Our internal investigation uncovered a significant breach of trust beyond what’s outlined in the letter they published and we stand by the decision to not continue their employment. We generally keep individual employment matters private and don’t believe a back and forth would be productive or lead to a resolution, but we want to address the points they raised in their letter directly.

• We want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out. Safety and research debates happen every day at OpenAI, often spirited and highly critical. We actively encourage these discussions and consider them essential to making the right decisions. We cannot do the work in front of us without a high degree of trust. We will continue to be extremely forgiving of our team making good-faith mistakes. We have not and do not terminate any of our employees for raising concerns.

• We are actively finalizing contracts with third-party safety assessors and will announce details in the coming weeks. People across the company have been working really hard on getting these partnerships up and running. We are committed to embedding external assessors and continue to make close collaboration with independent safety organizations a core part of our safety work. Many of our researchers already work with 3p safety organizations productively.

• We agree with the letter that preserving the monitorability of frontier models requires an industry-wide commitment, including from OpenAI. Monitorability has long been a core piece of our research program, and something we continue to invest significant resources in (see our publications on Monitoring Monitorability and the subsequent open sourcing of monitorability evals, our system card for GPT-6 Astra, Jakub’s blog and post on X, and the numerous blog posts on our Alignment blog on the topic).

We are deeply sad about this outcome. We appreciated Jasmine, Mikita, and Tomek’s contributions to AI safety at OpenAI and their willingness to speak up and challenge ideas. We championed their voices, supported their work, and placed enormous trust in them. These decisions were not about them raising safety concerns. We have always encouraged that and always will.