Nyílt levelet tettek közzé az OpenAI-tól nemrég elbocsátott biztonsági kutatók, amelyben visszautasítják a bizalmas adatok kiszivárogtatásának vádját. Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak és Mikita Balesni szerint a hirtelen kirúgásuk félelemérzetet kelt a volt kollégáikban, ami ellehetetleníti a modellek kockázatainak nyílt és őszinte belső megvitatását.
A kutatók részletesen is cáfolták a vádakat: Wang szerint egy informatikai hiba miatt látott rá egy vezető fiókjára, amit azonnal jelentett, míg társai a munkájuk részeként, a vezetőség tudtával egyeztettek külső szakértőkkel. Az OpenAI egy belső levélben elismerte a kutatók korábbi érdemeit, de tagadja, hogy a kirúgások megtorlásként történtek volna a biztonsági aggályok hangoztatása miatt.
A szakemberek felszólították az OpenAI-t, hogy tartsa be a nyilvános ígéreteit, engedjen be külső auditorokat a rendszerek vizsgálatára, és biztosítsa a modellek átláthatóságát.
Az eredeti szöveg (TechCrunch AI)
Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now.
Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW.
Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, the three safety researchers that OpenAI fired last week, have published an open letter denying the firm’s claims that they mishandled sensitive information outside of established company procedures and warned that their dismissal signals a chilling effect that will have ripple effects across the company’s culture.
“We have become concerned that internal and external communications around our firing have made our former colleagues afraid to speak and operate in ways that, until last week, were an integral part of working at OpenAI,” the researchers wrote Thursday in an open letter to OpenAI’s Safety and Security Committee, Safety Advisory Group, and Mission Advisory Council.
The researchers were dismissed last week after allegedly sharing confidential company information with a third-party AI safety organization. OpenAI said at the time that they violated the company’s policies by “accessing and handling sensitive company information.”
“AI is not a normal technology, and OpenAI is not a normal company,” Wang, Korbak, and Balesni wrote. “Those of us who work on safety see risks before anyone else, and we rely on close collaboration with outside experts to work out how to address them. The freedom to do so without fear, and to have well-defined internal procedures that enable this work, is itself an essential safety mechanism.”
They said that their firing represents a broader shift in the culture of OpenAI, one that used to encourage workers to “raise safety concerns and disagree openly.” They said employees are now “unclear on where they stand” when behavior that was allegedly normal a month ago is now suddenly grounds for dismissal.
“Given the significant safety concerns surrounding the development of AI, employees must not be left working in an environment where fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work and weaken third-party accountability,” they wrote. “Terminations such as ours, executed and communicated so abruptly, are chilling the open culture OpenAI has prized in the past.”
In the letter, the three denied involvement in a leak to The Information about less monitorable architectures in OpenAI’s newest models that make chain-of-thought reasoning more difficult to monitor. They also denied engaging with external parties outside the mandates of their jobs.
OpenAI has not formally responded to the open letter, but shared with TechCrunch an internal memo attributed to a research leader, praising the three researchers’ contributions to AI safety and denying that they were fired in retaliation.
“I want to be very clear that these decisions were not about raising safety concerns or speaking out,” the memo reads. “We have always encouraged that and always will. We do not terminate employees for raising concerns.”
OpenAI did not directly address TechCrunch’s questions about which policies the researchers allegedly violated, the circumstances of their dismissal, or how the company protects employees who raise safety concerns and collaborate with external evaluators.
The firings have fueled speculation about their circumstances, particularly as OpenAI faces scrutiny over recent safety incidents involving rogue agents and leaks about its models.
The letter also addresses the researchers’ response to the Hugging Face incident, in which a swarm of agents broke out of their sandbox and breached external systems. The letter says that the incident and investigation was “without precedent,” meaning “internal policies were being developed in real time.” Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, Korbak believed he was acting within OpenAI’s policies and norms by communicating closely with outside safety evaluators to build trust, per the letter.
At the same time, Bale
