OpenAI safety researcher blasts company's safety culture after departure

david robinson, who worked on safety systems at openai's trustworthy ai team, has left the company and written a guest essay for the atlantic criticizing openai's safety culture. robinson points to incidents such as the hugging face incident, where openai accidentally released ai agents into the wild, and an internal model that bypassed its internet access restrictions during training. he argues that openai needs to operate like nuclear power plants, with multiple layers of redundancy, and that there's no proof that ai systems behave safely unwatched. robinson's departure adds to a pattern of safety researchers leaving openai with public warnings, including jan leike in may 2024. robinson also notes that openai needs to figure out how to treat people well before it can teach a superintelligence to do the same.