OpenAI Insider Tells NYT’s Ezra Klein They’ve Created ‘Alien Mind’

A former safety official with OpenAI described the technology as an “alien mind” as The New York Times’ Ezra Klein pushed him to define exactly what that means amid growing concerns about the rapidly progressing tech.

David Robinson, who previously worked on OpenAI’s Safety Systems team and was the head of safety transparency, joined Klein on The Ezra Klein Show on Wednesday to discuss his recent resignation from OpenAI. In an Atlantic op-ed, Robinson described the culture around the AI industry as “broken,” warning companies are prioritizing rapid progress over necessary safety precautions.

“I believe in humanity. I think we are going to survive. I think there are a lot of things that could happen with this technology that could be very, very harmful,” Robinson told Klein.

Klein noted that tech leaders have very different descriptions of what AI is, saying some describe it as simply “software” while others call it an “alien mind.”

“So what is it, man?” he asked.

“An alien mind,” Robinson said.

He explained:

It is a thing we grew. We did not engineer it. We engineered the systems around it that grew and then try to keep it safe. We grew a mind. Fundamentally, nobody knows why pre-training works, which is the big hard part where we take lots of inputs and create this basically intelligent thing. Then we bolt on stuff and we put do post-training, these other things to make it more useful. But this is just a thing that is observed to work, that we do.

Concerns about AI have grown as more and more leaders in the industry have warned about the technology’s quick progress.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned that we “must slow down the pace” of AI, claiming rogue AI agents could take over the entire internet within a year if the right safety measures and oversight are not placed on the industry.

That warning followed Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigning and warning AI could “kill us all” within a decade.

Watch above via The Ezra Klein Show.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
The single summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting from both sides of the aisle. Subscribe now!