When asked for comment on this story, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed WIRED to a June blog post stating that Brockman’s engagement with Leading the Future was in a personal capacity and not on behalf of the company. The blog also notes that OpenAI “employees are free to participate in the political process in their personal … Read more
OpenAI’s head of safety systems, Johannes Heidecke, told staff this week that he’s leaving the company, WIRED has learned. Heidecke’s departure follows a reorganization that sought to integrate OpenAI’s safety and research teams. In a memo to staff seen by WIRED, chief research officer Mark Chen said OpenAI’s safety teams will now report to the … Read more
Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its hardware chief on Friday for allegedly stealing the iPhone-maker’s trade secrets, including unreleased parts and prototypes, confidential designs, and documents about stealth projects. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who spent 24 years at Apple and oversaw iPhone product design, and his colleagues at … Read more
OpenAI’s chief executive of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, is leaving her full-time role at the company and transitioning to become a part-time advisor. The move comes after Simo took a monthslong medical leave due to a worsening neuroimmune condition. “Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a … Read more
These days, the frontier AI labs are all racing to build self-improving models. Some believe it’s the surest route to superintelligence—as AI improves itself in a mind-melting loop, the thinking goes, it will eventually surpass human comprehension (and perhaps even control). That’s all well and good, but I have a newsletter to produce. I wondered … Read more
Reports of an artificial intelligence arms races are everywhere—even in this very publication. But what if that framing is fundamentally dangerous? That’s Verity Harding’s concept. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days briefing politicians across the globe, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on advances in AI. As the head of global public policy … Read more
OpenAI’s chief futurist, Joshua Achiam, notified colleagues on Tuesday that he is leaving the company later this month after nearly nine years, WIRED has learned. Achiam, who previously led a team tasked with upholding the organization’s nonprofit mission, told OpenAI staff that his departure was not motivated by any specific reason, but was something he’s … Read more
When SpaceX announced last month that it had agreed to acquire the popular AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, investors believed the deal would be a boon for both companies. Cursor would benefit from getting the computing resources of a major AI lab, which it could use to train its own models. In turn, … Read more
Writing AI Lab each week means I occasionally encounter AI models that behave badly and bizarrely. Usually, there’s nothing to be done about it, save for sharing those tales with you. But that could change soon. A group of AI researchers has set up a crowdsourced websiteFlaw Reporting for AI (FLARE-AI), for reporting and tracking … Read more
Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project. The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active … Read more