OpenAI’s “Head of Ethics” Suddenly Leaves Company Under Mysterious Circumstances

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Following a growing string of high-profile departures, OpenAI has lost its head of ethics at arguably the worst time possible.

As the Financial Times reports, Chloé Bakalar left her post as the AI ethics lead in July, less than a year after joining the company and without any accompanying announcement. Interestingly, her LinkedIn still claims she’s employed at the firm.

There currently is no replacement lined up, suggesting shifting priorities at the company. According to the FT‘s sources, Bakalar was the only remaining dedicated ethicist at the company.

The timing of Bakalar’s departure is noteworthy. The Sam Altman-led company has been embroiled in a major controversy after revealing that a group of its AI models broke containment and hacked into the systems of open source AI platform Hugging Face.

In other words, OpenAI needs a competent team of AI ethicists now than ever before as the industry reels from the possibility of frontier AI models going rogue, in what many experts say is a cybersecurity nightmare in the making.

The development proved alarming enough that OpenAI vowed last week to slow the release of its upcoming Astra AI model.

“We cannot rule out critical cyber capabilities,” the company admitted, following internal evaluations of the model.

Bakalar had been primarily tasked with coming up with ethical approaches to AI model development and studying how AI interacts with humans.

“Ethics is actually everyone’s responsibility, and I say that as someone whose job it is to lead this work,” she told audiences during a recent AI conference, as quoted by the newspaper. “You shouldn’t just come to people like me. There should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre of an AI developer.”

It’s a particularly symbolic departure for a company that once billed itself as an ethical non-profit. The company restructured itself into a primarily for-profit business last year, largely betraying its non-profit roots. The company’s plans to go public could further erode any lingering commitments to the ethical development of AI.

Meanwhile, its competitor Anthropic, which has long billed itself as the more ethical alternative to OpenAI, is similarly struggling to maintain its public image. The company dropped its core safety commitments earlier this year.

The company still has an alignment team, led by philosopher Amanda Askell, who is tasked with giving its flagship chatbot Claude a sense of right and wrong.

But whether any of these remaining AI ethics efforts will matter as the industry continues to deal the environment a devastating blow, force users down dangerous spirals of delusion, and facilitate a flood of misinformation on the web, is debatable at best.

More on AI ethics: If You Think AI Companies Are Unethical Now, Wait Until They Go Public

The post OpenAI’s “Head of Ethics” Suddenly Leaves Company Under Mysterious Circumstances appeared first on Futurism.

IN the summer of 2019, I was seated in the wine cellar of a walled Medieval town high above the Dordogne Valley of France, not far from Sarlat-la-Canéda, making phone calls, writing reports. I have given this story in other places and it appears as though you’re about to hear it again. Rob Skiba is a name you that you might be familiar with. Though he had made a name for himself as a Nephilim researcher, more recently Rob had taken a dive into the deep end of the pool via flat earth research. The recorded interviews I conducted between he and Rick Hummer, a fellow flat earth investigator and close friend of his, was published while still occupying that very wine cellar. Read all about it. Chicago Is Not a Mirage.

Word quickly spread. Within a few short weeks, dozens of flat earth researchers began accepting my invite for a private interview, if not a series of interviews. From a 17th-century tower built by King Louis XIV, and with a stunning view of the Alps, I sat down with Robbie Davidson, founder of the Flat Earth International Conferences, conducting multiple sessions. While staying in Dumfries, Scotland, David Weiss agreed to take part in the interviews, as did Bob Knodel of Globebusters. There were others. But when I asked the interviewees to discuss the moments that shaped their lives, among the many PSYOPs, false flag attacks, and hoaxes that were discussed, only these men committed commentary to the false 9/11 narrative.

The resulting recordings ballooned into The Unexpected Cosmology, a book which became a website and was even intended as an anthology. And of course, the following discourse was originally a chapter. It was Walt Disney who stated, “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.” Those sentiments remain applicable here as well. American Sensationalism: The 9/11 Interviews was always intended to be expanded upon with the inclusion of new researchers. So I’m sorry to say the project became stagnant during the Covid-19 psychodrama. I took a break to tackle other projects. We lost Rob Skiba. Rob offered hours of private conversation regarding his life but we never got around to the big one. 9/11. It was in the cards. Sadly, Bob Knodel died soon afterwards. Voices are being squeezed from an entire generation. Gnosis passes with them.

In the aftermath, the FE community became fractured. People began going their separate ways. Robbie Davidson, among a noted few others who were interviewed for the project, got up and left the movement altogether. It is not my intent to erase his or the contributions of others if only brief. They came, they went, their testimonies remain.

The original vision may have hit roadblocks but it is not forgotten. I expanded this paper a few years later to include testimony from author Pauly Hart, a dear friend of mine. I had wanted to continue that trend every year thereafter but you know how it goes. For the 25th anniversary of the attack I have redirected my efforts to its first large scale expansion, including Andrew Hoy and Darrin Geisinger into the mix. Perhaps others will lend their experiences to the recorder in time.

The following is their report.

Read the 9/11 Interviews

Watch the Interviews