But when you give them a larger remit, and structure teams with some owning "value" and and others essentially owning "risk", the risk teams tend to attract navel-gazers and/or coasters. They wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value.
The problem is the incentives tend to be totally misaligned. Instead the team that ships the "value" also needs to own their own risk management - metrics and counter metrics - with management holding them accountable for striking the balance.
Imagine if vehicle manufacturers[2] split their design and R&D teams into a "make the thing go" team and a "don't kill the passengers" team. Literally noone would think that arrangement made sense.
I can totally see when we are at a state of significant maturity of both AI and AI regulation that you have a special part of your legal team that are specialised in legal/regulatory compliance issues around AI just like companies tend to have specialised data privacy compliance experts. But we're not there yet.
[1] If you're serious about long-term AI risk and alignment research, sponsor some independent academic research that gets published. That way it's arms-length and genuinely credible.
[2] If you like you can maybe mentally exclude Boeing in this.
I think you definitely want people who have that responsibility to "wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value".
Now, whether you buy OpenAI's hype about the potential danger (and value) of their products, that's up to you, but when the company says, "We're getting rid of the team that makes sure we don't kill everyone", there is a message being sent. Whether it's "We don't really think our technology is that dangerous (and therefore valuable)" or "We don't really care if we accidentally kill everyone", it's not a good message.
Without them internally, it'll just fall to regulators, which of course is what shareholders want; to privatize upside and socialize downside.
As someone who has scaled orgs from tens to thousands of engineers, I can tell you: you need value teams to own their own risk.
A small, central R&D team may work with management to set the bar, but they can't be responsible for mitigating the risk on the ground - and they shouldn't be led to believe that that is their job. It never works, and creates bad team dynamics. Either the central team goes too far, or they feel ignored. (See: security, compliance.)
In this specific case, though, Sam Altman's narrative is that they created an existential risk to humanity and that the access to it needs to be restricted for others. So which is it?
Rocket caskets. Can't kill someone who is already dead!
Hard not to imagine a pattern if one considers what they did a few months ago:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-o...
Anyone who's used their AI and discovered how it ignores instructions and makes things up isn't going to honestly believe it poses an existential threat any time soon. Now they're big enough they can end that charade.
Yeah, the problem (in this outsider's opinion) is that that charter is so ill-defined that it's practically useless, which in turn means that any sufficiently loud voice can apply it to anything. It's practically begging to be used as a whip.
> I think you definitely want people who have that responsibility to "wield their authority like a whip without regard for business value".
No, because without thinking of value, there is no enterprise, and then your mission is impossible. Essentially, it creates an incentive where the best outcome is to destroy the company. And, hey hey, that's kinda what almost happened.
> Whether it's "We don't really think our technology is that dangerous (and therefore valuable)" or "We don't really care if we accidentally kill everyone", it's not a good message.
I don't think it has to be so black-and-white as this. Meta, Microsoft, and Google did the same thing. Instead, those functions have been integrated more closely into the value teams. And I can't imagine Amazon or Oracle ever having those teams in the first place. They likely all realized the same thing: those teams add huge drag without adding measurable business value.
And yes, there are ways to measure the business value of risk management, and weigh against upside value to decide the correct course of actions - it's just that most of those teams in big tech don't actually take a formal "risk management" approach. Instead they pontificate or copy and enforce.
I hope others see that there are two extremely intelligent sides, but one has mega $$ to earn and the other is pleading that there are dangers ahead and not to follow the money and fame.
This is climate change and oil companies all over again, and just like then and now, oil companies are winning.
Fundamentally, many people are the first stage, denial. Staring down our current trajectory of AGI is one of the darkest realities to imagine and that is not pleasant to grapple with.
2. Boeing is a good and timely example of the consequences of said internal checks and balances collapsing under “value creation” pressure. That was a catastrophic failure which still can’t reasonably be compared to the downside of misaligned AI.
> A small, central R&D team may work with management to set the bar, but they can't be responsible for mitigating the risk on the ground - and they shouldn't be led to believe that that is their job. It never works, and creates bad team dynamics. Either the central team goes too far, or they feel ignored. (See: security, compliance.)
[1]: >>40391283
Most folks who are part of the startup, don't care to stick around for the scale. Different phases of the company tend to attract different types of people.
The reason you can't "align" AI is because we, as humans on the planet, aren't universally aligned on what "aligned" means.
At best you can align to a particular group of people (a company, a town, a state, a country). But "global alignment" in almost any context just devolves into war or authoritarianism (virtual or actual).
Not supported by Ilya agreeing with board to fire Sam Altman.
I also think you'll struggle to find a majority of people thinking AI research's "ceiling is proving to be lower than originally hoped", what with 4o, SORA, GPT5 all coming and it's only been 1.5 years since ChatGPT.