Long-time OpenAI safety researcher Miles Brundage will start or join another artificial intelligence firm after quitting his position as head of “AGI Readiness” and leaving the company on Oct. 23.
Brundage, who joined OpenAI in 2018 as a researcher, was positioned as the company’s top safety officer.
In a Substack post discussing his departure he claimed that OpenAI’s “AGI Readiness” team will be disbanded, potentially leaving the firm without a dedicated safety department.
AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a theoretical paradigm wherein an AI model would be capable of performing any task a human could do if given the same resources.
Brundage’s team’s primary purpose appeared to have been providing policy suggestions and safety oversight for the company’s continuing development toward AGI.
His exit, according to the post, was prompted by the desire to focus on independent research and advocacy. He cited several reasons for his departure including the desire to “be less biased” toward his corporate setting, and to seek opportunities through either entrepreneurship or at a different organization.
Per Brundage:
“I plan to start a new nonprofit (and/or join an existing nonprofit) and will work on AI policy research and advocacy. I will probably do some mix of research and advocacy but the details and ratios are TBD.”
The researcher might not be out of a job for long, however, as he’s already made a potential business connection with Brendan McCord, founder and Chief of Cosmos Institute, an organization dedicated to developing technology with a humanist approach.
A potential business connection on X.com. Source Miles Brundage, Brendan McCord
AGI Readiness
The significance of Brundage’s departure from OpenAI remains unclear. Cointelegraph reached out to OpenAI and was given the following statement:
“We fully support Miles’ decision to pursue his policy research outside industry and are deeply grateful for his contributions. His plan to go all-in on independent research on AI policy gives him the opportunity to have an impact on a wider scale, and we are excited to learn from his work and follow its impact. We’re confident that in his new role, Miles will continue to raise the bar for the quality of policymaking in industry and government.”
The company declined to respond to Cointelegraph’s questions concerning the future of the AGI Readiness team.
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OpenAI’s employee exodus
Prior to the creation of the AGI Readiness team, the company’s primary AGI oversight department was the “Superalignment” team co-led by company cofounders Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike.
That team was disbanded after Leike left the company in May, claiming he’d reached his “breaking point” after disagreements with management.
Sutskever quit the firm the next month and has since gone on to found his own competing artificial intelligence company already valued at an estimated $5 billion.
OpenAI had already lost co-founder and chief scientist Andrej Karpathy by this point, who’d left to start his own company in February.
Another co-founder, John Schulman, called it quits in August to join competitor Anthropic. Meanwhile, former chief technology officer Mira Murati is reportedly raising funds to start a competing artificial intelligence company as well.
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