The sudden departure of Jan Leike, a senior leader at OpenAI, has caused a stir in the AI community. Leike's brief announcement, "I have resigned," on X surprised many, given his crucial role in OpenAI's AI superintelligence control project. Shortly before this, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, also announced his departure from the company.
Leike and Sutskever previously led the “superalignment” team – an ambitious project aimed at ensuring that super-AI, with intelligence far superior to humans, would always act according to human wishes. OpenAI invested 20% of its computing resources in this project with the goal of finding a solution to control AI within four years.
However, OpenAI acknowledges that they have yet to find an effective way to control superintelligence. In a July 2023 post, OpenAI stated: “Current AI alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on human AI monitoring capabilities. But humans will not be able to reliably monitor AI systems that are smarter than themselves, and therefore our current alignment techniques will not scale to superintelligence. We need new scientific and technical breakthroughs.”
Before joining OpenAI, Leike worked at Google's DeepMind. He has always harbored the ambition to protect humanity from the potential risks posed by super-advanced AI. In an August 2023 episode of the podcast "80,000 Hours," Leike shared: "It's like we have a difficult problem that we've been talking about for years, and now we have a real opportunity to solve it."“
On his personal Substack, Leike offered an analysis of the AI alignment problem. He stated: “Perhaps the solution to the optimization and fine-tuning problem lies within human capabilities. But it may not.” Leike proposed a more feasible solution: “Build a sufficiently finely tuned AI system to accelerate alignment research, thereby enabling the development of more capable AI systems.”
The departure of Sutskever and Leike raises many questions about the future of the AI superintelligence control project. Will OpenAI be able to find worthy replacements for these two leading experts? And more importantly, is the goal of taming super-intelligent AI an impossible task?
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