Exclusive: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say

Nov 22 - Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The previously unreported letter and AI algorithm were key developments before the board's ouster of Altman, the poster child of generative AI, the two sources said. The sources cited the letter as one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board leading to Altman's firing, among which were concerns over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences. After being contacted by Reuters, OpenAI, which declined to comment, acknowledged in an internal message to staffers a project called Q* and a letter to the board before the weekend's events, one of the people said. An OpenAI spokesperson said that the message, sent by long-time executive Mira Murati, alerted staff to certain media stories without commenting on their accuracy. Advertisement Scroll to continue Some at OpenAI believe Q* could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence, one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*'s future success, the source said. Advertisement Scroll to continue Reuters could not independently verify the capabilities of Q* claimed by the researchers. Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. This could be applied to novel scientific research AI researchers believe. In their letter to the board, researchers flagged AI's prowess and potential danger, the sources said without specifying the exact safety concerns noted in the letter. Advertisement Scroll to continue Researchers have also flagged work by an "AI scientist" team, the existence of which multiple sources confirmed. The group, formed by combining earlier "Code Gen" and "Math Gen" teams, was exploring how to optimize existing AI models to improve their reasoning and eventually perform scientific work, one of the people said. Anna Tong is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where she reports on the technology industry. She joined Reuters in 2023 after working at the San Francisco Standard as a data editor. Jeffrey Dastin is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where he reports on the technology industry and artificial intelligence. He joined Reuters in 2014, originally writing about airlines and travel from the New York bureau. Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing.

This Cyber News was published on www.reuters.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000


Cyber News related to Exclusive: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say

Exclusive: OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say - Nov 22 - Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with ...
11 months ago Reuters.com
Sam Altman's Return As OpenAI CEO Is A Relief-and Lesson-For Us All - The sudden ousting of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday initially seemed to suggest one thing: he must have done something really, really bad. Possibly illegal. So when OpenAI's board of directors publicly announced that Altman was fired after "Failing ...
11 months ago Forbes.com
OpenAI's board might have been dysfunctional-but they made the right choice. Their defeat shows that in the battle between AI profits and ethics, it's no contest - The drama around OpenAI, its board, and Sam Altman has been a fascinating story that raises a number of ethical leadership issues. What are the responsibilities that OpenAI's board, Sam Altman, and Microsoft held during these quickly moving events? ...
11 months ago Fortune.com
UK Scrutiny Of Microsoft Partnership With OpenAI - CMA seeks feedback about the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, and whether it has antitrust implications. Microsoft, it should be remembered, was firmly rebuked for its conduct by the CMA in October after the UK regulator reversed its ...
10 months ago Silicon.co.uk
OpenAI Launches Security Committee Amid Ongoing Criticism - The new committee comes in the wake of two key members of the Superalignment team - OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and AI researcher Jan Leike - left the company. The shutting down of the superalignment team and the departure of Sutskever and Leike ...
5 months ago Securityboulevard.com
Microsoft Invests Billions in OpenAI – Innovator in Chatbot and GPT Technology - Microsoft has announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence (AI) research and development firm. Founded by tech moguls Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI is a leader in AI technology, and the investment ...
1 year ago Securityweek.com
OpenAI's Sora Generates Photorealistic Videos - OpenAI released on Feb. 15 an impressive new text-to-video model called Sora that can create photorealistic or cartoony moving images from natural language text prompts. Sora isn't available to the public yet; instead, OpenAI released Sora to red ...
8 months ago Techrepublic.com
ChatGPT Maker OpenAI Raises $6.6bn In Funding | Silicon UK - Last week when OpenAI’s ‘for profit’ restructuring move was revealed, three senior executives abruptly announced they were departing, including Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, VP Research Barret Zoph, and Chief Research ...
1 month ago Silicon.co.uk
Nadella Says Microsoft 'Comfortable' With OpenAI Governance - Microsoft chief Nadella says he is 'comfortable' with OpenAI's non-profit governance structure, plays down competition issues. Microsoft secured a non-voting board observer role at OpenAI following Altman's firing and return, but Nadella said ...
9 months ago Silicon.co.uk
Google Researchers' Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data - A team of researchers primarily from Google's DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. ...
11 months ago 404media.co
Why Virtual Board Portals are the Key to Better Collaboration and Decision-Making - A digital meeting refers to a business gathering conducted electronically, eliminating the need for traditional paper documents. Embracing paperless council meetings contributes to sustainability by reducing paper waste and diminishing the energy ...
10 months ago Hackread.com
OpenAI Reveals ChatGPT Is Being DDoS-ed - ChatGPT developer OpenAI has admitted the cause of intermittent outages across its flagship generative AI offering over the past day: distributed denial of service attacks. According to the developer's status page, ChatGPT and its API have been ...
11 months ago Infosecurity-magazine.com
Experts call for US Cyber Safety Review Board rethink The Register - As the US mulls legislation that would see the Cyber Safety Review Board become a permanent fixture in the government's cyber defense armory, experts are calling for substantial changes in the way it's organized. Discussions were held at a US Senate ...
9 months ago Go.theregister.com
Researchers extract RSA keys from SSH server signing errors - A team of academic researchers from universities in California and Massachusetts demonstrated that it's possible under certain conditions for passive network attackers to retrieve secret RSA keys from naturally occurring errors leading to failed SSH ...
11 months ago Bleepingcomputer.com
Elon Musk's xAI Seeks To Raise $ 1 Billion In Equity - AI startup xAI, founded by one of the richest men in the world Elon Musk, seeks to raise up to $1 billion in equity offering. Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, has filed with the US securities regulator to raise up to $1 billion in an equity offering. The ...
11 months ago Silicon.co.uk
Superconductor Claim 'Baseless' Experts - 'Breakthrough' claim by South Korean researchers of a room-temperature superconductor dismissed by reviewing experts. Doubts about a breakthrough claim earlier this year by a group of South Korean researchers appear to be justified, after experts ...
10 months ago Silicon.co.uk
Locking Down ChatGPT: A User's Guide to Strengthening Account Security - OpenAI officials said that the user who reported his ChatGPT history was a victim of a compromised ChatGPT account, which resulted in the unauthorized logins. OpenAI has confirmed that the unauthorized logins originate from Sri Lanka, according to an ...
9 months ago Cysecurity.news
IT and security professionals demand more workplace flexibility - The concept of Everywhere Work is now much broader, encompassing where, when, and how professionals get their work done - and flexibility has become a key workplace priority, according to Ivanti. Ivanti surveyed over 7,700 executive leaders, IT and ...
6 months ago Helpnetsecurity.com
New York Times Sues Microsoft, OpenAI AI Training - The New York Times has sued both OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement of its news content. The NYT said it is the first major US media organisation to sue OpenAI, the creator of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. The lawsuit, filed in ...
10 months ago Silicon.co.uk
AI models can be weaponized to hack websites on their own The Register - AI models, the subject of ongoing safety concerns about harmful and biased output, pose a risk beyond content emission. When wedded with tools that enable automated interaction with other systems, they can act on their own as malicious agents. ...
8 months ago Go.theregister.com
4 Metrics That Help CISOs Become Strategic Partners With the Board - Many CISOs experience burnout, and most find it difficult to be recognized as strategic, growth-oriented partners to their leadership team and board of directors. Challenges CISOs Face When Reporting to the Board It can be hard for CISOs to prove ...
11 months ago Darkreading.com
Researchers Uncover Simple Technique to Extract ChatGPT Training Data - Can getting ChatGPT to repeat the same word over and over again cause it to regurgitate large amounts of its training data, including personally identifiable information and other data scraped from the Web? The answer is an emphatic yes, according to ...
11 months ago Darkreading.com
Malicious GPT Can Phish Credentials, Exfiltrate Them to External Server: Researcher - A researcher has shown how malicious actors could create custom GPTs that can phish for user credentials and exfiltrate the stolen data to an external server. Researchers Johann Rehberger and Roman Samoilenko independently discovered in the spring of ...
10 months ago Securityweek.com
Latest Information Security and Hacking Incidents - OpenAI has addressed significant security flaws in its state-of-the-art language model, ChatGPT, which has become widely used, in recent improvements. Although the business concedes that there is a defect that could pose major hazards, it reassures ...
10 months ago Cysecurity.news

Latest Cyber News


Cyber Trends (last 7 days)


Trending Cyber News (last 7 days)