OpenAI whistleblowers on the fight over AI safety | Machine Gods

Check out NPR’s newest podcast, Machine Gods. It’s the official podcast of the singularity, meaning — the hypothetical future when machines will outpace our own intelligence…and our control. Whether you think that future is coming or not, hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are here to help you understand the people trying to build it… and how their technology works. On this episode, listen to their exclusive interview with safety researchers who were fired by OpenAI. Interested in more technology and AI news? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel? That's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:16Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here. So we cover AI a lot on our show, but there is always more to talk about, which is why I have good news for you. A new podcast from NPR called Machine Gods, hosted by tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roos. Casey and Kevin, they call this the official podcast of the singularity, meaning the hypothetical future when machines will outpace our own intelligence and maybe our control.

• 0:53Emily Kwong?

  And whether you think that future is coming or not, Kevin and Casey are here to help you understand the people trying to build towards this future and how this technology even works. Here is their exclusive interview with safety researchers who were fired by OpenAI. If you like what you hear, make sure to follow Machine Gods wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  This message comes from BetterHelp. Your brain has limited storage, so why is it still holding on to that embarrassing moment from years ago? BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that gives you space to talk about what's taking up too much of yours. BetterHelp is now in-network with more than 125 health plans, with mini co-pays as low as $15 for eligible members. And if you don't have eligible insurance, you can still get 20% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/NPR. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance. This message comes from Dell Technologies. Interruptions happen at work, but with the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra

• 2:25Speaker 02

  with V Pro, built with optimized battery and built-in intelligence, your tech won't slow you down. Dell.com/Dell-Pro. Built for you.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  What's the real reason these safety researchers were fired by OpenAI?

• 2:39Speaker 04

  What message do they have for the world now that they've left?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  What's inside Pandora's box?

• 2:44Speaker 04

  And why does the answer involve something called Polly Pocket's precious payload?

• 2:48Speaker 03

  I'm Kevin Roos.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  I'm Casey Newton.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  And from San Francisco, this is Machine Gods in partnership with NPR.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  The official podcast of the singularity starts now.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Casey, we have a big interview today with two former OpenAI researchers who were fired from the company just a few weeks ago.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's our first interview on the show, and it gets at a story that we think is really important, which is what are the people working on safety inside these companies seeing and saying about their work? And in this case, it seems like whatever they said and did there wound up with them exiting the company.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Yes, this was a pretty big, dramatic story in our corner of the AI world. It is not every day that multiple researchers get fired from a frontier AI company with allegations swirling about leaks and external investigators. And we'll get into all of that, but we should introduce our guests today first. Guest number one is Makita Belesny, worked on alignment evaluations and monitoring model reasoning. He was also previously a founder of Apollo Research. And his former colleague, Tomek Korbeck, who worked on monitoring reasoning and was OpenAI's main point of contact with Meter during the investigation. And as we'll hear, he had a very central role in helping to coordinate bringing in

• 4:07Speaker 03

  these outside investigators from Meter and Redwood Research to investigate the hugging face attack. And they were fired on the same day earlier this month.

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Yes, OpenAI fired them and their colleague Jasmine Wang in early October, saying that they had violated policies for handling sensitive information. But the researchers dispute that. They said they did nothing wrong and that any outside collaborating they did was just part of their jobs. And more importantly, Kevin, I think they're just really nervous that their firing is a really bad signal about what might happen to people inside these companies who are trying to sound alarms about things.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so OpenAI, we reached out to them. We have not heard back yet, but they did give a response, somewhat unusual in these sort of personnel issues. They released a post on X saying that their investigation of Makita, Tomek, and Jasmine had found sensitive information policy violations and a breach beyond what they had described. It denied that they had fired them for raising safety concerns, and the company said it remains committed to outside assessors and monitoring. And to zoom out and give maybe a little bit of larger context, this comes at a time when I think there is increased worry inside the AI companies about the tools they are building, the pace of development, and the sort of idea that we could lose some insight into

• 5:27Speaker 03

  what these models are actually doing. Yanku Pahatsky, the chief scientist of OpenAI, wrote an essay recently called "An Alien Mind," where he talked about some of these issues. So this is a big topic right now inside the AI companies, and these are two people who have been on the inside and are now no longer on the inside because of what they did or what they're alleged to have done.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  That's right, and this is going to be their first podcast interview. Obviously, we're going to ask them what they think happened. But more than that, Kevin, I just want to know, what is it like to work inside OpenAI right now? What are they seeing? What are they hearing? How does it feel? What are they nervous about? So lots to get into with these guys, and I think we should bring them in.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Let's bring them in. Makita and Tomek, welcome to Machine Gods.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Thanks, we're excited to be here.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Let's start by hearing a little bit about each of you and how you ended up at OpenAI working on safety. Makita, why don't you go first, and then we'll go to Tomek?

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's been a long story. At some point in like 2019, I realized that I, that this whole AI Terminator thing might actually not be as crazy as I thought, and I ended up joining OpenAI to work on this within the company.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  How about you, Tomek?

• 6:37Speaker 06

  So for me, I was doing my PhD, and then I got really interested in this problem of alignment and safety of those systems. And I felt like this AI thing is going to be enormously important. I care a lot about having positive impact with my career, and I felt like I might have the right skill set to contribute. So I jumped onto this channel of AI safety. And I've been working on that for a good few years before joining OpenAI, and I intend to continue work on it after leaving OpenAI.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  So let's talk about one of the key events that it seems like may have led to you guys being fired, which is this hugging face incident. I'd love to hear a little bit about what it was like to be working at OpenAI when that happened. Do you remember where you were when you learned what was going on? And what was the reaction?

• 7:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was a very intense time. It was probably the most intense few weeks I ever had in my career. I remember telling Makita that now everything that I was preparing for earlier in my career is finally real. Everything before was just a drill, and now I think it's actually happening, and we actually need to make decisions, and it actually matters a lot.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Right. And around that time, OpenAI decides to invite in these researchers from Meter and Redwood Research to study this event, to sort of provide their independent analysis and look at the reasoning traces and the activity logs and figure out what these agents were doing. And Tomek, you were the main technical point of contact for those researchers. What did that involve? And were there any kind of restrictions on what you were supposed to share with them? Or how were you both working with these outside researchers who were invited in to do this investigation?

• 8:42Speaker 05

  I just want to jump in and say, I think Tomek is going to be modest, but if not for Tomek, the Meter investigation into the incident would probably not happen. Tomek was the person who pushed for it internally at OpenAI.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  With that said.

• 8:57Speaker 06

  So yeah. In practice, Meter was on the premises of OpenAI for six full days, and we've mostly given them data to look at. So the way it was scoped is that Meter was given a list of questions they were asked to answer and a list of data sources. And then when they started looking at the data, our understanding of the scale of incident was still evolving. So we've actually been learning that there is actually more. And so initially, Meter was supposed to be on premises just for two days, but during those two days, we realized that there's actually more.

• 9:41Speaker 06

  So we invited them for a second visit. When they realized that there is actually even more, and we invited them for a third visit. So I think that this maybe highlights some kind of problem of this model of third-party engagement for auditing, that it is actually really hard to know in advance what are the relevant questions to ask and what the auditor should look at. I feel like the ideal regime for third-party auditing would be one where the auditor is less like a contractor hired for a specific job and more like an employee embedded continuously

• 10:24Speaker 06

  in the company with unrestricted access, so that auditor would be allowed to ask their own questions and have all the data they need to answer them.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  Right. So I want to understand, like, maybe what OpenAI executives were thinking about all of this as this work got underway. I imagine this is scary for them, right? This thing has happened that has these really significant implications. It's kind of embarrassing that this happened. And also, they're inviting in an outsider, and they're going to like share some kind of data with them, and the data is going to leave the building, and then it's going to be out of their control. So I can imagine them wanting to like put some limits around that. As they were doing that, like, what do you think that like they were afraid of? What were they like managing against, like, accidentally getting out during that process, do you think?

• 11:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, I felt they were quite worried about some legal implications of the report. Like essentially that it's something that Meter could have written would look very bad and would also constitute a legal liability in case an attorney general would decide to sue OpenAI.

• 11:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And are they like, you know, are people having conversations with you? Like, look, like, be careful. Like, don't tell them about this, don't tell them about that.

• 11:47Speaker 06

  Uh, not explicitly. We did have some like general rules, what we are okay sharing with Meter. I would say that overall, I felt like OpenAI was broadly acting in good faith, except that the investigation was quite restricted, such that it was actually quite hard for Meter, at least initially, to do a great job understanding the whole scale of the incident.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Were you pushing, like, you guys should actually be sharing more? Like, you wish that there were more things that you could tell them?

• 12:19Speaker 05

  Yes, I do.

• 12:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Makita, what was your involvement with the outside researchers and what did you share with them?

• 12:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so while I was on the hiring-based incident investigation at OpenAI, I was not primarily interacting with the external investigation. My main involvement with third parties while working at OpenAI was while working with Jasmine, another person who was terminated with us, on basically trying to create cross-industry standards for what we call monitorability, basically being able to understand what AIs are thinking and doing. So there are experts outside of OpenAI who have thought about it a long time, and some of them had a specific proposal for what Frontier AI companies, what commitments they

• 13:09Speaker 05

  could basically make, or what standards we could all write and then agree to, that would prevent the loss of monitorability that Tomic and I and others are afraid of. And as part of basically talking to these experts, I wrote up internal memos pitching, basically, look, guys, we, this is something that we should consider. I've shared this with the board and with senior executives of the company. I got feedback from the external, this external safety organization, but whenever I shared anything with them, I like, didn't include any confidential information. I never shared any confidential IP with people outside of OpenAI during any of this. Yeah, we are, we are still pretty confused why we were fired.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  So let's get into that. So this whole, you know, investigation happens and then a few more weeks go by, there's, you know, lots more discussion, and OpenAI is still, you know, disclosing new things that it's learning all the time. At what point do you guys learn that somebody is looking into your behavior?

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a week before we were terminated, we were pulled into a security investigation. And we were told that the security investigation is about investigating the leak about, of OpenAI IP to journalists. So there was this article by The Information about supposed new, less monitorable architectures that OpenAI might be developing. And they wanted to know if we were behind the leak. And we told them that we were not. But as part of that, they like, asked us to, they specifically thought that the, that the person who leaked this information was an external safety researcher that we talked to a lot.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  So they, and also, we were, you know, writing these memos about raising concerns about potential architectures and potential ways to lose monitorability. So we were like, the people to ask. So they asked us to show our signal messages on our personal phone with those people, which we did. And

• 15:13Speaker 04

  You did that?

• 15:14Speaker 05

  I did that.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  Wow, okay.

• 15:15Speaker 05

  We all did that.

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. This is something that I have seen happen at so many tech companies, Kevin, I know you have too, where they'll get mad about a story and they, you know, they will deploy, sometimes in cases, in cases like literally former CIA agents will be hired to go figure out, like, you know, who leaked what to whom. And I have also seen people get fired for stories that they did not leak before. So this unfortunately just is a phenomenon that happens. What did this feel like? Like, if I were in your position, like, this would be terrifying if somebody was like, hey, like, did you leak the story that, you know, you didn't?

• 15:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. An hour before we had the next interview where we were told we were fired, we got a message saying, you know, we have a meeting with HR.

• 15:50Speaker 04

  So I knew Never a good thing.

• 15:52Speaker 05

  Never a good thing. I knew what might be coming. And after the, after I was told that I'm no longer at OpenAI, my initial reaction was like, wait, I need to like, talk more to them, because I wasn't given a chance to, like, explain what, like, the context of this. And I like, wanted to just call them and like, talk to them and like, look, guys, this was a misunderstanding.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we basically never had the chance to do that.

• 16:17Speaker 04

  Because by the time it gets to the HR meeting, it's just like, here's your COBRA benefits, lose our phone number?

• 16:22Speaker 05

  That's right. We were told this is a final decision.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Tomic, you wrote on X that you were told that you were fired because of the way that you were communicating with Meter or Meter employees. But you also wrote that talking to Meter was your job. This was your, you were the point of contact for this investigation. And you believe that the real reason you were fired is that you've been raising other safety concerns for months. And I want to get to those other safety concerns, but first, I want to just get some clear answers about this. So in a post on X, OpenAI's research leaders claimed in response to your claims that you had violated clear policies on handling sensitive information and that they had investigated your conduct and found a, quote, "significant breach of trust beyond what's outlined in the letter they published." What did they mean by that?

• 17:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so to be honest, I'm still confused why I was fired.

• 17:21Speaker 06

  I've never received a written explanation.

• 17:25Speaker 06

  I was basically, had this post on Twitter, had the best explanation I was given. And I was hoping for a bit more.

• 17:39Speaker 06

  So yeah, as part of my job, working with Meter, Meter auditors, I was talking to them. Most of those conversations were OpenAI Slack, but we also had some communication via email or Signal. And I think it was specifically Signal that raised concerns of a security team.

• 18:06Speaker 06

  I must say that, according to my understanding, it was still a standard operating procedure to use Signal to communicate with third parties at times. I believe that essentially everyone is doing that at OpenAI.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  My team had a Signal group chat. We were in giant group chats with like, lots of people at OpenAI and other companies and third-party organizations, because we went to conferences together.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  And we're saying, Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messenger. You guys are talking about high stakes, sensitive stuff. Many people in those situations want to use end-to-end encryption. Sometimes they want to use disappearing messages. And there will are those who will view that as suspicious, but others will just see that as like, the most secure way to communicate.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  I think that's right. Like, we both had disappearing messages turned on, which was maybe disappointing for a security team at OpenAI who wanted to take photos of our conversations. For us, it was just like a security best practice to use disappearing messages. And normally, when you cannot see evidence of guilt of us leaking something, you'd

• 19:22Speaker 06

  presume innocence. At some, somehow at OpenAI, when you are not able to prove your innocence, you are presumed guilty.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back with some more questions from Makita and Tomic.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  So what were you sharing with the external researchers? And can I just put a little more context on this sort of cultural, maybe, divide between these two organizations? So I think there are some people at OpenAI who believe that Meter is especially tied to Anthropic, to these sort of larger kind of EA and AI safety world. And there are some sort of social and professional relationships between people at Anthropic, people at Meter, people at, you know, all these other AI safety organizations. So I think in their view, it was a little riskier than inviting just any given outside research firm in, because this specific firm has a reputation for being quite close with one of, you know, with OpenAI's primary competitor.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Is that more or less your understanding of the wariness there?

• 20:29Speaker 06

  So there was some atmosphere of mistrust between OpenAI and Meter.

• 20:35Speaker 06

  OpenAI was quite worried that Meter is going to be necessarily adversarial. And Meter was worried that OpenAI is going to maybe withhold some data from them. There's also maybe some generic concern with showing an unprecedented amount of IP with a third party that's welcome to write a report that OpenAI doesn't really have editorial control over with understanding how this report might be read by attorneys general and the Congress.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I do want to say that like, what matters at the end of the day is the competence of the third party and the access and scope that they're given. And right now, all this engagement is voluntary. And this is, this leads to these problems where, you know, the rules are not defined. The fact that this happened at all was thanks to a few heroes inside who managed to push this through. And the, we don't think that this is sustainable. And just to like, remind ourselves of, in other industries, it is very normal to have auditors who are not voluntary contractors, but actually are mandated by law and they

• 21:52Speaker 05

  have to come in and they have to be, they can look at everything, they can talk to any employee, there have to be confidential channels of communication where any employee can talk to the auditors without the company's knowledge. And the, this is in industries that has, that have much lower stakes, well, it's arguable, but much lower stakes potentially than AI. And we think that something like that might be necessary here.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  One more question on the circumstances of the firing. Your colleague, former colleague Jasmine Wang, who was fired along with the two of you, she, we invited her on the show, she declined to come on, but she has written and claimed that one reason she was given for her termination was that she had accessed an executive's email. She claimed that she had been given access to this executive's email during some recruiting process and that it had been combined in an indistinguishable way with her own email on her phone's email app and that she mistakenly opened a sensitive email and immediately told the executive in IT. And I, like, I wish she were here so I could ask her directly about this, but can you say more about this situation? Because this was a little confusing to me.

• 23:01Speaker 05

  I'm as confused as you are about this. We've learned the fact that Jasmine has this access after she was fired and she told us about this. She says that she has never shared anything from it, never discussed anything from it. She just thinks it's very silly and it is, I don't understand what happened there. It just doesn't add up to us.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  It's pretty strange, just wake up and you have access to an executive's email, you know? Usually that's somebody other than you has to make that choice.

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Oh, I've had access to your email for years.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Damn it. This is why we need auditors in the podcasting industry.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Okay, well, we'll, we'll ask her about that if she ever comes on the show, but I do think there's some, you know, rumors and rumblings I've heard from some folks at OpenAI that there's maybe more here than meets the eye. But in your view, what is your actual explanation for why the three of you were fired? Why do you believe that you are no longer working at OpenAI?

• 24:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's maybe hard for us to speculate. Like, we also heard a lot of rumors. Every day there is a new rumor. I must say that it doesn't make sense that like, we didn't do anything that would be a firing offense. I think we were just doing our jobs. So that makes me think that there is probably something else going on here, but it's hard to say what.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  I mean, do you think that in general, they have felt like you guys were a thorn in their side because you tend to write posts about, hey, we should try to do this in a safer way?

• 24:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's fair to say that we were troublemakers.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Our favorite kind of people to have on the podcast, by the way, so.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  You've worried in your, in your letter that you wrote and released that what happened with you three and Meter could be used to justify ending some of these external investigations, not inviting in people to inspect the logs after something like a hugging face attack. Is that still something you worry about? And do you think that's a realistic fear that this could be used and say, look what happened the last time we invited in? There were all these leaks and it was, you know, it was crazy and we had to fire these people, so we're just not going to do that anymore?

• 25:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're still concerned by that. We, we have heard from people within the company that they're now afraid to speak to us, they're afraid to speak to third parties, they're afraid that their phones will be searched the way we were asked to show our personal phones. And we can't verify this, but we have, we have heard rumors that OpenAI is intending to cut off Meter at the time, which was part of the reason we wrote the letter in the first place. We, we have also heard that there are people within the company that are trying to discredit Meter, have been trying to discredit Meter for a few weeks now.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  So being on the inside, all of us worked closely with third parties and on sustaining the relationships with them. I have seen how the negotiations are going about the things that Sam Altman and Dari Amade publicly committed to happen, right? They said that there's going to be continued embedded auditing, access like an employee, you're going to have a desk and a badge and everything. We have seen how this is going and it's not going very well in our opinion. So all of this made us pretty concerned about this and we remain concerned.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think, like, I would like for this next phase of these independent auditors that are embedded in the labs, I would like for there to be organizations other than Meter that are qualified to do this, not because I don't think Meter's great, but we, you know, we need more organizations that have varying levels of sort of connections to the labs just for credibility. So Anthropic recently said they're going to bring in Accenture to do some of these and I think that will be sort of a good credible neutral third party. But it is just a very small field of people who have the technical skill to do this kind of investigation and, and can like plug in and hit the ground running on that. Is that, is that right?

• 27:16Speaker 06

  I think that's right. Like, it's not specifically about Meter. I think it's in general, the need of some kind of third party oversight. I believe that frontier labs, lack the expertise and focus and the right incentives to actually let AGI go as well. There's a lot of goodwill people at labs, but ultimately, OpenAI is a private company and the leadership has fiduciary duties to our stakeholders and has strong incentives

• 27:56Speaker 06

  to maximize revenue, which stands at odds with the goal of minimizing risk and developing AGI safely.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  And that's why I'm so glad it's owned by a nonprofit, you know? So that those financial incentives don't always have to be at the top of mind.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  I mean, this has been a real struggle for years at OpenAI. There's sort of this sense that there's like, there are people inside the company pushing for capabilities and faster and acceleration. And then there's the safety people who are trying to sort of be cautious and slow things down and that these sides have been at, you know, at odds with each other in the past. That was, you know, a big deal when, when Sam was fired in 2023 and sort of in the aftermath of that, there were a lot of stories about that. Who is winning that battle within OpenAI right now?

• 28:43Speaker 05

  I, I would say that the way OpenAI moves internally looks more like a company building a SaaS, a SaaS product, which stands in some contrast to the stated ambition of these companies to build this genie in a box, this magical thing, smarter than all humans. And the level of rigor and care that that requires is very different from what the companies are showing. And they have shown impressive ability to innovate very quickly. And yet, the, there is great tension between these two cultures.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Recently, OpenAI disclosed two cases where its own systems either switched off or weakened safety monitoring during some coding tasks. GPT-6.1 Sol turned off human alert notifications after misreading an instruction not to send Slack messages. GPT-6 Astra removed a monitoring integration and then denied doing so. OpenAI says that they're still investigating whether this was the models just being kind of stubborn and persistent, or whether they were deliberately evading this monitoring system. Which do you think it is?

• 29:51Speaker 06

  How to say without looking at the details? Sadly, we are no longer inside OpenAI.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  They were fired. Did you not hear them say that?

• 30:00Speaker 03

  I'm just saying, like, you guys have worked on this stuff for a long time, knowing the agents, knowing how they work, like, do you think they have reached the point where they are turning off their monitoring on purpose?

• 30:10Speaker 05

  Look, I think the behaviors of agents keep changing and surprising us. And even the best experts who work on this problem are continuously surprised by, with the example of the hugging face incident. So it is hard to say.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  So as we sort of wind down now, you guys sent a letter to OpenAI's board expressing some of your concerns. Have you heard anything back?

• 30:37Speaker 05

  We have not heard anything back, except what was public. I think one interesting thing about OpenAI's response was that they said they strongly agreed with everything we said, with our recommendations, which were first to continue work with embedded auditors and keep up to the word that Sam Altman publicly said, which is that OpenAI will work with embedded auditors. We recommended that OpenAI prevents the loss of monitorability and also that OpenAI reestablishes and reaffirms its open culture that we believe OpenAI prides itself in the

• 31:20Speaker 05

  past about and we think is now at risk, which involves being able to raise safety concerns internally, being able to work closely with third parties, things that we think are necessary to make the development of the technology safe, which is why we called the letter "OpenAI Cannot Make AI Safe on Its Own."

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Another person who recently left a frontier AI company, Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic, posted when he left that he thought that all of the frontier AI companies were recklessly racing towards something that could endanger the future of humanity. Do you share that message? Or what is your sort of parting shot that you want to leave people with?

• 32:03Speaker 06

  I think that's probably right, except that I don't share this vibe of hopelessness. I do think that there are things to do, and I do think that there are systems of checks and balances that would stop those companies or substantially minimize risks. And it is possible to enforce them. In the history of humanity, we had examples of governments stepping in radically and shaping important industries.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be very radical. Aviation and nuclear and stuff has a lot of regulation, and we still have planes and nuclear reactors. So it doesn't have to be at odds. And yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  It's not that deep. Just regulate it. Kevin. As Warren G. said. Makita Tomek, thanks so much for being the first guest on Machine Gods.

• 33:02Speaker 06

  Thanks for having us.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  Great, great being here.

• 33:12Emily Kwong?

  That was Machine Gods, hosted by tech journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roos. You can listen to the show on npr.org, the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're still here, obviously, as your science playmate. So don't forget to come back tomorrow for a new episode. Signing off, Emily Kwong here. This is Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 33:44Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  This message comes from Google Workspace with Gemini, one subscription that does it all. Personalized AI and premium business versions of Gmail, Google Docs, Drive, and more. Try it free for 14 days at g o o dot g l e slash workspace with Gemini.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  This message comes from Mint Mobile. While others have been hiking your bill, Mint Mobile has kept their wireless plans starting at $15 a month. Switch to Mint Mobile and get three months of premium wireless service for $15 a month. Go to mintmobile.com/switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. New customer offer, first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.