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Anthropic hires former OpenAI safety lead to head up new team | TechCrunch
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Industry news piece relevant to understanding organizational dynamics in AI safety, specifically the movement of key researchers between major labs and what it signals about internal safety culture priorities at OpenAI and Anthropic.
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Importance: 42/100news articlenews
Summary
Anthropic hired Jan Leike, former head of OpenAI's superalignment team, to lead a new safety-focused team after his high-profile resignation from OpenAI citing concerns about safety culture. This move signals ongoing competition for top AI safety talent and reflects broader tensions within the AI industry about prioritizing safety research.
Key Points
- •Jan Leike, who resigned from OpenAI citing safety concerns being deprioritized, joined Anthropic to lead a new safety team.
- •Leike's departure from OpenAI along with Ilya Sutskever highlighted internal tensions over safety culture at OpenAI.
- •Anthropic positions itself as a safety-focused company, making it a natural destination for researchers prioritizing alignment work.
- •The hire reflects intense competition among AI labs for leading safety researchers and talent.
- •This personnel movement illustrates the broader AI safety community's concerns about adequate resources devoted to alignment research.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Alignment Research Agendas | Crux | 69.0 |
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Anthropic hires former OpenAI safety lead to head up new team | TechCrunch
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Anthropic hires former OpenAI safety lead to head up new team
Kyle Wiggers
10:24 AM PDT · May 28, 2024
Jan Leike, a leading AI researcher who earlier this month resigned from OpenAI before publicly criticizing the company’s approach to AI safety, has joined OpenAI rival Anthropic to lead a new “superalignment” team.
In a post on X, Leike said that his team at Anthropic will focus on various aspects of AI safety and security, specifically “scalable oversight,” “weak-to-strong generalization” and automated alignment research.
I'm excited to join @AnthropicAI to continue the superalignment mission!
My new team will work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization, and automated alignment research.
If you're interested in joining, my dms are open.
— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 28, 2024
A source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that Leike will report directly to Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s chief science officer, and that Anthropic researchers currently working on scalable oversight — techniques to control large-scale AI’s behavior in predictable and desirable ways — will move to report to Leike as Leike’s team spins up.
✨🪩 Woo! 🪩✨
Jan's led some seminally important work on technical AI safety and I'm thrilled to be working with him! We'll be leading twin teams aimed at different parts of the problem of aligning AI systems at human level and beyond. https://t.co/aqSFTnOEG0
— Sam Bowman (@sleepinyourhat) May 28, 2024
In many ways, Leike’s team sounds similar in mission to OpenAI’s recently dissolved Superalignment team. The Superalignment team, which Leike co-led, had the ambitious goal of solving the core technical challenges of controlling superintelligent AI in the next four years, but often found itself hamstrung by OpenAI’s leadership.
Anthropic has often attempted to position itself as more safety-focused than OpenAI.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, was once the VP of research at OpenAI and reportedly split with OpenAI after a disagreement over the company’s direction — namely OpenAI’s gro
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