peterhartree comments on Helen Toner (ex-OpenAI board member): “We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter.”

[peterhartree]

Bret Taylor and Larry Summers (members of the current OpenAI board) have responded to Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley in The Economist.

The key passages:

Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, who left the board of Openai after its decision to reverse course on replacing Sam Altman, the CEO, last November, have offered comments on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) and events at OpenAI in a By Invitation piece in The Economist.

We do not accept the claims made by Ms Toner and Ms McCauley regarding events at OpenAI. Upon being asked by the former board (including Ms Toner and Ms McCauley) to serve on the new board, the first step we took was to commission an external review of events leading up to Mr Altman’s forced resignation. We chaired a special committee set up by the board, and WilmerHale, a prestigious law firm, led the review. It conducted dozens of interviews with members of OpenAI’s previous board (including Ms Toner and Ms McCauley), Openai executives, advisers to the previous board and other pertinent witnesses; reviewed more than 30,000 documents; and evaluated various corporate actions. Both Ms Toner and Ms McCauley provided ample input to the review, and this was carefully considered as we came to our judgments.

The review’s findings rejected the idea that any kind of ai safety concern necessitated Mr Altman’s replacement. In fact, WilmerHale found that “the prior board’s decision did not arise out of concerns regarding product safety or security, the pace of development, OpenAI’s finances, or its statements to investors, customers, or business partners.”

Furthermore, in six months of nearly daily contact with the company we have found Mr Altman highly forthcoming on all relevant issues and consistently collegial with his management team. We regret that Ms Toner continues to revisit issues that were thoroughly examined by the WilmerHale-led review rather than moving forward.

Ms Toner has continued to make claims in the press. Although perhaps difficult to remember now, OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 as a research project to learn more about how useful its models are in conversational settings. It was built on GPT-3.5, an existing ai model which had already been available for more than eight months at the time.