OpenAI dissolves safety team, head advisor for ‘AGI Readiness’ departs

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)-backed OpenAI is dissolving its “AGI Readiness” team, which advised the startup on its capacity to handle AI and the world’s readiness to manage the technology, according to the head of the team who has resigned.

OpenAI’s Economic Research team, which until recently was a subteam of AGI Readiness led by Pamela Mishkin, will move under Ronnie Chatterji, OpenAI’s new chief economist. Meanwhile, the remaining AGI Readiness team will be distributed among other teams, said Miles Brundage, senior advisor for AGI Readiness, in a post on Substack post, while announcing his departure.

Brundage said his main reasons to leave included — the opportunity costs becoming very high. “To be clear, while I wouldn’t say I’ve always agreed with OpenAI’s stance on publication review, I do think it’s reasonable for there to be some publishing constraints in industry (and I have helped write several iterations of OpenAI’s policies), but for me the constraints have become too much,” Brundage noted.

Brundage also said that he wanted to be less biased and that he had accomplished what he set out to at OpenAI.

In addition, Brundage plans to start his own nonprofit or join an existing one to focus on AI policy research and advocacy.

“We fully support Miles’ decision to pursue his policy research outside industry and are deeply grateful for his contributions. His plan to go all-in on independent research on AI policy gives him the opportunity to have an impact on a wider scale, and we are excited to learn from his work and follow its impact,” said an OpenAI spokesperson in an emailed statement to Seeking Alpha.

On OpenAI and the world’s readiness on artificial general intelligence, or AGI, Brundage said — “in short, neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready, and the world is also not ready.”

In July, OpenAI reassigned Aleksander Madry, one of the company’s top safety executives, to a job focused on AI reasoning, the report added.

The decision to reassign Madry came around the time Democratic senators sent a letter to OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman related to questions about how OpenAI was addressing emerging safety concerns, according to the report.