OpenAI has been aggressively approaching its ambitious vision, especially with DeepSeek's growing popularity and the threat it poses to OpenAI's position as one of the leading AI companies. The tech giant has been pursuing AGI development and has even shared that super AI agents are the next big thing. While the company has, since its inception, been balancing safety and competition, its recent approach to AI safety has not been well-received, particularly with a former key member criticizing the direction of the company and questioning whether the company is revising its narrative.
OpenAI is being called out by an ex-policy lead over its changing narrative on AI safety and maintaining responsible measures
OpenAI has recently shared its approach to the careful iterative deployment of its AI models with the community by releasing them step-by-step and using GPT -2's cautious rollout as an example. The example, however, invited criticism from former OpenAI policy researcher Miles Brundage, who called out the company and accused it of rewriting the narrative on AI safety history.
The document that OpenAI published highlights its approach to AI safety and the deployment of its models. It emphasized how it takes a cautious approach with the current systems and mentioned GPT -2 as part of its cautious release approach. The company expressed its belief in learning from the tools available to ensure the safety of future systems. In the document, it was stated:
In a discontinuous world […] safety lessons come from treating the systems of today with outsized caution relative to their apparent power, [which] is the approach we took for [our AI model] GPT‑2. We now view the first AGI as just one point along a series of systems of increasing usefulness […] In the continuous world, the way to make the next system safe and beneficial is to learn from the current system.
Miles Brundage, who was the company's head of policy research for several years, insists that the GPT-2 release also followed an incremental approach with OpenAI sharing insights at each stage, and the security experts acknowledged and appreciated the company's cautious approach to handling the model. He argues that the gradual release of the GPT-2 aligned with its current iterative deployment strategy and firmly believes that the past caution was not excessive but necessary and responsible.
The bulk of this post is good + I applaud the folks who work on the substantive work it discusses.
But I'm pretty annoyed/concerned by the "AGI in many steps rather than one giant leap" section, which rewrites the history of GPT-2 in a concerning way. https://t.co/IQOdKczJeT
— Miles Brundage (@Miles_Brundage) March 5, 2025
Brundage also went ahead and expressed concerns over OpenAI's claim that AGI will be developed in gradual steps rather than a sudden breakthrough. He shared how the company misrepresenting the history of GPT-2's release and rewriting the safety history is troubling. He further stated his apprehensions regarding OpenAI releasing the document to create a standard or place safety concerns as overreactions, potentially posing a great risk, especially as more advancement is achieved in AI systems.
This is not the first time that OpenAI has been criticized for prioritizing progress and profits over long-term safety. Experts like Brundage highlight whether the trade-off is justified and share concerns regarding what the future may hold if AI safety is not dealt with caution.
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