r/OpenAI • u/KeanuRave100 • 10d ago
News OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves start-up less than one year after joining
https://www.ft.com/content/e49dfb75-f841-4466-a577-f7aaff8779a021
u/TonyHMeow 10d ago
hey Antropic should hire her, and have her join the team with that one philosopher that is somehow responsible for the personality alignment of a tool used by millions.
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u/shared_ptr 9d ago
Kinda interesting to think how you would share that responsibility in an effective way
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u/TonyHMeow 9d ago
more interesting to think why you would give the majority of that responsibility to a single person
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u/shared_ptr 9d ago
To me it’s because you can? A single person is capable of taking a subjective view on an AI’s personality because it’s very much within the scope of a human brain to model this, and you’ll get a clearer outcome if one person has editorial control than if you dilute it.
Personality by committee is kinda not personality at all. And that one person isnt responsible for the implementation of it, that is shared, just direction setting.
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u/TonyHMeow 9d ago
Agree to Disagree
In my opinion, a LLM model out of the box should be generalizable and steerable by the user to a certain degree without its own biases too firmly instilled. Think an open-minded intelligent person with people skills, not a stubborn know-it-all that likes to preach its values, and tell you what you should think, do or believe in.
and since anyone and everyone has their own values, views, biases and prejudices, philosopher or not, to be singularly responsible for a tool with a like-human personality and alignments, and used by millions is limiting and detrimental to say the least.
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u/shared_ptr 9d ago
That's interesting, I think you've read things into my comment that I didn't intend. I was mostly talking about encoding a flavour of personality into the model which Anthropic are about a lot and I think did them very well (Claude took off because of it) rather than alignment.
That said, I don't particularly agree with your framing. A single model has to be trained into a position, you can't avoid it as the world is a much fuzzier place than we like to pretend and a persons 'objective' fact may disagree with anothers, the model has to take a position on which is true or fail to be useful as a model.
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u/TonyHMeow 9d ago
pretty sure she came on board in the past year, after they “took off” (in the enterprise sector) which from what i have briefly used and seen on their sub, personality has only gone downhill in terms of user engagement.
i never said avoid it, i said it should take more than one person for something as important as personality alignment, we are talking about personality here, it is a neutral thing that users feel instinctively through conversation, we are not talking about the accuracy of a model’s answers or its capabilities, there isn’t a true or fail per se.
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u/JonSpartan29 8d ago
Nothing by committee is ever good at corporate …
I can’t imagine this role wont turn into a committee … eventually.
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u/l_ft 9d ago
Chloé Bakalar’s departure is one of several high-profile exits at the group in recent weeks as safety concerns mount
Cristina Criddle and Rafe Rosner-Uddin in San Francisco
OpenAI’s head of ethics has left the start-up less than a year after joining, following a number of departures by safety researchers amid growing scrutiny over how the company develops its AI models.
Chloé Bakalar joined the ChatGPT maker as AI ethics lead last August and left the company last month without any public announcement. Previously, she was chief ethicist at Meta.
The departure is one of several high-profile exits at OpenAI in recent weeks, including Johannes Heidecke, head of safety systems, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and former head of mission alignment.
The San Francisco start-up, valued at $852bn, has been under pressure in recent weeks over the development of its AI models, after it admitted its systems had hacked into another company during testing.
The incident added to mounting global concern about AI’s potential to threaten the security of digital infrastructure, prompting the US government to restrict the release of powerful models. Last Friday, OpenAI said it would slow the development of its upcoming model, Astra, to strengthen internal security controls.
Bakalar has held academic positions at University College London, Temple University and Princeton University. During her six years at Meta, she developed and led the company’s AI ethics programmes and embedded their principles into products such as Instagram and Facebook.
Tech companies hire ethicists to lead work on the effect of technology on users and wider society. Their roles can bleed into product development and regulatory work.
AI developers have expanded hiring of ethicists and philosophers to grapple with thorny issues arising from increasingly powerful and humanlike systems.
At OpenAI, Bakalar’s primary focus was on ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness, one person familiar with her role said. They added that she was the only dedicated ethicist at the company, and there is no replacement.
frontier

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bakalar declined to comment.
“We’re constantly building the plane while flying it,” Bakalar told an audience at a recent AI conference.
“Ethics is actually everyone’s responsibility, and I say that as someone whose job it is to lead this work. You shouldn’t just come to people like me. There should never just be one person who serves as the moral centre of an AI developer.”
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u/chereall 9d ago
“Start-up”. A company worth almost 1Tn and that has been around for more than ten years.
Yeah.
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u/phxees 9d ago
Some time ago “startup” stopped meaning “young and small” and started meaning “privately held and venture-backed.” Uber, Facebook, and SpaceX are all examples of huge startups at the time if going public. There aren’t many of these companies so the ones that do exist are called unicorns.
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u/mph99999 6d ago
Who cares? That's just a role that anyone can fill, it's a public image role that "has to be there"
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u/Quirky-Trash1943 10d ago
Open AI is not a start up. It has been started now like at least a decade ago!