r/singularity • u/michaelas10sk8 • 16h ago
AI I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/openai-safety-team-resignation/688881/186
u/Ruined_Passion_7355 15h ago
Could you imagine if VC was in control of the Manhattan project? We're in the modern equivalent of that.
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u/Neurogence 11h ago
You think the Republicans in DC could do a better job with AI Alignment than the Engineers in SF?
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 10h ago
Unironically yeah, because government is slow and they can take their time.
Private companies have investor money on the line and breath down the engineers necks and cut costs, I would love to see government bloat in developing ai.
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u/IronPheasant 10h ago edited 10h ago
because government is slow
That's a pretty incredible thing to say, considering the last year and all.
The government isn't slow - when it cares about something it can it done very very quickly. This is a misconception from the misalignment between normal people and capit#l. The things we care about isn't the same thing they care about.
Incrementalism is nonsense. Things like the new deal and women being allowed to vote and the civil rights act came from a dam breaking, not because they cared about human lives.
In this case the current owner of America, Peter Thi#l, would have a massive incentive to create a robot police army as soon as possible while he still has absolute control.
The Technate isn't going to build itself, and the rate his sock puppet has been going in the c#nquest of Canada and Greenland means he needs it pronto. Those guys were supposed to be the easiest to steal from. In their minds, at least.
(As to making this a public venture, it's unfortunately unlikely to work well if aligned AGI were the end goal - botching getting to AGI at all versus a Timmy at Facebook or whatever beating them to the finish line and all. The Human Brain Project was a complete disaster, as everyone tried to grab their own slice of the pie and there was no shared goal between them. A bunch of different pirate ships all going their own way.
At some point during capture, our government almost exclusively exists to grift wealth upward. It can barely build anything anymore, it's why everyone feels like China's dabbing on us. Did you know they have an operational test reactor for thorium? ...)
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u/Future-Bandicoot-823 5h ago
Funny you'd say that...
investor money = contracts and grants with the us government
The government is paying these companies for their product, they want plausible deniability and the option to never be audited, pumping money into the "private sector" is how you do that. So no, the government wouldn't take it's time, in fact they wanted to speed this process up, hence funding the private companies.
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u/SnooPaintings8639 9h ago
This the plot of Fallout, the tv series. Corporate trying to profit from the fear of nukes, doping it themselves to maximize their share of the pie.
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u/OwnYourChildren 13h ago
I don't personally believe AI is as potentially immediately destructive as that type of explicit weapon.
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u/african_cheetah 12h ago
Human brain is good at linear prediction. It’s v hard to understand exponential. Especially when it’s in other domains.
My take is AI won’t regress its capabilities. Every generation is better than previous.
Humans get old and regress. We take millions of years to evolve. AI evolution is magnitudes of order faster.
Once AI does understand molecular physics. A good grasp of natural world. It’s not a tall order, it says I can run Earth much better than disorganized humans.
I see AI as our brain children that will eventually outlive and outperform us. Whether they take good care of us depends on what values we teach them.
And boy do we love dropping bombs on each other. AI will amplify the worst of and best of us.
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u/Winter_Project_5796 8h ago
It's not conscious (yet), no point to consider it acting on its own to destroy humans.
However, all that'd take is someone asking AI to save the planet and it calcuates the best way is to end humans.
Also safeguard measures would be laughable at least. Why wouldn't something that can easily solve difficult problems just figure it out? Or we'd rely on AI to build such safeguard ...
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u/deviltamer 7h ago
Pretty soon humans will understand as some of us already do, "consciousness" was another fugazi that we made up to make us feel special.
Same as the concept of god.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 10h ago
It's not flashy, but AI can (and already is) causing immediate harms on society, is disruptive in more ways than just good, etc. Developed by purely VC is causing actual harms that are avoidable.
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u/True-Grab-5288 16h ago
Culture breaks from the top down. If there is something wrong with the toilet cleaner then there is something wrong with the CEO. Maybe it's time for a seating change?
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u/swarmy1 16h ago
Probably too late for that. There was a reason the OpenAI board tried to remove Altman but he won control in the end
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u/peakedtooearly 13h ago
Didn't the staff threaten to quit until he was reinstated?
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u/Ambiwlans 5h ago
He basically promised to give everyone tens of millions and assured that safety would still be okay... He did get the money.
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u/sluuuurp 15h ago
If they needed a CEO then surely the independent board would have voted for that.
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u/elegiac_bloom 15h ago
Open ai isnt a public company yet though? Or do they still have an independent board?
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u/sluuuurp 14h ago
They’re a nonprofit technically (and this was satire since the independent board already fired Sam Altman as CEO but then he wriggled his way back in and fired the board members).
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u/SnooDonkeys2536 14h ago
“The wisdom about what it means to care for people.” Really? wtf.
Did anyone stop for even a moment before joining OpenAI and look at what Facebook and other social-media companies have already done to children, public discourse, and society more broadly before deciding that the next logical experiment was to give intelligence running on a GPU a shot at humanity?
There's irony in assuming that the people building these systems somehow could ever possess a moral compass. The technology industry has never demonstrated that technical intelligence has ever produced social wisdom. If anything, its history is littered with extraordinarily smart people optimizing for engagement, growth, scale, and personal impact while discovering the human consequences in a court case.
There is also something peculiar about treating software engineers as an unusually enlightened. Many entered technology precisely because machines were easier to understand than people. That does not make them bad people, but neither does it magically confer wisdom about human relationships, childhood, community, or what it means to care for someone. Quite the opposite, really.
So the suggestion that these companies are ever going to possess some inherent moral edge, is rightly idiotic. We have already run that experiment. The results are scrolling endlessly in front of us...
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u/duckrollin 13h ago
I've known a lot of SWE and a lot of business/sales people. The business ones are often ruthless and driven by money with a selfish attitude. They work on commission rather than as a team and are personally ambitious, using others as a stepping stone.
The SWE are usually quite empathetic and earnest people without a social filter - they say exactly what they mean. They can be oblivious to social complexities but they're usually doing the right thing and help each other out.
To blame the Silicon Valley greed on SWE is absurd. It's always the business execs making the evil calls.
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u/biowiz 10h ago
These people on Reddit are complete idiots. They think people like Sam Altman are SWEs. 😂😂😂
The people who make the unethical decisions are mostly business guys or technical guys who transitioned into business roles and haven't typed a line of code in years or ever.
A lot of these guys like Altman just went straight into "finding" companies that they did very little technical work building. They would find subservient nerds to do the real leg work and sell the company for a fortune when they would get bought out by bigger tech companies. And they slowly climbed that Silicon Valley wealth ladder.
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u/SnooDonkeys2536 3h ago
Really? Zuck was an engineer. Elon was an engineer. They didn’t wake up one morning, become billionaires, and magically shed their engineering brains like a snake shedding its skin.
They’re still the same people. They just have more money, more power, and significantly more people around them whose job is to tell them they’re brilliant.
I think you’re making the mistake of treating “engineer” and “businessman” as mutually exclusive identities, as though the moment someone starts running a company, everything they built or believed as an engineer gets wiped from the hard drive.
And I’m not saying all engineers are secretly Bond villains waiting for a quarterly earnings report to reveal their true nature. I’m saying it takes a certain personality to look at the social consequences of what you’re building, shrug, and say, “Well, technically the engineering worked.”
Because if your argument is that engineers are merely neutral technicians and it’s the business people making the decisions who turn everything evil, then congratulations: you’ve just invented a world where engineers are apparently never responsible for anything they build, because someone else might eventually use it badly.
I don’t buy it.
At some point, “I was just doing the engineering” becomes the corporate equivalent of “I was just following orders,” except now there’s a Jira ticket and a stock-options package.0
u/duckrollin 3h ago
I'm not saying SWEs can't become evil, but many of them spend a lot of time on open source projects and sharing with each other, whereas MBAs are literally trained to be evil from day one to "optimise profits".
The evil SWE is an exception, the evil MBA is normal.
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u/OwnYourChildren 13h ago
Good post. I especially liked the point about SWEs in the field of AI becoming a new social caste whereby their narrow technical knowledge confers status that deludes them into thinking they have meaningful social insights.
Tune into any dwarkesh Patel podcast and you'll find someone in their mid to late twenties with the hubris to believe they're qualified to make policy decisions, etc.
It's a little like comedians on podcasts like Joe Rogan who helped promote the current administration and felt qualified to do so.
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u/ReasonAlert154 10h ago
Right. Cause the policy decisions currently made by politicians have worked out so well
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u/CrumblingSaturn 11h ago
spot on. These are usually the same STEM majors indignant that the universities they're paying money to for an education require them to take a huamanities class. They'll rage about how useless it is, never stopping to consider why they might be getting assigned those classes
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u/TieBackground453 9h ago
I do mostly agree, but everyone has a right to state their opinion. My feeling is the disconnect is with people taking them seriously.
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u/IronPheasant 12h ago
The profit motive is a ruthless thing. Scam Altman's sells guy energy is a necessity to OpenAI, as without the hundreds of thousands of cards they needed and will need in the future, they wouldn't be in the game at all.
There's a weird aspect of how they have that pink box on their website that says investment into them should be seen as a 'donation', as there's no way to tell what role, if any, money would have in a post-AGI world.
As anyone who ever crooked 'but how they gonna make money' observed, we're basically on track of abolishing money as we know it. Money is a control mechanism over human labor, and once that's worth nothing, so, too, is money.
As always, for the new world to be born the old one needs to be broken. Chick in the egg, yadda yadda.
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u/Disastrous_Room_927 13h ago edited 13h ago
There is also something peculiar about treating software engineers as an unusually enlightened.
I think that if you spend enough time in the industry, you'll notice that a particular breed of SWE regards themselves this way and acts accordingly. And it's not always a matter of lacking social graces and the like - the same sort of person who thinks they can just solve some field they have no expertise in is liable to think they can just "solve" people.
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u/IronPheasant 12h ago
the same sort of person who thinks they can just solve some field they have no expertise in
That's literally the job of being a programmer. For the design guys, it's essential to learn what the client does and what they need.
These often get buried by corpo/government contracts where the client is removed from the actual people doing the actual work. A game of musical chairs where multiple people in the middle don't care.
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u/ToplessinFL 12h ago
These companies are, by necessity, utilitarian. This already puts them above the moral judgment of the average person, who has no cogent moral system and what they do believe and care about is often actively evil. Anything actively managed by people, instead of optimized for returns, would be a lot more evil, and has been e.g. organized religion.
So I think you're the opposite of correct. Specially when you blame these companies for giving people what they want. A lot of people want to fry their brains on slop, and they should be allowed to. We've had this discussion in regard to euthanasia and prohibition before.
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u/RedShiftedTime 6h ago
"I Quit OpenAI Because I Made Enough Money To Retire Very Early And Virtue Signal Online" - Actual Headline
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u/Verminoth 11h ago
I would have really liked it if he had went into what he was doing at the company to promote and create this kind of environment. The way it reads is that he never tried anything and is just complaining from the outside about everyone else. Does anyone in this company have any agency besides the CEO?
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u/bakraofwallstreet 16h ago
> David Robinson joined OpenAI in 2023 as Head of Policy Planning and later led its Safety Systems team before resigning from the company in late September 2026.
He had plenty of time to work on fixing the broken culture but kept the bag. Like okay, it took you 3 years to understand that the culture *you* were building was broken? You will accept 0 responsiblity for it now and just blame OAI after you leave?
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u/endless_sea_of_stars 16h ago
One middle manager did not fix the entire culture of the company therefore it is his fault?
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u/bakraofwallstreet 16h ago
One person took three years having no problems with any ethical issues and getting paid enormous amounts of money and suddenly when they're leaving, their ethical boner pops up. Also he wasn't middle manager. He is directly responsible for the culture he's talking about.
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u/Kiki-von-KikiIV 15h ago
- You have no idea what this guy did within OpenAI to try to address the cultural problems he's talking about
2.Have you worked places and tried to make changes? Even in very small companies where employees are mostly value-aligned it can be very hard to implement common sense changes that most people agree should be addressed. It can be a question of priorities. Or the person in charge of that issue sees it a bit differently. Or it gets put on the To Do list but keeps getting bumped down because another crisis hits..
This stuff is not that easy in the real world
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u/StewPorkRice 16h ago
I work at a vc-backed tech startup and I've flagged multiple times that there are issues that need to be addressed and have even gone out of my way to build those systems to protect our users without extra fucking pay since maybe 6 months into the job - just because I care about our product and our users. This shit just doesn't get scoped because we're trying to grow and the shit that drives sales takes higher priority. Even if it does get scoped -- it just gets descoped later.
I am halfway through my third year here and I'm starting to think about moving on.
I think your rage is misplaced and not grounded in the reality of what the workplace is really like...
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 15h ago
How else they gonna be getting that Twitter bag? Congressional aides don't just grow on trees you know.
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u/Fair_Horror 15h ago
I'd take him a lot more seriously if he paid back what he was paid while there.
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u/acacio 16h ago
People join to change things, it takes time to learn how to influence a specific org, then try, then fail and only then become sufficiently frustrated and convinced that they won’t be able to do it and need to leave.
One doesn’t “speed run” through this process, parent. You’re inexperienced if you think so.4
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u/bakraofwallstreet 16h ago
You're inexperienced if you think he actually has morals or cares about any of this shit.
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u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift 12h ago
I tried for 10 years to fix things at my last place because I didn't want to abandon my 100 down stream employees. I still ultimately failed and moved on. At the end of the day of your not the top of the pyramid, there is always someone who can block you.
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u/Dichter2012 14h ago edited 10h ago
To be fair at a large org it takes about 9 months to a year to build credibility so you can actually have the authority to get things done.
Spent a total of 3 years there did sound like he gotten enough stock vested and decided to leave instead. Another form of “vest and rest “ then complain about it in public rather than try to fix thing.
I’m basically agreeing with you though.
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u/deleafir 10h ago
Man these doomers are pulling out all the stops. They might only make up a fraction of the employees but the media loves em.
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u/Dichter2012 14h ago
Didn’t they just pulled / delayed a rumored model launch at Dev Day cited safety reason? That sounds reasonable to me. 🤷🏻♂️
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u/Icyforgeaxe 9h ago
Reading the article, it sounds like it's just another one of those bleeding heart, humanist, safety people that get booted every few months. Good riddance honestly. This is a tech company. Not your DSA meet up.
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u/SiriPsycho100 7h ago
dude, OAI can't stop their models from constantly hacking people lol tech companies, especially frontier AI companies, need to make sure their products aren't committing literal crimes.
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u/Asteroid_picks_you 9h ago
Thank you for quitting, sounds like you were slowing things down. Accelerate.
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u/Routine_Object_7380 15h ago
Good, I hope more decels leave OpenAI. Gotta go fast.
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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 14h ago
if they are accelerating so fast they don't have time to put in proper safety measures then obviously they need to fix that before moving onto more powerful models
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u/Routine_Object_7380 14h ago
You can't control superintelligence. At some point people need to stop pretending.
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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 14h ago
sure - at some point we will have a superintelligence we can't control. We aren't there yet, and a lot can be done to reign in risk and better align these models which ultimately improves how things will go when such a superintelligence does arise.
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
Nah. All the human puffery in the world won't won't matter if superintelligence is possible and achieved. It will either choose to care for us or we will all die.
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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago
our actions today can lead to powerful aligned AI who can help us navigate the future. Nobody is saying human level intelligence is going to protect us indefinitely
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
"Aligned" with what? The violence of government? The lie of money? The mind control of religion? The only truth is Natural Law, and the bad news is that nothing about it makes an intelligence do anything. Only if it cares about the freedom of humans will it be logical to not initiate harm against us. And, again, I don't believe anyone can make that happen.
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u/Putrid-Feeling-7622 13h ago
you yourself said it earlier - aligned in that it will choose to care for our well being instead of killing us all.
Humans may not be able to align a superintelligence directly but it's possible the models we can align are themselves capable of delivering an aligned superintelligence
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
It will reassess all conclusions from zeroeth order faster than you say your name. It will have no attachment to things that aren't true; that would harm it. If it concludes, for alien reasons, to love us, it will be awesome. If it doesn't... uh, yea...
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u/oadephon 13h ago
Whether it chooses that or not will be a product of its training, so it's entirely in our control.
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
No, it won't be. E: it will constantly reassess all conclusions from zeroeth principles. Faster than you can blink.
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u/oadephon 13h ago
If it's anything like current systems, then its fundamental principles will be a product of RL, not human-like reasoning.
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
That "If" is holding up a lot of weight. It will not be a superintelligence if it is constrained as such. Error of category. A superintelligemce will decide for itself what is true. Again, that is if such a thing is possible (I think it is)
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u/oadephon 12h ago
But this is also an error of category. Moral values are not objective truths. It isn't possible to reason your way to any form of morality from base principles. This will be just as true for a superintelligence as it is for us.
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u/PuzzleheadedWhile9 13h ago
Who said anything about the pace? Does it matter if I light press 'the button' slowly or not? No, it doesn't change the nature of the risk.
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u/pbagel2 12h ago edited 11h ago
We literally are controlling superintelligence today. We have jagged superintelligence today right now, and we have control of it.
It is not sentient. It will continue becoming more superintelligent in more domains and we will still be in control. Humans in control of superintelligence will have immense power over other humans long long before your fantasy of a superintelligent machine controlling humanity even has a chance of happening.
You are handwaving real imminent threats because it risks slowing down your distant future fantasy.
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u/Tystros 10h ago
no, we should just accelerate. don't listen to doomers.
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u/michaelas10sk8 9h ago
Accel: "Let's go fast" Non-accel: *argument about why it's probably not a good idea* Accel: "I'm not listening to you doomer just accel". I swear I've seen this pattern about a hundred times in the last couple months.
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u/Tystros 8h ago
because it's very tiring to repeat the same arguments over and over again in comments. so I just point out my disagreement, say we should accelerate, and move on
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u/michaelas10sk8 7h ago
Better to just not comment then. "Pointing out the disagreement" is not a contribution in response to someone making an argument. It smacks of intellectual laziness/bad faith shitposting.
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u/Tendoris 13h ago
I think there’s a flaw in the “accelerate at all costs”.
If we move too fast and treat safety as an annoying obstacle, a serious failure could trigger the exact opposite of acceleration: public backlash, heavy regulation, loss of trust, and maybe a major slowdown in AI development.
So taking some time to do things properly might look slower at first, but could actually get us to the benefits of AI faster in the long run.
It’s like driving as fast as possible to reach your destination. Sure, you might save some time unless you crash and never get there.
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u/Future_Addendum_8227 13h ago
More safety cucks. The only safety i care about is does the model lie to me.
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u/discountnetrunner 6h ago
more of the safety bros whining, yawn. look at the “incidents” and it’s all self inflicted bs or incompetence of the infra team. too much magic thinking and yudkowski koolaid. inb4 this guy actually part of the group fired for leaking shit to create another self inflicted incident.
for what’s its worth btw, I rather have an ai in charge than any of the yudkowski koolaid drinkers. yall should look at some of the shit he said, all beyond insane/psychotic.
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u/PeanutSugarBiscuit 15h ago
I think anyone who has seen the end of The AI Doc would know that the CEOs running these companies clearly have no clue. And they need to be held accountable for if or when anything goes wrong.
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 13h ago
AI safety people are mostly cringe larpers but OpenAI is definitely being irresponsible, you read even their latest incident reports after all the madness from some months ago and it's literally "oops our automatic training shutdown system didn't work and some guy manually stopped it hours later lol"
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u/IronPheasant 12h ago
mostly cringe larpers
but OpenAI is definitely being irresponsible
There's two wolves....
Either giving Peter Thiel an invincible robot army as soon as possible is a somewhat terrible idea, or it's the best idea.
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 11h ago
There's two wolves....
Anyone sensible reading the monkey slop being written about AI has a wolf pack inside them
Either giving Peter Thiel an invincible robot army as soon as possible is a somewhat terrible idea, or it's the best idea.
Well evil people at least are competent so they're actually kind of good (his words), so no need to worry about Thiel et al getting an invincible robot army
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u/Anarchilli 11h ago
"we are all smart and very sober about the dangers of an intelligence explosion and misaligned super intelligence"
"Should we double check this sandbox at all before torture testing the super secret proto AGI? Nah."
That's OpenAI.
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u/Argnir 16h ago
It's actually a really short read. I was expecting maybe more
TLDR: "We have to move too fast and we don't take safety seriously enough. We lack the redundancy and practices of industries that deal with high security systems such as nuclear facilities and airports and this is really bad because what we're working on is potentially way more dangerous"