OpenAI has announced the establishment of a Safety and Security Committee and has initiated the training of a new AI model to replace the current GPT-4 system that underpins its ChatGPT chatbot.
This committee will be tasked with providing recommendations to the entire board on “essential safety and security matters” pertaining to OpenAI’s projects and operations, according to the company’s statement released on Tuesday.
A first task of the committee will involve assessing and enhancing OpenAI’s processes and safeguards over the next 90 days. Once this period ends, the committee will present its recommendations to the entire board for review. Following the board’s assessment, OpenAI will publicly share an update on adopted recommendations.
The safety committee is established amid debates on AI safety within the company, which gained attention following the resignation of researcher Jan Leike, who criticized the company for prioritizing shiny products over safety concerns. OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever also resigned, leading to the dissolution of the “superalignment” team dedicated to addressing AI risks.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s chatbots, equipped with generative AI capabilities like engaging in human-like conversations and generating images from text prompts, have raised safety concerns due to the increasing power of AI models.
OpenAI has announced that it has recently commenced training its “next frontier model” and expects the “resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI.”
