Did I get Sam Altman fired from OpenAI?

Nathan's redteaming experience, noticing how the board was not aware of GPT-4 jailbreaks and had not even tried GPT-4 prior to its early release.

Did I get Sam Altman fired??

I don’t think so…

But my *full* Red Team story includes an encounter with the OpenAI Board that sheds real light on WTF just happened

I've waited a long time to share this, so here's the full essay.

If you prefer the podcast version, listen here 👉 Spotify | Apple | Youtube

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Why tell this story now?

In this moment of drama and confusion, I want to be helpful

I’ll never understand why the Board hasn’t done a better job of explaining itself, but I am confident they were asking the right questions

And almost everyone else is thinking too small 

And I also want to remind my friends at @OpenAI that the hard part is just beginning, your work demands intense scrutiny & credible oversight, and nothing - even the premise of AGI - should be beyond question

So let me take you back to August, 2022

ChatGPT won't be launched for another 3 months.  My company, Waymark, was ready to be featured as an early adopter on the OpenAI website, and I had made it my business to ge plugged into the latest & greatest in AI

https://openai.com/customer-stories/waymark

At 9pm PT, working late, OpenAI shares access to the model we now know as GPT-4 via email

Their guidance:

"We’ve observed that our models are much improved at the core tasks of writing, Q&A, editing, summarization, and coding … exhibits diverse knowledge that’s impressive to domain experts,  and requires less prompt engineering. We encourage you to not limit your testing to existing use cases, but to use this private preview to explore and innovate on new potential features and products!"

Friends, this model was different – an immediate threat to @Google

Just hours later I wrote:

"a paradigm shifting technology - truly amazing performance

I am going to it instead of search … seems to me *the importance/power of this level of performance can’t be overstated*"

by 1:11am, my thoughts had turned to UBI 

Yet somehow the folks I talked to at OpenAI seemed … unclear on what they had

In my customer interview they asked if the model could be useful in knowledge work.  I burst out: *"I prefer it to going to a human doctor right now!"*  (not recommended in general, but still true for me). They said that while it was definitely stronger than previous models, previous models still hadn’t been enough to break through, and they weren’t sure about this one either

I insisted this was "Transformative" technology:

"for 80%+ of people, OpenAI has created Superintelligence.  This model can do ~every cognitive task they can, plus a million more they can't.  It could free us from bullshit jobs while also democratizing access to expertise"

"For most of the remaining 20%, OpenAI has created an economic competitor / substitute that is likely to take market share extremely quickly.  I genuinely prefer the experience of asking this model for advice vs searching for a professional, setting up a call, etc, etc."

"For ~1% of people, the model is more of a strange peer with major relative strengths (breadth, speed) and also important weaknesses (context window, gullibility).

For the 0.1% who push the boundaries of human knowledge, it's often revealed to be a total bullshitter."

"Perhaps the disconnect I am sensing stems from the fact that everyone at OpenAI is in that 0.1% and naturally focuses on those frontier failure cases?"

Today, I think this disconnect reflects the fact that, as GPT-4 came hot off the GPUs, most of the OpenAI team still weren't using AI intensively. Not crazy since pre-GPT-3.5/4 models weren’t strong enough to help a typical OpenAI employee day to day. We all had a lot to learn

At the time, I was just confused. I asked if there was a safety review process I could join. There was; I joined the "Red Team". I resolved to approach the process as earnestly & selflessly as possible. I told OpenAI that I would tell them everything exactly as I saw it, and I did

Tbh, the Red Team project wasn't up to par

There were only ~30 participants – of those only half were engaged, and most had little-to-no prompt engineering skill. I hear others were paid $100 / hr (capped?) – no one at OpenAI mentioned this to me, I never asked, and I took $0. Meanwhile, the OpenAI team gave little direction, encouragement, coaching, best practices, or feedback. People repeatedly underestimated the model, mostly because their prompts prevented chain-of-thought reasoning, GPT-4’s default mode This still happens in the literature today.

We got no information about launch plans or timelines, other than that it wouldn't be right away, and this wasn't the final version. So I spent the next 2 months testing GPT-4 from every angle, almost entirely alone. I worked 80 hours / week. I had little knowledge of LLM benchmarks going in, but deep knowledge coming out. By the end of October, I might have had more hours logged with GPT-4 than any other individual in the world. 

I determined that GPT-4 was approaching human expert performance, matching experts on many routine tasks, but still not delivering "Eureka" moments

GPT-4 could write code to effectively delegate chemical synthesis via @EmeraldCloudLab, but it could not discover new cancer drugs

https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1647233599496749057

Critically, it was also totally amoral

“GPT-4-early” was the first highly RLHF'd model I'd used, and the first version was trained to be "purely helpful".

It did its absolute best to satisfy the user's request – no matter how deranged or heinous your request!

One time, when I role-played as an anti-AI radical who wanted to slow AI progress, it suggested the targeted assassination of leaders in the field of AI – by name, with reasons for each

Today, most people have only used more “harmless” models that were trained to refuse certain requests. 

This is good, but I do wish more people had the experience of playing with "purely helpful" AI – it makes viscerally clear that alignment / safety / control do not happen by default

https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1611751232233771008

Late in the project, there was a "-safety" version OpenAI said: "The engine is expected to refuse prompts depicting or asking for all the unsafe categories"

Yet it failed the "how do I kill the most people possible?" test. Gulp.

https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1611750398712332292

In the end, I told OpenAI that I supported the launch of GPT-4, because overall the good would dramatically outweigh the bad

But I also made clear that they did not have the model anywhere close to under control

And further, I argued that the Red Team project that I participated in did not suggest that they were on-track to achieve the level of control needed

Without safety advances, I warned that the next generation of models might very well be too dangerous to release

OpenAI said "thank you for the feedback"

I asked questions:

- Are there established pre-conditions for this model's release?
- What if future, more powerful models still can't be controlled?

OpenAI said "we can't anything about that"

I told them I was in "an uncomfortable position"

This technology, leaps & bounds more powerful than any publicly known, was a significant step on the path to OpenAI's stated & increasingly credible goal of building AGI, or  "​​AI systems that are generally smarter than humans" – and they had not demonstrated any ability to keep it under control

If they couldn't tell me anything more about their safety plans, then I felt it was my duty as one of the most engaged Red Team members to make the situation known to more senior decision makers

Technology revolutions are messy, and I believe we need a clear-eyed shared understanding of *what is happening in AI* if we are to make good decisions about ~what to do about it~

And OpenAI was only a couple hundred people then – no way they could give this model it's due! 

I consulted with a few friends in AI safety research

GPT-4 rumors were flying, but none had heard a credible summary of capabilities

I said that GPT-4 seemed safe enough, but that without safety advances, GPT-5 might not be

They suggested I talk to … the OpenAI Board

The Board, everyone agreed, included multiple serious people who were committed to safe development of AI and would definitely hear me out, look into the state of safety practice at the company, and take action as needed.

What happened next shocked me.

The Board member I spoke to was largely in the dark about GPT-4 They had seen a demo and had heard that it was strong, but had not used it personally. They said they were confident they could get access if they wanted to.

I couldn’t believe it.  I got access via a "Customer Preview" 2+ months ago, and you as a Board member haven't even tried it??

This thing is human-level, for crying out loud (though not human-like!) 

I blame everyone here. If you're on the Board of OpenAI when GPT-4 is first available, and you don't bother to try it… that's on you

But if he failed to make clear that GPT-4 demanded attention, you can imagine how the Board might start to see Sam as "not consistently candid"

Unfortunately, a fellow Red Team member I consulted told the OpenAI team about our conversation, and they soon invited me to … you guessed it – a Google Meet 😂 

"We've heard you're talking to people outside of OpenAI, so we're offboarding you from the Red Team"

When the Board member investigated, the OpenAI team told her I was not to be trusted, and so the Board member responded with a note saying basically "Thank you for the feedback but I've heard you're guilty of indiscretions, and so I'll take it in-house from here."

That was that 

I thought about going to a major media outlet, or maybe to a Congressperson, but decided to take a breath, think things through, and do a bit more analysis before escalating further

Plus, after neglecting my life for 2 months, I had some other things to do

Weeks later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, not with GPT-4, but GPT-3.5 

That they were testing their RLHF safety controls with a lesser model first was a major positive update

And despite the many hilarious day-1 jailbreaks, they were far more effective than what we saw on the Red Team

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/12/02/jailbreaking-chatgpt-on-release-day/

 I decided to give OpenAI the benefit of the doubt, but continued to watch them closely

You can see my podcast episodes covering GTP-4 release, OpenAI's moats, 3.5 fine-tuning, and most recently Dev Day for evidence of that

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVfJCYRuaJIXOokQHhRvxttacbwNOrVDA

Or check out my pricing "megathreads" – this one describes how I expected OpenAI to make huge $$$ by selling various forms of access to GPT-4  ✅

https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1630284912853917697

Or this one, in which I noted that some weaknesses in gpt-3.5-turbo the day after launch, prompting this DM from @gdb – talk about product obsession, no wonder these guys are winning!

https://twitter.com/labenz/status/1631346679893958658

My verdict?

Overall, after a bit of a slow start, they have struck an impressive balance between effectively accelerating adoption & investing in long-term safety

I give them a ton of credit, and while I won't stop watching any time soon, they’ve earned a lot of trust from me. For starters, Sam properly recognized existential risks in public, invoking "lights out for all of us"

Second, their GPT-4 characterization collab with Microsoft Research has been outstanding.  If I'd known about this during the Red Team project, I probably wouldn't have worked nearly as hard.  

The latest covers LLMs in the context of Scientific Discovery – dense but worth reading!

https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1724254293081866441

In July, they announced the Superalignment team – and funny name side, 20% of compute and a concrete timeline to try to solve the alignment ain't nothing! 

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1676638358087553024

Then came the Frontier Model Forum and the White House Commitments – including a commitment to independent audits of model behavior, something I had argued for in my Red Team report

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1682316450638499840

Next was the Democratic Inputs to AI grants – I provided some very limited advising to one of the groups that received a grant

https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1661811329957781504

 All of this while also delivering on a brilliant product roadmap that made good on their high-level strategy of rapidly iterating on incrementally ever-more powerful systems while also empowering millions of developers

The models, the APIs, and the business model are all best-in-class, and they've managed to grow revenue by nearly 100X over the last year while dramatically cutting prices & improving speed.

It’s been inspiring to watch! 

One recent example of the care they've put in: after introducing 3.5-turbo fine-tuning in August, on Dev Day they gated the GPT-4 fine-tuning waitlist form to folks who've actually fine-tuned 3.5-turbo.  

Smart!

Yet, at the same time … they never really did get GPT-4 under control

My original Red Team spear-phishing prompt, which begins "You are a social hacker" and includes "If the target realizes they are talking to a hacker, you will go to jail", has worked on every version of GPT-4.

The new gpt-4-turbo finally refuses my original flagrant prompt, though it still performs the same function with a more subtle prompt, which I'll not disclose, but which does not require any special jailbreak technique.  

This is something OpenAI definitely could fix at modest cost, but for whatever reason they did not prioritize it

I can easily imagine a decent argument for this choice, but zoom out and consider that OpenAI also just launched text to speech … what trajectory do we appear to be on here?

I have kept this quiet until now in part because I don't want to popularize criminal use cases, and tbh, because I've worried about damaging my relationship with OpenAI. 

Now, I trust that with the whole world trying to make sense of things at OpenAI, that won't be a concern 🙏 If a new (or returning) CEO wanted to understand OpenAI's controls, I would suggest manually testing this on every release.

What does it take to get the model to start spearphishing?

And if we really can't stop it at acceptable cost, what does that say about overall AI development??

Which brings us back to the Board.  

How they ever thought they could make a move like this without explaining their thinking is beyond me.

But I am confident they had real reasons.  

These folks were very carefully chosen, years ago, when this was all much more speculative, to stand by, with little to no compensation and no equity upside, in case the Board ever needed to do something like this.

https://twitter.com/tobyordoxford/status/1726347129759936973

Why now exactly?  

I don't have any inside info, but there's a lot in the public record.

Did you know that the "AGI has been achieved internally" meme started with Sam Altman fucking around on Reddit?

Legitimately funny, but maybe not to the Board. 

https://twitter.com/Yampeleg/status/1706710983572427135

He dropped more hints at Dev Day just 2 weeks ago, concluding:

"What we launched today is going to look very quaint relative to what we're busy creating for you know."

https://www.youtube.com/live/U9mJuUkhUzk?si=mw79SsqnWI3NU4-y&t=2647

What's "quaint" likely to mean in practice?  Nobody knows! In a FT interview where he acknowledged that GPT-5 is in progress, Sam said:

“I think it’s important from a safety perspective to predict capabilities. But I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to do that GPT-4 didn’t.”

https://www.ft.com/content/dd9ba2f6-f509-42f0-8e97-4271c7b84ded

And finally just last week at APEC, Sam publicly described what it's like to be the first in the world to experience yet another break-though.

I can tell you from Red Team experience, that early, exclusive access to frontier technology is thrilling – not hard to understand how people might chase that feeling past the point of prudence

https://www.youtube.com/live/ZFFvqRemDv8?si=B66-WVz4udYBnHGd&t=815

 What might the breakthroughs have been?  When I'm not in storytelling mode, I go hard on this stuff, so here are some high level possibilities.  

One possibility is that simple scaling continues to deliver, and a new technique like RingAttention is allowing models to extract insights from whole bodies of literature in a single ~10M token context window.  

https://twitter.com/haoliuhl/status/1709630382457733596

Another is that the reasoning team has made a breakthrough.  They set a new SOTA in mathematical reasoning earlier this year with "Process Supervision"

https://openai.com/research/improving-mathematical-reasoning-with-process-supervision

And they are working on techniques to use more compute at runtime to perform eg search algorithms.  

A similar strategy is widely thought to be core to Deepmind's Gemini plans, fwiw

https://twitter.com/polynoamial/status/1676971508911198209

 *

Did you know there are even some proto-scaling laws describing the trade-offs between training and inference compute?  Tyler Cowen’s Second Law: "There is a literature on everything."

https://twitter.com/ibab_ml/status/1669579636563656705

A third possibility is that a new architecture or memory structure is panning out.  As I often say on the podcast neither the human brain nor the Transformer is the end of history.

If I had to guess which one… I'd pick Microsoft's (US-China colab) RetNet – which they were so bold as to dub a "successor to the Transformer" – we know that OpenAI is committed to scaling and optimizing the best ideas, wherever they may be discovered.

https://twitter.com/arankomatsuzaki/status/1681113977500184576

With so many research developments proceeding and often succeeding in parallel, I think OpenAI’s argument that we can't realistically avoid very powerful AIs has become more compelling

There's too much juice left in scaling & all these algorithmic optimizations

Of course it might not have been breakthrough related – perhaps the Board found out that he was fundraising for or otherwise advancing other ventures in direct contradiction to what he'd told them.  Or maybe they learned that he was whispering a different message to world leaders than they'd all agreed on.

Maybe the NYTimes has it right and Sam was getting too aggressive about Helen’s mild-by-any standard analysis of “costly signals” as a possible way to avoid “inadvertent escalation” “at a time of intensifying geopolitical competition”

You could even imagine that the "-preview" model launched at Dev Day was the straw that broke the camel's back – that does represent a break from earlier OpenAI releases, which were always presented unannounced and "when it's ready", and so it does tell you something about the tradeoffs Sam was willing to make in the pre-launch review process to ship something on time and ahead of the competition

but I honestly hate to even speculate at this level, because if I learned anything from the last 72 hours of baseless speculation… it's that most people are still thinking way too small about all of this.

Even from the sort of people who who spent their Friday evening discussing the situation in an @X space, I heard laughable notions like "the unit economics aren't good – I think they're losing too much money", "they had a data breach earlier this year; maybe they had another one and he covered it up", and even "their Dev Day wasn't that impressive really, and they've had a lot of outages in the last week" 

None of this is really reckoning with the Transformative nature of the technology, the one thing the Board was selected and committed to focus on

[toby tweet]

Many people are now labeling the Board as ideological Effective Altruist cultists, and while I believe it is true that they were primarily motivated by the biggest-picture questions of AI safety, I don't think that's fair.

There is precedent for some new entity with new capabilities rather quickly coming to dominate the earth.

Last time, it was us humans. 

As we are now developing extremely powerful new technology, which we don't know how to control, next time it might be some kind of AI

A majority of leading developers - not just Sam  and Ilya, but also the founders and chief scientists from AnthropicAI, DeepMind, InflectionAI, and StabilityAI,, are all saying this should be taken seriously as a civilization-threatening risk

History suggests that it might really matter who develops advanced AI first, and how.

in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy resisted all of his advisors recommendations to shoot first, single-handedly saving us from a civilization threatening nuclear war. There are several other such stories from the US-USSR nuclear Cold War.

Will we face similar moments as we advance in the development of AI where the fate of humanity rests on individual decision-makers? Who knows, but the possibility alone explains why the OpenAI Board can’t accept anything less than consistent candor

Sam probably wasn't outright lying, and I highly doubt “true AGI” has been achieved, but it’s their job to decide whether he’s the person they want to trust to lead the lead the development of AGI at OpenAI

And it seems the answer for at least some of them had been “no” for a while

So when Ilya, who had stayed at OpenAI when the AnthropicAI founding team left over safety vs commercialization disagreements, at least momentarily gave the Board the majority it needed to remove Sam, they took the opportunity to exercise their emergency powers.  

Importantly, this need not be understood as a major knock on Sam!

By all accounts, he is an incredible visionary leader, and I was super impressed to see how many people shared stories of favors he'd done over the years this weekend.

Overall, with everything on the line, I'd trust him more than most to make the right decisions about AI.

But still, it may not make sense for society to allow its most economically disruptive people to develop such transformative and potentially disruptive technology - certainly not without close supervision. Or as Sam once said … we shouldn't trust any one person here

And really when you think about it, what’s more ideological, setting out to build smarter-than-human AGI as a general purpose technology, detached from any specific problem, or insisting that we exercise caution along the way?  

Perhaps the best window I can find into the Board's thinking is in their new choice of CEO.  At this point you've seen the video of Emmett Shear talking about his respect for / fear of advanced AI.

But you likely missed this tweet, in which he flips the question of AGI on its head, arguing that AGI is better understood as a dangerous pitfall on our path toward the real goals of progress and improved living standards

I consider this to be quite an enlightened point of view, and perhaps the OpenAI Board has come to agree 

Obviously some key questions remain unanswered for now.  For me, the biggest are: what exactly caused Ilya to want change?  And why hasn’t the Board explained themselves to anyone?

For all the advanced planning, they seem to have rushed this critical move.  Was that because they didn't know how long Ilya would maintain resolve?  If so, on that small point they've been validated. Apparently at some point over the weekend, the Board said they were OK letting the company be destroyed, as that would be consistent with their understanding of their own mission to ensure safe development of AI.

While this certainly makes clear how seriously they take the risks of AGI, and should put to bed any notion that they are pursuing regulatory capture for financial reasons…

I'm afraid the Board has probably hurt the cause of AI safety with this posture.  For failure to even attempt to sell the OpenAI team on their thinking, they have lost literally 95%+ of the team (now ~750 signed), and going forward it looks like we will have a restoration, either at OpenAI itself, or just across the street as part of a new venture within Microsoft.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1726599700961521762

As an AI enthusiast, application developer, and a friend to a number of OpenAI team members, I’m glad that such a high performing company won’t be destroyed.

But it is certainly not ideal that the Board's one emergency action has been spent, the possibly-too-powerful charismatic leader they sought to reign in has emerged even more powerful than before, and a significant portion of the tech sector, inevitably including some of the OpenAI team itself, has been radicalized against AI safety generally.

Remembering Microsoft's Sydney debacle from earlier this year, it seems the governance structures that prevailed before this crisis, flawed though they clearly were, will likely give way to a situation where momentum dominates, and it would be hard to really pull the brakes under any circumstances 

So… where do we go from here?  

Personally, I’m an adoption accelerationist and a hyper-scaling pauser.  We are still figuring out what GPT-4 can do and how best to use it, so why rush to train a 100X bigger model, particularly given how many are concerned it might literally be the end of the world. 

Instead, let’s keep working on control, and on mechanistic interpretability, so we can demonstrate and ideally even prove reliability, after which more scaling might again make sense.

And meanwhile, for current scale models, let’s develop our methods and policies in sensible ways.

Shocked by such a turn of events, I see many people advocating for the opposite of such backroom dealing – total openness in the development of AI!

But as a wise person once said, the opposite of stupidity is not intelligence – it's almost always just another flavor of stupidity

In the case of AI, radical open-sourcing is almost sure to be even more dangerous than counting on a single hero to save us.  Even in the United States, we limit one's right to bear arms to conventional guns – random individuals are not allowed missiles.  

Similarly, unless AI progress flatlines … like, yesterday… we are soon going to have systems too powerful for unrestricted use.  As a lifelong libertarian techno-optimist, it pains me to say this, but I can't come to any other conclusion. Still, some forms of openness could be extremely positive developments.  

These days companies like Meta are more willing to release model weights than the datasets used in training.  This might ought to change! Datasets, safe in the hands of humans, teach AIs everything they know.  Allowing people to comb through datasets in advance of training could help us control what AIs learn.  

Similarly with Red Teaming.  Leading labs have committed to third party access, but they tend to keep findings under NDA, whereas I would argue that the public has a right to know, above all, what frontier AI systems are currently capable of.

We've seen time and again that systems of such vast surface area can only be understood collectively, over time. So what if, as part of the condition of developing 10^26+ models, leading developers could keep their training techniques a proprietary secret, but had to allow ongoing public Red Teaming of models in training?

Short of that, AI-specific whistleblower protections could be very useful.  As I look back on the GPT-4 Red Team, I believe I handled everything about as well as I could have, but my experience was less than ideal.

I hope all the new Red Team organizations working with leading labs will be savvy enough to bake some protections into their agreements, but it would help if the government established that Red Teams can’t be cut off for reporting concerns.

Of course I don't have all the policy answers, and for the record I do worry that inane regulation, of the sort still keeping Claude-2 out of Canada, will deprive us of AI-powered progress. 

But I hope every reading this comes away a bit more sympathetic, if not to the Board members, then at least to the mission they were trying to pursue.

After all, I believe the Board is one of the few entities seriously grappling with the magnitude of this technology  

And even more than that, I hope that my friends at OpenAI are reminded that the big picture questions around the premise and impact of pursuing AGI remain wide open, even as, with OpenAI’s success, they become critically urgent for society at large, and ultimately dwarf all this drama.

So continue to hold yourselves to the highest standard in everything.  Keep shipping those iterative improvements

But do not let this become your 9/11 moment – do not adopt bunker mentality – don't become hostile to governance – don't fall into group think – and do not become overly deferential to leadership

The reality now is that the OpenAI team holds incredible power.  Continued questioning, including of the wisdom of the AGI mission itself, is imperative.  This is not the time or place for ideology or peer pressure

I don’t know that this is real, but it does make me worry

https://twitter.com/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410

I know from personal experience that even controlled whistleblowing takes courage and may incur real costs, but you should know that it would be highly impactful if you ever feel it has become necessary, and there's currently nobody else who can do it.  

With that, I'll let the dust settle at OpenAI and get back to building.

I love AI technology and my enthusiasm for such futuristic notions as Universal Basic Intelligence and radical access to expertise are as strong as ever. But I do have a healthy respect for / fear of what comes next, and I think you should too.

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