OpenAI's Safety Team Exodus: Ilya Departs, Leike Speaks Out, Altman Responds - Zvi Analyzes Fallout

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to the Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together, we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg.
Zvi Maksud, welcome back to a special bonus session of the Cognitive Revolution.

**Zvi Maksud** (0:28)
Yeah, there's always more to learn.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:30)
It's happening quickly today.
By the time we got off the recording, Jan Leike had posted his TweetThread statement about his reasons for leaving OpenAI, in which he puts it pretty plainly that he's had pretty fundamental disagreements with leadership, and has had trouble getting the resources that he needed to do the work, including compute resources, and certainly had some nice, fond things to say to his teammates, but basically was like, I don't think we're on the right track, and seems to be resigning pretty much in protest. So that doesn't seem like a good thing, doesn't seem like a good situation. What else have you learned, and what do we make of it?

**Zvi Maksud** (1:15)
We also got coverage from Vox, Bloomberg, from TechCrunch, we got a response actually, to Leike, which was extremely graceful. Essentially saying, yes, we have a lot of work to do and we're going to do it, and expect a longer response later. It's basically the best possible thing you can say there, but then you're on the hook for doing it.
We have Kelsey Piper confirming the nature of the draconian non-disbaragement clauses, which apparently have lifetime duration, and include an NDA that you can't reveal about violating the NDA. She claims that when employees come on board for the first time, and are given an equity heavy compensation, they are not told that they will be required to sign these disparagement clause, or have their existing vested equity confiscated upon departure. That seems like a really bad equilibrium and way to run a company. I'm honestly confused as to why that's legal.

**Nathan Labenz** (2:12)
Well, it maybe shouldn't be.

**Zvi Maksud** (2:14)
Yeah, I think you should have to very much acknowledge a disparagement clause rules very clearly initially if you're going to confiscate something of immense value for someone not signing them. Doesn't seem reasonable at all. It also doesn't obviously speak well of the company in its openness in the good sense, right? If you're forcing every employee to never disparage you for life, no matter what, or else, that's just not a reasonable position to take if you want people to not assume the worst.
And so, yeah, we look at Leike's statement, essentially saying that for years, they have had the trouble of shining new products, becoming the priority of a move away from safety culture, that the culture is not amenable to or compatible with safety. I'm paraphrasing here a bit, I'm not looking at the words precisely.
And that he had trouble getting the last few months despite the explicit 20% of existing compute commitment from OpenAI, which should have been sufficient for current purposes. And indeed TechCrunch confirms that they have not been honoring their commitments. They have asked for a fraction of the 20% commitment and have repeatedly not gotten what they asked for.
And that is part and parcel of the whole idea of running anything in AI these days is compute. You need your compute to do your thing. And he was reporting this has specifically become a substantial barrier to doing their work. So this is not only a philosophical approach because he said they should be spending vastly more, but not just a little bit more, but they should be spending vastly more of their resources on preparing for our AGI future. But also if you'll notice what he actually said for just the next generation that essentially he doesn't think they're ready for GPT-5.
He doesn't think they're on pace to have the tools they need for GPT-5 to be safe in a pedestrian mundane utility sense, like not in an existential sense. And then later on, there's the problem with super alignment, there's the problem with AGI, which many people at OpenAI have said they expect within several years, a very short timeline. And now the super alignment team has been dissolved and its people have been dispersed throughout the company. They claim they will still continue the work on that level, but having dishonored their commitment and having dissolved the team and having lost the leadership, it doesn't look like the kind of effort they promised us, but they said they were going to do. Yeah.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:46)