A number of people seem to have departed OpenAI at around the same time as you. Is there a particular reason for that which you can share?
My own departure was driven largely by my desire to work on more conceptual/theoretical issues in alignment. I’ve generally expected to transition back to this work eventually and I think there a variety of reasons that OpenAI isn’t the best for it. (I would likely have moved earlier if Geoffrey Irving’s departure hadn’t left me managing the alignment team.)
I’m pretty hesitant to speak on behalf of other people who left. It’s definitely not a complete coincidence that I left around the same time as other people (though there were multiple important coincidences), and I can talk about my own motivations:
A lot of the people who I talked with at OpenAI left, decreasing the benefits from remaining at OpenAI and increasing the benefits for talking to people outside of OpenAI.
The departures led to a lot of safety-relevant shakeups at OpenAI. It’s not super clear whether that makes it an unusually good or bad time to shake up management of my team, but I think it felt unusually good to me (this might have been a rationalization, hard to say).
My own departure was driven largely by my desire to work on more conceptual/theoretical issues in alignment. I’ve generally expected to transition back to this work eventually and I think there a variety of reasons that OpenAI isn’t the best for it. (I would likely have moved earlier if Geoffrey Irving’s departure hadn’t left me managing the alignment team.)
I’m pretty hesitant to speak on behalf of other people who left. It’s definitely not a complete coincidence that I left around the same time as other people (though there were multiple important coincidences), and I can talk about my own motivations:
A lot of the people who I talked with at OpenAI left, decreasing the benefits from remaining at OpenAI and increasing the benefits for talking to people outside of OpenAI.
The departures led to a lot of safety-relevant shakeups at OpenAI. It’s not super clear whether that makes it an unusually good or bad time to shake up management of my team, but I think it felt unusually good to me (this might have been a rationalization, hard to say).