I don’t think this is true. Transformers were introduced by normal NLP researchers at Google. Generative pre-training is a natural thing to do with them, introduced at OpenAI by Alec Radford (blog post here) with no relationship to alignment.
I just looked into it, it turns out you’re right. I think I was given a misimpression of the motivations here due to much OpenAI research at the time being vaguely motivated by “lets make AGI, and lets make it good”, but it was actually largely divorced from modern alignment considerations.
I don’t think this is true. Transformers were introduced by normal NLP researchers at Google. Generative pre-training is a natural thing to do with them, introduced at OpenAI by Alec Radford (blog post here) with no relationship to alignment.
I just looked into it, it turns out you’re right. I think I was given a misimpression of the motivations here due to much OpenAI research at the time being vaguely motivated by “lets make AGI, and lets make it good”, but it was actually largely divorced from modern alignment considerations.