Sam Altman on OpenAI’s next model and the AI backlash

Sam, what's

going on? It's definitely an exciting time in the world of AI. Model capabilities are progressing very quickly, and we're seeing people do amazing things with these. And then as we talked about, and as we knew what happened at some point, the model capability is progressing so quickly that we've had to make some changes to how we work to be able to make the safety cases and safety threshold standards, guarantees, whatever you want to call it, that we need to make to be able to confidently proceed with our training. It's very important that alignment, safety, and security progress along with capabilities. And I think we have had a moment recently where the capability progress has been in awe is the only way I can describe it. And we have needed more time to catch up with safety, alignment, and security. That's always been a core part of our work, but these have to progress together and we've needed time to catch up. So we delayed a Frontier RL training run. Even before that, over weeks in the past of that, we had paused and slowed down on a lot of training to have more compute to go into safety and alignment work. This is the thing that I think we should be proud of. And it's, you know, a thing that I think will happen again in the future as we reach even higher levels of capability. But it is, you know, when you like live through it, it's like, oh, this is a moment we talked about for a long time and now it's happening.

What has it been like living through it? Well,

it started even longer than that with the Hugging Face incident. Right. And that was a real moment of, man, this is like, it's like a sci-fi story. You can understand how every piece of it happened, but the number of things that came together for the Hugging Face incident to happen was a real, wake up call is too strong of a word because again, we had talked about this, but it was like that and the things that happened at other companies were a legitimate moment of like, wow, the AI capability level has reached new heights and our alignment of the alignment of the model the security we have around the model um that failed now we treated that as an accident and we've responded as such and i think that is the way to make things better um but that was that was when this whole period of these last couple of months started we then potentially hit cyber critical under our preparedness framework we then saw some things during our training run where we said, well, you know, we need stronger alignment guarantees and we need new methods and to make more progress here. But I feel both very proud of how we've reacted to it, very like, okay, we're in this in a way that feels like kind of, I mean, it feels strange to have been thinking about this for the last decade and for it now to be happening. And then like, you know, we know what to do.

What was the thing you all saw in the training run that is not Astra, that's the future stuff, that caused, it seems like, the reaction that you're now talking about? I mean, I know you described the hugging face, all of that, and people know about the hugging face incident, but what happened on the pre-training run that really alarmed you guys?

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