I haven't shared this post with other relevant parties – my experience has been that private discussion of this sort of thing is more paralyzing than helpful. I might change my mind in the resulting discussion, but, I prefer that discussion to be public.
I think 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from its job board, and similar EA job placement services should do the same.
(I personally believe 80k shouldn't advertise Anthropic jobs either, but I think the case for that is somewhat less clear)
I think OpenAI has demonstrated a level of manipulativeness, recklessness, and failure to prioritize meaningful existential safety work, that makes me think EA orgs should not be going out of their way to give them free resources. (It might make sense for some individuals to work there, but this shouldn't be a thing 80k or other orgs are systematically funneling talent into)
There plausibly should be some kind of path to get back into good standing with the AI Risk community, although it feels difficult to imagine how to navigate that, given how adversarial OpenAI's use of NDAs was, and how difficult that makes it to trust future commitments.
The things that seem most significant to me:
- They promised the superalignment team 20% of their compute-at-the-time (which AFAICT wasn't even a large fraction of their compute over the coming years), but didn't provide anywhere close to that, and then disbanded the team when Leike left.
- Their widespread use of non-disparagement agreements, with non-disclosure clauses, which generally makes it hard to form accurate impressions about what's going on at the organization.
- Helen Toner's description of how Sam Altman wasn't forthright with the board. (i.e. "The board was not informed about ChatGPT in advance and learned about ChatGPT on Twitter. Altman failed to inform the board that he owned the OpenAI startup fund despite claiming to be an independent board member, giving false information about the company’s formal safety processes on multiple occasions. And relating to her research paper, that Altman in the paper’s wake started lying to other board members in order to push Toner off the board.")
- Hearing from multiple ex-OpenAI employees that OpenAI safety culture did not seem on track to handle AGI. Some of these are public (Leike, Kokotajlo), others were in private.
This is before getting into more openended arguments like "it sure looks to me like OpenAI substantially contributed to the world's current AI racing" and "we should generally have a quite high bar for believing that the people running a for-profit entity building transformative AI are doing good, instead of cause vast harm, or at best, being a successful for-profit company that doesn't especially warrant help from EAs.
I am generally wary of AI labs (i.e. Anthropic and Deepmind), and think EAs should be less optimistic about working at large AI orgs, even in safety roles. But, I think OpenAI has demonstrably messed up, badly enough, publicly enough, in enough ways that it feels particularly wrong to me for EA orgs to continue to give them free marketing and resources.
I'm mentioning 80k specifically because I think their job board seemed like the largest funnel of EA talent, and because it seemed better to pick a specific org than a vague "EA should collectively do something." (see: EA should taboo "EA should"). I do think other orgs that advise people on jobs or give platforms to organizations (i.e. the organization fair at EA Global) should also delist OpenAI.
My overall take is something like: it is probably good to maintain some kind of intellectual/diplomatic/trade relationships with OpenAI, but bad to continue giving them free extra resources, or treat them as an org with good EA or AI safety standing.
It might make sense for some individuals to work at OpenAI, but doing so in a useful way seems very high skill, and high-context – not something to funnel people towards in a low-context job board.
I also want to clarify: I'm not against 80k continuing to list articles like Working at an AI Lab, which are more about how to make the decisions, and go into a fair bit of nuance. I disagree with that article, but it seems more like "trying to lay out considerations in a helpful way" than "just straightforwardly funneling people into positions at a company." (I do think that article seems out of date and worth revising in light of new information. I think "OpenAI seems inclined towards safety" now seems demonstrably false, or at least less true in the ways that matter. And this should update you on how true it is for the other labs, or how likely it is to remain true)
FAQ / Appendix
Some considerations and counterarguments which I've thought about, arranged as a hypothetical FAQ.
Q: It seems that, like it or not, OpenAI is a place transformative AI research is likely to happen, and having good people work there is important.
Isn't it better to have alignment researchers working there, than not? Are you sure you're not running afoul of misguided purity instincts?
I do agree it might be necessary to work with OpenAI, even if they are reckless and negligent. I'd like to live in the world where "don't work with companies causing great harm" was a straightforward rule to follow. But we might live in a messy, complex world where some good people may need to work with harmful companies anyway.
But: we've now had two waves of alignment people leave OpenAI. The second wave has multiple people explicitly saying things like "quit OpenAI due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI."
The first wave, my guess is they were mostly under non-disclosure/non-disparagement agreements, and we can't take their lack of criticism as much evidence.
It looks to me, from the outside, like OpenAI is just not really structured or encultured in a way that makes it that viable for someone on the inside to help improve things much. I don't think it makes sense to continue trying to improve OpenAI's plans, at least until OpenAI has some kind of credible plan (backed up by actions) of actually seriously working on existential safety.
I think it might make sense for some individuals to go work at OpenAI anyway, who have an explicit plan for how to interface with the organizational culture. But I think this is a very high context, high skill job. (i.e. skills like "keeping your eye on the AI safety ball", "interfacing well with OpenAI staff/leadership while holding onto your own moral/strategic compass", "knowing how to prioritize research that differentially helps with existential safety, rather than mostly amounting to near-term capabilities work.")
I don't think this is the sort of thing you should just funnel people into on a jobs board.
I think it makes a lot more sense to say "look, you had your opportunity to be taken on faith here, you failed. It is now OpenAI's job to credibly demonstrate that it is worthwhile for good people to join there trying to help, rather than for them to take that on faith."
Q: What about jobs like "security research engineer?".
That seems straightforwardly good for OpenAI to have competent people for, and probably doesn't require a good "Safety Culture" to pay off?
The argument for this seems somewhat plausible. I still personally think it makes sense to fully delist OpenAI positions unless they've made major changes to the org (see below).
I'm operating here from a cynical/conflict-theory-esque stance. I think OpenAI has exploited the EA community and it makes sense to engage with them from more of a cynical "conflict theory" stance. I think it makes more sense to say, collectively, "knock it off", and switch to default "apply pressure." I think if OpenAI wants to find good security people, that should be their job, not EA organizations.
But, I don't have a really slam dunk argument that this is the right stance to take. For now, I list it as my opinion, but acknowledge there are other worldviews where it's less clear what to do.
Q: What about offering a path towards "good standing?" to OpenAI?
It seems plausibly important to me to offer some kind of roadmap back to good standing. I do kinda think regulating OpenAI from the outside isn't likely to be sufficient, because it's too hard to specify what actually matters for existential AI safety.
So, it feels important to me not to fully burn bridges.
But, it seems pretty hard to offer any particular roadmap. We've got three different lines of OpenAI leadership breaking commitments, and being manipulative. So we're long past the point where "mere words" would reassure me.
Things that would be reassure me are costly actions that are extremely unlikely in worlds where OpenAI would (intentionally or no) lure more people in and then still turn out to, nope, just be taking advantage of them for safety-washing / regulatory capture reasons.
Such actions seem pretty unlikely by now. Most of the examples I can think to spell out seem too likely to be gameable (i.e. if OpenAI were to announce a new Superalignment-equivalent team, or commitments to participate in eval regulations, I would guess they would only do the minimum necessary to look good, rather than a real version of the thing).
An example that'd feel pretty compelling is if Sam Altman actually really, for real, left the company, that would definitely have me re-evaluating my sense of the company. (This seems like a non-starter, but, listing for completeness).
I wouldn't put much stock in a Sam Altman apology. If Sam is still around, the most I'd hope for is some kind of realistic, real-talk, arms-length negotiation where it's common knowledge that we can't really trust each other but maybe we can make specific deals.
I'd update somewhat if Greg Brockman and other senior leadership (i.e. people who seem to actually have the respect of the capabilities and product teams), or maybe new board members, made clear statements indicating:
- they understand: how OpenAI messed up (in terms of not keeping commitments, and the manipulativeness of non-disclosure non-disparagement agreements)
- they take some actions that are holding Sam (and maybe themselves in some cases) accountable.
- they take existential risk seriously on a technical level. They have real cruxes for what would change their current scaling strategy. This is integrated into org-wide decisionmaking.
This wouldn't make me think "oh everything's fine now." But would be enough of an update that I'd need to evaluate what they actually said/did and form some new models.
Q: What if we left up job postings, but with an explicit disclaimer linking to a post saying why people should be skeptical?
This idea just occurred to me as I got to the end of the post. Overall, I think this doesn't make sense given the current state of OpenAI, but thinking about it opens up some flexibility in my mind about what might make sense, in worlds where we get some kind of costly signals or changes in leadership from OpenAI.
(My actual current guess is this sort of disclaimer makes sense for Anthropic and/or DeepMind jobs. This feels like a whole separate post though)
My actual range of guesses here are more cynical than this post focuses on. I'm focused on things that seemed easy to legibly argue for.
I'm not sure who has decisionmaking power at 80k, or most other relevant orgs. I expect many people to feel like I'm still bending over backwards being accommodating to an org we should have lost all faith in. I don't have faith in OpenAI, but I do still worry about escalation spirals and polarization of discourse.
When dealing with a potentially manipulative adversary, I think it's important to have backbone and boundaries and actual willingness to treat the situation adversarially. But also, it's important to leave room to update or negotiate.
But, I wanted to end with explicitly flagging the hypothesis that OpenAI is best modeled as a normal profit-maximizing org, that they basically co-opted EA into being a lukewarm ally it could exploit, when it'd have made sense to treat OpenAI more adversarially from the start (or at least be more "ready to pivot towards treating adversarially".
I don't know that that's the right frame, but I think the recent revelations should be an update towards that frame.
Hi, I run the 80,000 Hours job board, thanks for writing this out!
I agree that OpenAI has demonstrated a significant level of manipulativeness and have lost confidence in them prioritizing existential safety work. However, we don’t conceptualize the board as endorsing organisations. The point of the board is to give job-seekers access to opportunities where they can contribute to solving our top problems or build career capital to do so (as we write in our FAQ). Sometimes these roles are at organisations whose mission I disagree with, because the role nonetheless seems like an opportunity to do good work on a key problem.
For OpenAI in particular, we’ve tightened up our listings since the news stories a month ago, and are now only posting infosec roles and direct safety work – a small percentage of jobs they advertise. See here for the OAI roles we currently list. We used to list roles that seemed more tangentially safety-related, but because of our reduced confidence in OpenAI, we limited the listings further to only roles that are very directly on safety or security work. I still expect these roles to be good opportunities to do important work. Two live examples:
- In
... (read more)Nod, thanks for the reply.
I won't argue more for removing infosec roles at the moment. As noted in the post, I think this is at least a reasonable position to hold. I (weakly) disagree, but for reasons that don't seem worth getting into here.
The things I'd argue here:
- Safetywashing is actually pretty bad, for the world's epistemics and for EA and AI safety's collective epistemics. I think it also warps the epistemics of the people taking the job, so while they might be getting some career experience... they're also likely getting a distorted view of what what AI safety is, and becoming worse researchers than they would otherwise.
- As previously stated – it's not that I don't think anyone should take these jobs, but I think the sort of person who should take them is someone who has a higher degree of context and skill than I expect the 80k job board to filter for.
- Even if you disagree with those points, you should have some kind of crux for "what would distinguish an 'impactful AI safety job?'" vs a fake safety-washed role. It should be at least possible for OpenAI to make a role so clearly fake that you notice and stop listing it.
- If you're set on continuing to list Ope
... (read more)Thanks.
Fwiw while writing the above, I did also think "hmm, I should also have some cruxes for 'what would update me towards 'these jobs are more real than I currently think.'" I'm mulling that over and will write up some thoughts soon.
It sounds like you basically trust their statements about their roles. I appreciate you stating your position clearly, but, I do think this position doesn't make sense:
- we already have evidence of them failing to uphold commitments they've made in clear cut ways. (i.e. I'd count their superalignment compute promises as basically a straightforward lie, and if not a "lie", it at least clearly demonstrates that their written words don't count for much. This seems straightforwardly relevant to the specific topic of "what does a given job at OpenAI entail?", in addition to being evidence about their overall relationship with existential safety)
... (read more)we've similarly seen OpenAI change it's stated policies, such asremoving restrictions on military use. Or, initially being a nonprofit and converting into "for-profit-managed by non-profit" (where the "managed by nonprofit board" part turned out to be pretty ineffectual)(not sure if I endorse this, mulling over HabThe arguments you give all sound like reasons OpenAI safety positions could be beneficial. But I find them completely swamped by all the evidence that they won't be, especially given how much evidence OpenAI has hidden via NDAs.
But let's assume we're in a world where certain people could do meaningful safety work an OpenAI. What are the chances those people need 80k to tell them about it? OpenAI is the biggest, most publicized AI company in the world; if Alice only finds out about OpenAI jobs via 80k that's prima facie evidence she won't make a contribution to safety.
What could the listing do? Maybe Bob has heard of OAI but is on the fence about applying. An 80k job posting might push him over the edge to applying or accepting. The main way I see that happening is via a halo effect from 80k. The mere existence of the posting implies that the job is aligned with EA/80k's values.
I don't think there's a way to remove that implication with any amount of disclaimers. The job is still on the board. If anything disclaimers make the best case scenarios seem even better, because why else would you host such a dangerous position?
So let me ask: what do you see as the upside to highlighting OAI safety jobs on the job board? Not of the job itself, but the posting. Who is it that would do good work in that role, and the 80k job board posting is instrumental in them entering it?
I think that given the 80k brand (which is about helping people to have a positive impact with their career), it's very hard for you to have a jobs board which isn't kinda taken by many readers as endorsement of the orgs. Disclaimers help a bit, but it's hard for them to address the core issue — because for many of the orgs you list, you basically do endorse the org (AFAICT).
I also think it's a pretty different experience for employees to turn up somewhere and think they can do good by engaging in a good faith way to help the org do whatever it's doing, and for employees to not think that but think it's a good job to take anyway.
My take is that you would therefore be better splitting your job board into two sections:
- In one section, only include roles at orgs where you basically feel happy standing behind them, and think it's straightforwardly good for people to go there and help the orgs be better
- You can be conservative about inclusion here — and explain in the FAQ that non-inclusion in this list doesn't mean that it wouldn't be good to straightforwardly help the org, just that this isn't transparent enough to 80k to make the recommendation
- In another more expansive section, you cou
... (read more)I am generally very wary of trying to treat your audience as unsophisticated this way. I think 80k taking on the job of recommending the most impactful jobs, according to the best of their judgement, using the full nuance and complexity of their models, is much clearer and straightforward than a recommendation which is something like "the most impactful jobs, except when we don't like being associated with something, or where the case for it is a bit more complicated than our other jobs, or where our funders asked us to not include it, etc.".
I do think that doing this well requires the ability to sometimes say harsh things about an organization. I think communicating accurately about job recommendations will inevitably require being able to say "we think working at this organization might be really miserable and might involve substantial threats, adversarial relationships, and you might cause substantial harm if you are not careful, but we still think it's overall still a good choice if you take that into account". And I think those judgements need to be made on an organization-by-organization level (and can't easily be captured by generic statements in the context of the associated career guide).
I don't think you should treat your audience as unsophisticated. But I do think you should acknowledge that you will have casual readers who will form impressions from a quick browse, and think it's worth doing something to minimise the extent to which they come away misinformed.
Separately, there is a level of blunt which you might wisely avoid being in public. Your primary audience is not your only audience. If you basically recommend that people treat a company as a hostile environment, then the company may reasonably treat the recommender as hostile, so now you need to recommend that they hide the fact they listened to you (or reveal it with a warning that this may make the environment even more hostile) ... I think it's very reasonable to just skip this whole dynamic.
Hmm at some level I'm vibing with everything you're saying, but I still don't think I agree with your conclusion. Trying to figure out what's going on there.
Maybe it's something like: I think the norms prevailing in society say that in this kind of situation you should be a bit courteous in public. That doesn't mean being dishonest, but it does mean shading the views you express towards generosity, and sometimes gesturing at rather than flat expressing complaints.
With these norms, if you're blunt, you encourage people to read you as saying something worse than is true, or to read you as having an inability to act courteously. Neither of which are messages I'd be keen to send.
And I sort of think these norms are good, because they're softly de-escalatory in terms of verbal spats or ill feeling. When people feel attacked it's easy for them to be a little irrational and vilify the other side. If everyone is blunt publicly I think this can escalate minor spats into major fights.
I don't really think these are the prevailing norms, especially not regards with an adversary who has leveraged illegal threats of destroying millions of dollars of value to prevent negative information from getting out.
Separately about whether these are the norms, I think the EA community plays a role in society where being honest and accurate about our takes of other people is important. There were a lot of people who took what the EA community said about SBF and FTX seriously and this caused enormous harm. In many ways the EA community (and 80k in-particular) are playing the role of a rating agency, and as a rating agency you need to be able to express negative ratings, otherwise you fail at your core competency.
As such, even if there are some norms in society about withholding negative information here, I think the EA and AI-safety communities in-particular cannot hold itself to these norms within the domains of their core competencies and responsibilities.
I don't regard the norms as being about witholding negative information, but about trying to err towards presenting friendly frames while sharing what's pertinent, or something?
Honestly I'm not sure how much we really disagree here. I guess we'd have to concretely discuss wording for an org. In the case of OpenAI, I imagine it being appropriate to include some disclaimer like:
I largely agree with the rating-agency frame.
I agree with some definitions of "friendly" here, and disagree with others. I think there is an attractor here towards Orwellian language that is intentionally ambiguous about what it's trying to say, in order to seem friendly or non-threatening (because in some sense it is), and that kind of "friendly" seems pretty bad to me.
I think the paragraph you have would strike me as somewhat too Orwellian, though it's not too far off from what I would say. Something closer to what seems appropriate to me:
... (read more)So it may be that we just have some different object-level views here. I don't think I could stand behind the first paragraph of what you've written there. Here's a rewrite that would be palatable to me:
... (read more)... That paragraph doesn't distinguish at all between OpenAI and, say, Anthropic. Surely you want to include some details specific to the OpenAI situation? (Or do your object-level views really not distinguish between them?)
Agree on this. For a long time I've had a very low opinion of 80k's epistemics[1] (both podcast, and website), and having orgs like OpenAI and Meta on there was a big contributing factor[2].
In particular that they try to both present as an authoritative source on strategic matters concerning job selection, while not doing the necessary homework to actually claim such status & using articles (and parts of articles) that empirically nobody reads & I've found are hard to find to add in those clarifications, if they ever do. ↩︎
Probably second to their horrendous SBF interview. ↩︎
I think this is a good policy and broadly agree with your position.
It's a bit awkward to mention, but as you've said that you've delisted other roles at OpenAI and that OpenAI has acted badly before - I think you should consider explicitly saying that you don't necessarily endorse other roles at OpenAI and suspect that some other role may be harmful on the OpenAI jobs board cards.
I'm a little worried about people seeing OpenAI listed on the board and inferring that the 80k recommendation somewhat transfers to other roles at OpenAI (which, imo is a reasonable heuristic for most companies listed on the board - but fails in this specific case).
I think this halo effect could be reduced by making small UI changes:
I would be all for a cleanup of 80k material to remove mentions of OpenAI as a place to improve the world.
fwiw I don't think replacing the OpenAI logo or name makes much sense.
I do think it's pretty important to actively communicate that even the safety roles shouldn't be taken at face value.
I would agree with this if 80k didn’t make it so easy for the podcast episodes to become PR vehicles for the companies: some time back 80k changed their policy and now they send all questions to interviewees in advance, and let them remove any answers they didn’t like upon reflection. Both of these make it very straightforward for the companies’ PR teams to influence what gets said in an 80k podcast episode, and remove any confidence that you’re getting an accurate representation of the researcher’s views, rather than what the PR team has approved them to say.
I think given that these jobs involved being pressured via extensive legal blackmail into signing secret non-disparagement agreements that forced people to never criticize OpenAI, at great psychological stress and at substantial cost to many outsiders who were trying to assess OpenAI, I don't agree with this assessment.
Safety people have been substantially harmed by working at OpenAI, and safety work at OpenAI can have substantial negative externalities.
Insofar as you are recommending the jobs but not endorsing the organization, I think it would be good to be fairly explicit about this in the job listing. The current short description of OpenAI seems pretty positive to me:
I think this should say something like "We recommend jobs at OpenAI because we think these specific positions may be high impact. We would not necessarily recommend working at other jobs at OpenAI (especially jobs which increase AI capabilities)."
I also don't know what to make of the sentence "They are also currently the subject of news stories relating to their safety work." Is this an allusion to the recent exodus of many safety people from OpenAI? If so, I think it's misleading and gives far too positive an impression.
Relatedly, I think that the "Should you work at a leading AI company?" article shouldn't start with a pros and cons list which sort of buries the fact that you might contribute to building extremely dangerous AI.
I think "Risk of contributing to the development of harmful AI systems" should at least be at the top of the cons list. But overall this sort of reminds me of my favorite graphic from 80k:
This thread feels like a fine place for people to express their opinion as a stakeholder.
Like, I don't even know how to engage with 80k staff on this on the object level, and seems like the first thing to do is to just express my opinion (and like, they can then choose to respond with argument).
Hey Conor!
Regarding
And
It seems like EAs expect the 80k job board to suggest high impact roles, and this has been a misunderstanding for a long time (consider looking at that post if you haven't). The disclaimers were always there, but EAs (including myself) still regularly looked at the 80k job board as a concrete path to impact.
I don't have time for a long comment, just wanted to say I think this matters.
I don't read those two quotes as in tension? The job board isn't endorsing organizations, it's endorsing roles. An organization can be highly net harmful while the right person joining to work on the right thing can be highly positive.
I also think "endorsement" is a bit too strong: the bar for listing a job shouldn't be "anyone reading this who takes this job will have significant positive impact" but instead more like "under some combinations of values and world models that the job board runners think are plausible, this job is plausibly one of the highest impact opportunities for the right person".
My own intuition on what to do with this situation - is to stop trying to change your reputation using disclaimers.
There's a lot of value in having a job board with high impact job recommendations. One of the challenging parts is getting a critical mass of people looking at your job board, and you already have that.
Hi there, I'd like to share some updates from the last month.
Text during last update (July 5)
Text as of today:
The thinking behind these updates has been:
- We continue to get negative updates concerning OpenAI, so it's good for us to update our guidance accordingly.
- While it's unclear exactly what's going on with the NDAs (are they cancelled or are they not?), it's pretty clear that it's in the intere
... (read more)Yeah, this does seem like an improvement. I appreciate you thinking about it and making some updates.
I think an assumption 80k makes is something like "well if our audience thinks incredibly deeply about the Safety problem and what it would be like to work at a lab and the pressures they could be under while there, then we're no longer accountable for how this could go wrong. After all, we provided vast amounts of information on why and how people should do their own research before making such a decision".
The problem is, that is not how most people make decisions. No matter how much rational thinking is promoted, we're first and foremost emotional creatures that care about things like status. So, if 80k decides to have a podcast with the Superalignment team lead, then they're effectively promoting the work of OpenAI. That will make people want to work for OpenAI. This is an inescapable part of the Halo effect.
Lastly, 80k is explicitly targeting very young people who, no offense, probably don't have the life experience to imagine themselves in a workplace where they have to resist incredible pressures to not conform, such as not sharing interpretability insights with capabilities teams.
The whole exercise smacks of nativity and I'm very confident we'll look back and see it as an incredibly obvious mistake in hindsight.
Alignment concerns aside, I think a job board shouldn't host companies that have taken already-earned compensation hostage. Especially without noting this fact. That's a primary thing about good employers, they don't retroactively steal stock they already gave you.
Thanks for raising this. I'm kind of on board with 80k's current strategy, but I think it's useful to have a public discussion like this nevertheless.
To the extent the proposed move is a political / diplomatic move, how much leverage do we actually have here? Does OpenAI nontrivially value their jobs being listed in our job boards? Are they still concerned about having a good relationship with us at all at this point? If I were running the job board, I'd probably imagine no-one much at OpenAI really losing sleep over my decision either way, so I'd tend to do just whatever seemed best to me in terms of the direct consequences.
Fourteen months ago, I emailed 80k staff with concerns about how they were promoting AGI lab positions on their job board.
The exchange:
It was not a meaningful discussion.
Five months ago, I posted my concerns publicly. Again, 80k staff removed one job listing (why did they not double-check before?). Again, staff referred to their website articles as justification to keep promoting OpenAI and Anthropic safety and non-safety roles on their job board. Again, I pointed out what's missing or off about their justifications in those articles, with no response from staff.
It took the firing of the entire OpenAI superal... (read more)
I do want to acknowledge:
I refer to Jan Leike's and Daniel Kokotajlo's comments about why the left, and reference other people leaving the company.
I do think this is important evidence.
I want to acknowledge I wouldn't actually bet that Jan and Daniel would endorse everyone else leaving OpenAI, and only weakly bet that they'd endorse not leaving up the current 80k-ads as written.
I am grateful to them for having spoken up publicly, but I know that a reason people hesitate to speak publicly about this sort of thing is that it's easier for soundbyte words to get taken and runaway by people arguing for positions stronger than you endorse, and I don't want them to regret that.
I know at least one person who has less negative (but mixed) feelings who left OpenAI for somewhat different reasons, and another couple people who still work at OpenAI I respect in at least some domains.
(I haven't chatted with either of them about this recently)
I wonder if it would be worthwhile for a bunch of AI Safety societies at elite universities to make some kind of public commitment about something in this vein. This probably has more weight/influence than 80,000 Hours, however, it would be more valuable if we were trying to influence them, but it's less valuable since we probably don't have any plausibly satisfiable asks so long as Sam is there.
Raemon -- I strongly agree, and I don't think EAs should be overthinking this as much as we seem to be in the comments here. Some ethical issues are, actually, fairly simple.
OpenAI, Deepmind, Meta, and even Anthropic are pushing recklessly ahead with AGI capabilities development. We all understand the extinction risks and global catastrophic risks that this imposes on humanity. These companies are not aligned with EA values of preserving human life, civilization, and sentient well-being.
Therefore, instead of 80k Hours advertising jobs at such compani... (read more)
If OpenAI doesn't hire an EA they will just hire someone else. I'm not sure if you tackle this point directly (sorry if I missed it) but doesn't it straightforwardly seem better to have someone safety-conscious in these roles rather than someone who isn't safety-conscious?
To reiterate, it's not like if we remove these roles from the job board that they will less likely be filled. They would still definitely be filled, just by someone less safety-conscious in expectation. And I'm not sure the person who would get the role would be "less talented" in e... (read more)
I attempted to address this in the Isn't it better to have alignment researchers working there, than not? Are you sure you're not running afoul of misguided purity instincts? FAQ section.
I think the evidence we have from OpenAI is that it isn't very helpful to "be a safety conscious person there." (i.e. combo of people leaving who did not find it tractable to be helpful there, and NDAs making it hard to reason about, and IMO better to default assume bad things rather than good things given the NDAs)
I think it's especially not helpful if you're a low-context person, who reads an OpenAI job board posting, and isn't going in with a specific plan to operate in an adversarial environment.
If the job posting literally said "to be clear, OpenAI has a pretty bad track record and seems to be an actively misleading environment, take this job if you are prepared to deal with that", that'd be a different story. (But, that's also a pretty weird job ad, and OpenAI would be rightly skeptical of people coming from that funnel. I think taking jobs at OpenAI that are net helpful to the world requires a mix of a very strong moral and epistemic backbone, and nonetheless still able to make good fa... (read more)
Executive summary: 80,000 Hours and similar EA organizations should remove OpenAI job listings from their platforms due to OpenAI's demonstrated recklessness, manipulativeness, and failure to prioritize existential AI safety.
Key points:
- OpenAI has broken promises, used non-disclosure agreements manipulatively, and shown poor safety culture, warranting removal from EA job boards.
- While some individuals may still choose to work at OpenAI, EA orgs should not systematically funnel talent there.
- OpenAI's path back to good standing with the AI risk community is unc
... (read more)