OpenAI creates a new monitoring team and begins training the next model

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it had created a safety and security committee led by senior executives, after disbanding its previous supervisory board in mid-May.

The new committee will be responsible for making recommendations to the OpenAI Board of Directors “on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations,” the company said.

This comes as virtual assistant developer ChatGPT announced it has started training its “next frontier model”.

The company said in a blog post that it expects “the resulting systems to take us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI,” or artificial general intelligence – which concerns AI that is as intelligent or smarter than humans.

The formation of a new oversight team comes after OpenAI disbanded a previous team that focused on long-term AI risks. Before that, the two team leaders, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, co-founder of OpenAI, announced their departure from the Microsoft-backed startup.

AI security is at the forefront of a broader debate, as the huge models that underpin applications like ChatGPT become more advanced. AI product developers are also wondering when AGI will arrive and what risks will arise from it.

Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo and Nicole Seligman, all of whom are on the OpenAI board of directors, now sit on the new security committee alongside Altman.

Leike wrote this month that OpenAI’s “security culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” In response to his departure, Altman said on social media platform X that he was sad to see Leike go, adding that OpenAI had “a lot more to do.”

Over the next 90 days, the security group will evaluate OpenAI’s processes and safeguards and share its recommendations with the company’s board of directors. OpenAI will provide an update on the recommendations it has adopted at a later date.

— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.