OpenAI Co-Founder Ilya Sutskever Launches Venture For Safe Superintelligence

Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI who recently left the startup, has launched a new venture called Safe Superintelligence Inc., aiming to create a powerful AI system within a pure research organization. Sutskever has made AI safety the top priority for his new company. Safe Superintelligence has two more co-founders: investor and former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy, known for training large AI models at OpenAI. From a report: Researchers and intellectuals have contemplated making AI systems safer for decades, but deep engineering around these problems has been in short supply. The current state of the art is to use both humans and AI to steer the software in a direction aligned with humanity's best interests. Exactly how one would stop an AI system from running amok remains a largely philosophical exercise. Sutskever says that he's spent years contemplating the safety problems and that he already has a few approaches in mind. But Safe Superintelligence isn't yet discussing specifics. "At the most basic level, safe superintelligence should have the property that it will not harm humanity at a large scale," Sutskever says. "After this, we can say we would like it to be a force for good. We would like to be operating on top of some key values. Some of the values we were thinking about are maybe the values that have been so successful in the past few hundred years that underpin liberal democracies, like liberty, democracy, freedom." Sutskever says that the large language models that have dominated AI will play an important role within Safe Superintelligence but that it's aiming for something far more powerful. With current systems, he says, "you talk to it, you have a conversation, and you're done." The system he wants to pursue would be more general-purpose and expansive in its abilities. "You're talking about a giant super data center that's autonomously developing technology. That's crazy, right? It's the safety of that that we want to contribute to."

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