The OpenAI board member who fired Sam Altman says we still can't trust AI CEOs

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Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odo.com slash vox. That's O Dlo.com slash box. Hello and welcome to Dekoder. I'm Neil IP Tell, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life. Helen is a well-known figure in the AI safety and policy community. Although she is perhaps best known for having served on the board of OpenAI.

And she was one of four board members who voted to fire Sam Altman. That incident, now sometimes referred to as the blip, ended with Sam coming back as CEO, Helen resigning, and a new board of directors. OpenAI has since restructured entirely, but it's worth remembering what Helen and the board were supposed to do. OpenAI's nonprofit board existed specifically to make sure the company didn't betray its mission to build safe AI. by prioritizing profit and growth over safety. When the board actually tried to pull that lever, that accountability mechanism broke. And here we are. Now the question of AI safety is everywhere. This summer AI models from OpenAI and the Tropics broke out of their testing environments and hacked into real companies. The CEOs of those frontier labs have since called for a slowdown and asked Washington for help.

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