Before Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, the developer of artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, the company's board was warned of a potential threat to humanity, according to reports.
Shortly before Altman was sacked, researchers at the company wrote a letter to OpenAI’s board of directors to warn them of a finding that had the potential to risk the future of humanity, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
OpenAI’s board ousted Altman from his role as chief executive on Friday before announcing that he had returned on Tuesday after hundreds of employees threatened to quit and join OpenAI-backer Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in protest.
Former Twitch boss Emmett Shear was hired as temporary chief executive for just one day as Altman prepared to join Microsoft.
Prior to this, an internal memo to staff by OpenAI executive Mira Murati discussed a secretive internal project known only as Q*, the Reuters report said.
It cited one person as saying some people at OpenAI believe Q* could be a breakthrough in the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI), which the company defines as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
The company is believed to be working on a model that can solve maths conundrums and researchers are optimistic about the project’s success.
Reuters said sources had confirmed the existence of an AI scientist team, which combines the Code Gen and Maths Gen teams and which is looking into how to accelerate AI models to make them better at reasoning so that they can practice science.
"Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honour of a lifetime," Altman said while speaking at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit on the day before he was fired.