Sudden! OpenAI fires Ilya ally for suspected information leakage

Breaking! OpenAI fired people, the reason: suspected information leakage.

One is Leopold Aschenbrenner, an ally of the missing chief scientist Ilya and a core member of the Superalignment team.

The other person is not simple either. He is Pavel Izmailov, a researcher on the LLM inference team, who also worked on the super alignment team.

It is unclear what information the two men leaked.

After the news was exposed, many netizens expressed "quite shocked":

I saw Aschenbrenner's post not long ago and felt that he was on the rise in his career. I didn't expect that There is such a shift.

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Some netizens believe:

OpenAI lost Aschenbrenner, Ilya Sutskever was also marginalized, the company’s The promise of building safe AI looks even less credible.

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OpenAI’s talent flow and mutual poaching with Google Meta are no longer surprising, but the personnel transfer in the form of expulsion was only after the board of directors’ rebellion in November last year the first time.

Both of them were once Ilya’s subordinates

It is understood that Leopold Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI a year ago. He had previously worked at Future Fund. Going back further, he graduated from Columbia University at the age of 19 and also conducted research on economic growth at Oxford University.

Pavel Izmailov is also a member of the CILVR team at New York University. He revealed that he will join NYU Tandon CSE and Courant CS in the fall of 2025 as an assistant professor.

Currently, both of their X homepages note their relationship with OpenAI.

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Neither of them has posted any new tweets in the past month. But the pinned post is very eye-catching.

Yes, both are the first papers of the Super Alignment team, and both of them are the authors of this paper.

This has to be said about this team. The team was formed in July last year. It is the third group established by OpenAI to deal with the security issues that may arise from large models on different time scales. One of the big security teams.

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The Super Alignment Team is responsible for the distant future, laying the foundation for super-human superintelligence security,By Ilya Sutskever and led by Jan Leike.

Although OpenAI seems to take security seriously, it is no secret that there are great differences within it regarding the security development of AI.

This disagreement is even considered to be the biggest reason for the internal strife in the OpenAI board of directors in November last year:

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It is reported on the Internet that Ilya Sutskever became The leader of the "coup" was uneasy because he saw something.

As for the super-aligned team led by Ilya, many members also sided with Ilya. In the subsequent Solitaire event supporting Ultraman, the members of this super-aligned team basically remained silent.

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As the OpenAI infighting subsides, Ultraman emerges as the winner, Ilya Sutskever leaves the board and barely appears in public again, the Super Alignment team is now We don’t know what the situation is.

Let’s go back to this time when two researchers were fired.

Both of them were once subordinates of Ilya, and the information also stated that Aschenbrenner is an ally of Ilya and is related to the movement that prioritizes solving the dangers of AI.

Therefore, some netizens speculate that this layoff is Ultraman's "settlement of accounts".

Is it related to the Q* leak?

In addition, netizens are more concerned about what the leaked content is.

The current focus of speculation is still on Q*, which is one of the triggers of the boardroom rebellion.

According to netizen comments, Jimmy apples seemed to have posted relevant tweets, but not long after we saw that the tweet had been deleted when the link was opened...

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Judging from the clues left behind, it seems that it may still be related to Q*.

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Currently, Q* has gone from rumors to officially confirmed existence, but Ultraman himself is currently keeping secret about everything about it. .

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In short, since Q*, there have been ideological differences within OpenAI.

After a series of turmoils, 93% of employees signed a joint letter to live and die with Ultraman. After the investigation results were announced, Ultraman returned to the board of directors without charge.

Seemingly calm, behind the scenes of everyone working together to realize AGI, cracks still exist.

Reference link:
[1]https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-researchers-including-ally-of-sutskever-fired-for-alleged-leaking
[ 2]https://x.com/BenjaminDEKR/status/1778536771837694353
[3]https://twitter.com/leopoldasch
[4]https://twitter.com/Pavel_Izmailov
[5 ]https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1c1qo04/openai_superalignment_researcher_fired_for/