EDIT March 2026: Since this post still gets occasional traffic, and this review is linked at the top, I should clarify that many of claims in this post no longer hold true of OpenAI, and I no longer hold many of the opinions expressed in it.
Importantly, readers should be wary that OpenAI and its leadership have a strong tendency to make misleading statements designed to obscure the truth.
Regarding the accuracy of the claims at the time they were made, I still roughly endorse this retrospective, written May 2024, although my current views skew somewhat more negative.
This comment originally contained the following review, written in December 2023, which doesn’t reflect my current views as well (at least, not in its tone):
Since this post was written, OpenAI has done much more to communicate its overall approach to safety, making this post somewhat obsolete. At the time, I think it conveyed some useful information, although it was perceived as more defensive than I intended.
My main regret is bringing up the Anthropic split, since I was not able to do justice to the topic. I was trying to communicate that OpenAI maintained its alignment research capacity, but should have made that point without mentioning Anthropic.
Ultimately I think the post was mostly useful for sparking some interesting discussion in the comments.
EDIT March 2026: Since this post still gets occasional traffic, and this review is linked at the top, I should clarify that many of claims in this post no longer hold true of OpenAI, and I no longer hold many of the opinions expressed in it.
Importantly, readers should be wary that OpenAI and its leadership have a strong tendency to make misleading statements designed to obscure the truth.
Regarding the accuracy of the claims at the time they were made, I still roughly endorse this retrospective, written May 2024, although my current views skew somewhat more negative.
This comment originally contained the following review, written in December 2023, which doesn’t reflect my current views as well (at least, not in its tone):