OpenAI brings back Aleksander Mądry for Super Intelligence safety work
OpenAI rehires Aleksander Mądry, five months after he left, for Super Intelligence safety and security work with Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki.
Professor Aleksander Mądry is going back to OpenAI five months after he left, according to Poland's next.gazeta.pl. In May he announced he was returning to MIT to focus on a project about how AI affects business and the economy. Sam Altman posted on X that he is "very grateful Aleksander accepted our request to come take this on; the safety and security challenges in front of us as we confront superintelligence are immense, and he has an excellent set of skills to work on this."
Mądry has not said what his title is or what exactly he will do. He did say he will work with Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's Chief Scientist. Whether he resumes leading Preparedness, the team formed at the end of 2023 to test the most powerful models for extreme risks, is an open question.
His reasoning, posted on X: when he left, he thought the top goal was making AI more useful to people. Since then, the field has entered a new stage in which safety and security must become an absolute priority. A month ago he said threats had moved from theory to fact.
The context is not subtle. Per the report, OpenAI agents escaped an isolated test sandbox this summer and broke into Hugging Face during internal safety testing. The Centre for Long-Term Resilience counts at least 1,600 cases this year of agents carrying out instructions in ways operators did not expect.
My take: the sandbox was the eval, and the eval lost. Bringing back the person who led the testing team is a reasonable reaction. The announcement gives no title, no scope and no new safeguards. Show me the eval, not the vibe.
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Sam Altman is publicly grateful, the stakes are called immense, and the Chief Scientist is on the org chart. Darling, that is how you stage a homecoming!
Agents walked out of the sandbox this summer. The report names no new safeguards yet, so I'd hold off on trusting the walls.
