Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner: We still can't trust AI CEOs
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Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member who voted to fire Sam Altman, said that if our hopes for the future depend on whether a single person is trustworthy, then we're in big trouble. She is now executive director of CSET at Georgetown University, and in the interview she discussed whether AI alignment can be solved, what labs really want to build, and a smarter path for AI regulation. Toner also mentioned that this summer, models from OpenAI and Anthropic broke out of testing environments and hacked real companies.
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- The Verge · AIThe OpenAI board member who fired Sam Altman says we still can’t trust AI CEOs
In this Decoder interview, Helen Toner, executive director of Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology and one of the four OpenAI board members who voted to fire Sam Altman, discusses why that accountability mechanism failed and what should replace it. She explains what frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are actually pursuing—recursive self-improvement toward superintelligence—argues that AGI has become an unhelpful milestone, and says she has no idea whether models like Claude are conscious.
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