One of OpenAI’s key staff, Lilian Weng, has announced her resignation. Weng worked for the company for 7 years as head of the security development systems department, and was promoted in August of this year. In a statement on Platform X (Twitter), she noted that she was leaving OpenAI to “start over and try something new.”
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According to TechCrunch, Weng’s last working day will be November 15, but she did not announce her future plans. “I made the extremely difficult decision to leave OpenAI,” Weng said. “Looking back at what we have achieved, I am very proud of each member of the security systems team and have every confidence that the team will continue to thrive.”
Weng is not the only specialist who has left the company. Security researchers and executives have left over the past year, accusing the company of prioritizing commercial products over AI security. Earlier this year, Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, leaders of the disbanded Superalignment team, which was developing methods for managing superintelligent AI systems, left OpenAI.
Weng joined OpenAI in 2018, starting her career on a robotics team that created a robotic arm that could solve a Rubik’s cube in seconds. With OpenAI’s transition to the GPT paradigm, Weng joined the Applied AI Research team in 2021. Following the launch of GPT-4 in 2023, she led a security development team of more than 80 people.
OpenAI says management is looking to replace Weng. “We deeply value Lillian’s contributions to breakthrough security research and the creation of strong technical assurance,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We are confident that the security systems team will continue to play a key role in ensuring the reliability of our systems serving hundreds of millions of people around the world.”
It is worth noting that in October, Miles Brundage, who worked on AI policy, left the company, after which OpenAI announced the dissolution of the AGI (artificial general intelligence) team. On the same day, the New York Times published an interview with former OpenAI researcher Suchir Balaji, who said that he also left the company because he believed that its technology would do more harm than good to society.