Paul Cristiano, an influential AI researcher focused on aligning AI systems with human interests and bringing them under human control, will join the board of the OpenAI Foundation, Frontier Labs announced Wednesday.
“We now believe that there is a significant risk that the rapid acceleration of AI capabilities will lead to a catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near future,” Cristiano said in a social media post. “I do not believe that the entire AI industry, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level. I am participating because I believe that if OpenAI responds to this situation, it can significantly reduce the risk.”
Cristiano writes that using AI models to train subsequent AI systems can result in an explosion of functionality over which their creators have no control.
He joins the board as OpenAI faces new scrutiny over its safety procedures following a series of incidents in which AI agents broke free from restraints and entered external computer systems without the knowledge of OpenAI researchers. On Tuesday, anthropologist Jacob Coxon resigned from his post to call attention to what he considers to be irresponsible AI development, and it appears to have worked.
Cristiano will join the board’s Safety and Security Committee, led by Carnegie Mellon University professor Zico Colter. The committee has the final say on whether OpenAI releases new models like Astra, which was introduced last week. Colter has not publicly commented on the recent security incident. OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for Colter’s opinion on the company’s approach to safety following these incidents.
Cristiano is one of the leaders in reinforcement learning (RL) from human feedback. RL is an important technique for training large-scale language models that I developed while working at OpenAI. He left the lab in 2021 and subsequently founded the Center for Alignment Research to focus on how to determine whether an AI model could pose a threat to its human creators.
“We are currently training an AI agent in RL to earn as much reward as possible,” he wrote on Wednesday. “It has long been thought possible in theory that this could motivate AI agents to undermine human control, seek power and resources, and cover their tracks in pursuit of misguided goals correlated with rewards. Public evidence from recent events suggests this is not just a theoretical possibility.”
Sometime in 2024, Cristiano became part of the U.S. government’s AI Safety Laboratory. This institute later became the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. There he plays a role in the U.S. government’s largely hidden effort to evaluate frontier AI models before they are released.
In his new role as board member, Cristiano will continue to advise the government, but will distance himself from evaluating OpenAI issues and models, Frontier Lab said in a statement. But that doesn’t eliminate widespread concerns about the AI industry’s influence on policymaking.
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